Wackenroder and Tieck, Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, tr. Edward Mornin (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1975), 58:
[A]ges of splendor pass away from the earth and vanish like sun-drenched clouds passing over the vault of heaven. They fade and are forgotten; they live on in the hearts of only a few, called to life by their passionate love, by dusty books, or timeless works of art.
László F. Földényi, Melancholy (Melankólia), tr. Tim Wilkinson (Yale University Press, 2016), 216-221:
Tieck, a friend, described Novalis in the following way: “Just as in the course of conversation he most willingly disclosed the depths of his frame of mind and conversed enthusiastically about the regions of invisible worlds, so, at one and the same time, he was happy as a child, jested in an easy manner, and had his share in the high spirits of a gathering” (quoted in Novalis, Ausgewählte Werke, 1:xlii). He had an unclouded, serene death, or at least that was how it was seen by one eyewitness, Friedrich Schlegel, and it seemed that for him, his twenty-eight years meant just as full a life as eighty-three years did for Goethe. Wackenroder was fond of revelry; Körner went into battle happily and optimistically; Büchner was partial to farce; Burns, Shelley, and Byron were greedy for life; unrestrained good humor was a feature of Fohr until death claimed him at twenty-two years of age. Posterity, kitsch-creating memory, is fond of highlighting only the suffering in melancholia—a basis for that is given also by the contemporaneous remarks of Goethe and Hegel. The suffering of the Romantics was not affectation, however; rather, it derived from the sadness that (as Byron was fond of citing in his journal) generally characterized great geniuses, according to Aristotle’s observation. Melancholia, springing from the impossibility of imagined and craved happiness, was attended by pain as a matter of course (“All deep feelings are melancholic to some degree,” Thomas Mann noted), but since the suffering was caused by neither this nor that specific object, and gloom had its foundation in the temperament, the suffering therefore appeared in the melancholic’s relationship to things.. . . In his journal, Byron records the following case: “People have wondered at the Melancholy which runs through my writings. Others have wondered at my personal gaiety; but I recollect once, after an hour, in which I had been sincerely and particularly gay, and rather brilliant, in company, my wife replying to me when I said (upon her remarking my high spirits) ‘and yet, Bell, I have been called and miscalled Melancholy you must have seen how falsely, frequently.’ ‘No, B.,’ (she answered) ‘it is not so: at heart you are the most melancholy of mankind, and often when apparently gayest’” (quoted in Letters and Journals, 4:73n1).
To make even good humor a target of gloom—that was one of the oddest features of these Romantics who died young. It was a recognition of uniqueness, finitude, inevitable demise; and when the Romantics attempted to protect their individuality against an all-leveling totality, they had to realize that if they did not give full vent to their character, then their individuality would degenerate into a foppish eccentricity. The world itself was the main barrier to a true life, so they created a new world within the boundaries of the soul. Not that they were so naïve as to imagine that the inner world was completely independent of the external world. As Novalis put it: “Inside us we also have an external world, which relates to our inner world as the outer world beyond us does to our outer world. . . . We can gain closer access to nature’s inside and soul only with our thoughts, in just the same way as we can only get acquainted with the outside and the physical essence of nature with our senses” (Novalis, Ausgewählte Werke, 3:27). Hence the gloom: freedom cannot be thought of without constraints. The Romantics were perfectly aware of their impossible position, and this awareness dictated their steps—not the sheer yearning that Hegel tried to attribute to them. The fundamental paradoxes of the Romantics can be seen to derive from this: from the suffering that at one and the same time offered the possibility of a liberated enjoyment of a new world; from a new world formed by an internal region of the soul and therefore more destructive than the outside world; from the recognition that the internal being is just as much a restraint as the external one; and from the astonishment that if God has in fact died, then it is vain hoping to conjure an absolute out of anything (even the self). Existence had not simply become senseless—one could easily see that—but one could not do anything with it because it kept slipping out of one’s hands. And that was no longer a hypothetical matter but a problem of how to live, which started with astonishment at one’s own existence and, after every conceivable detour, found its way back again to that starting point.
“As I grow older,” Byron wrote to Shelley, “the indifference—not to life, for we love it by instinct—but to the stimuli of life, increases” (26 April 1821; Letters and Journals, 5:268–69). Mention has already been made of boredom, which, inasmuch as it relates to existence itself, can also be called indifference. Indifference engulfs everything with a loss of faith and interest; it is ever harder for anything to awaken one’s interest. “There is no freedom in Europe—that’s certain,” Byron wrote, but his own apathy was divulged in the second part of the sentence: “it is besides a worn-out portion of the globe” (3 October 1819; ibid., 4:358). The Romantics withdrew into their own “internal,” unapproachable world, in contrast with the classicists, who strove to acquire eternity by self-realization in the “outside” world. Indifference toward the external world is inevitably attended by the muddling up of that external world. In characterizing Romantic poetry, August Wilhelm Schlegel apprehended the difference in the following way: “Ancient poetry and art is a rhythmical nomos, a harmonious promulgation of the eternal legislation of a beautifully ordered world mirroring the eternal Ideas of things. Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of a secret longing for the chaos which is perpetually striving for new and marvellous births, which lies hidden in the very womb of orderly creation” (quoted in René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, 2:59). The two types of poetry rest on two different interpretations of human nature. The origin of the word “classic” alludes to this: in Rome, the listing of citizens for taxation purposes was called classification. So Classicism refers not so much to the perfect, many-sided development of something (that definition is based on a preliminary, tacit acceptance of the notion of Classicism) as to an image of man. In Classicism, labeling, subordination, classification, respect for measure are asserted—even when there is seemingly no question of it (for example, in the case of individual works of art), this notion still lurks in the background (Horace’s Ars poetica or the architecture of Palladio are extreme examples). Classical sculpture, classical poetry, the classical conception of man equally have a liking for and lay stress on the typical. But what is considered typical at a certain time is always relative. At the bottom of classical notions there usually lies a trust in history, a faith in progress, identification with the goals of a country or politics, etc. For that reason, Classicism always favors the whole over the part, the general over the singular. (True, the great creative works of Classicism usually reek of melancholia, but that is a sign of the ultimate failure of the aspiration of classicist art; Palladio’s interiors are “melancholic” spaces because the architect palpably did not wish to be melancholic.) “It is only the whole which properly has reality,” Hegel pronounced in The Phenomenology of Mind (2:690), and at the bottom of that statement is a solid picture of man: man is heart and soul, root and branch, part of a larger whole, can “use” his body and soul only as part of that larger whole. Classicism is a belief in there being a goal for life, for existence, for the universe or anything else. Classicists mostly grew old—they preserved both body and soul, that is, they unconsciously stood (set themselves) in the service of something. A chasm yawned before the Romantics, and at most they could serve only that—even at the price of their own lives. Romanticism was indifference in the strictest sense of the word—and because it was interested in man rather than people, it was indifferent to politics as well. (Goethe, who in many respects was more Romantic than the Romantics, and Nietzsche were both indifferent to politics, which from the eighteenth century on became ever more formal and became subject to reasoning instead of action. And Byron, who started his career as a parliamentary speaker, noted: “As for me, by the blessing of indifference, I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; . . . I don’t think politics worth an opinion. Conduct is another thing:—if you begin with a party, go on with them. I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference on the subject altogether” (journal entry for 16 January 1814; Letters and Journals, 2:381). The measure was lost, or, more precisely, the earlier measure had come to be regarded chiefly as one that served for the destruction of the individual. Romanticism did not see any all-embracing whole into which the individual could have been incorporated body and soul. Unlike the classicists, the Romantics were incarnates of “passionate fragments” (Musil)—they were wastrels, at least from the point of view of the classicist or the everyday world, which in losing sees only the loss, in winning, the gain, and is unable to notice the gain deriving from loss, and the loss or narrowing associated with gains.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (in Nature, Addresses, And Lectures, Cambridge: Reverside Press, 1883), ch. 1, 14-17:
. . . The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,—he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. . . .
It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
Photos taken in Schweinfurt, Germany. 3 November 2026.
From Humphry Ward’s Introduction to Amiel’s Journal (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903), vol. I, lxxxix-xcvi:
The Journal is full, indeed, of this note of personal religion. Religion, Amiel declares again and again, cannot be replaced by philosophy. The redemption of the intelligence is not the redemption of the heart. The philosopher and critic may succeed in demonstrating that the various definite forms into which the religious thought of man has thrown itself throughout history are not absolute truth, but only the temporary creations of a need which gradually and surely outgrows them all. “The Trinity, the life to come, paradise and hell, may cease to be dogmas and spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish away—the question of humanity remains: What is it which saves?” Amiel’s answer to the question will recall to a wide English circle the method and spirit of an English teacher, whose dear memory lives to-day in many a heart, and is guiding many an effort in the cause of good—the method and spirit of the late Professor Green of Balliol. In many respects there was a gulf of difference between the two men. The one had all the will and force of personality which the other lacked. But the ultimate creed of both, the way in which both interpret the facts of nature and consciousness, is practically the same. In Amiel’s case, we have to gather it through all the variations and inevitable contradictions of a Journal which is the reflection of a life, not the systematic expression of a series of ideas, but the main results are clear enough. Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope which springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil. Conscience and the moral progress of the race—these are his points of departure. Faith in the reality of the moral law is what he clings to when his inherited creed has yielded to the pressure of the intellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessitarianism have passed over him. The reconciliation of the two certitudes, the two methods, the scientific and the religious, “is to be sought for in that moral law which is also a fact, and every step of which requires for its explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity.” “Nature is the virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity.” Consciousness is the one fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf of things, and the soul’s inward law, as it has been painfully elaborated by human history, the only revelation of God.
The only but the sufficient revelation! For this first article of a reasonable creed is the key to all else—the clue which leads the mind safely through the labyrinth of doubt into the presence of the Eternal. Without attempting to define the indefinable, the soul rises from the belief in the reality of love and duty to the belief in “a holy will at the root of nature and destiny”—for “if man is capable of conceiving goodness, the general principle of things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good.” And then the religious consciousness seizes on this intellectual deduction, and clothes it in language of the heart, in the tender and beautiful language of faith. “There is but one thing needful—to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, are so many ways of approaching the Divine, so many modes of tasting and adoring God. Religion is not a method; it is a life—a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.” And the faith of his youth and his maturity bears the shock of suffering, and supports him through his last hours. He writes a few months before the end: “The animal expires; man surrenders his soul to the author of the soul.” ... “We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to God. And so what was an austere monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty”—“Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.” [...]
And yet how clear the intellect remains, through all the anxieties of thought, and in the face of the soul’s dearest memories and most passionate needs! Amiel, as soon as his reasoning faculty has once reached its maturity, never deceives himself as to the special claims of the religion which by instinct and inheritance he loves; he makes no compromise with dogma or with miracle. Beyond the religions of the present he sees always the essential religion which lasts when all local forms and marvels have passed away; and as years go on, with more and more clearness of conviction, he learns to regard all special beliefs and systems as “prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind;” misgrowths of thought, necessary in their time and place, but still of no absolute value, and having no final claim on the thought of man.
And it is just here—in this mixture of the faith which clings and aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which allows the mind to sway freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect for truth, which will allow nothing to interfere between thought and its appointed tasks—that Amiel’s special claim upon us lies. It is this balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the modern mind—of its doubts, its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in his contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant straining toward the unseen and the ideal which gives a fundamental unity to his inner life, he is the type of a generation universally touched with doubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man’s physical environment; but at the same time—paradox as it may seem—more conscious of man’s greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the nobility and beauty interwoven with the universe.
And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation, so much doubt of his thought and of himself! He is no preacher, like Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much in common; there is little resemblance between him and the men who speak, as it were, from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always of themselves and what they have to say. And here again he represents the present and foreshadows the future. For the age of the preachers is passing those who speak with authority on the riddles of life and nature as the priests of this or that all-explaining dogma, are becoming less important as knowledge spreads, and the complexity of experience is made evident to a wider range of minds. The force of things is against the certain people. Again and again truth escapes from the prisons made for her by mortal hands, and as humanity carries on the endless pursuit she will pay more and more respectful heed to voices like this voice of the lonely Genevese thinker—with its pathetic alterations of hope and fear, and the moral steadfastness which is the inmost note of it—to these meditative lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, and in the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in new forms, and proclaim to us in new words,
“The mighty hopes which make us men.”
Adolf Friedrich von Schack, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: 1897), Herbstgefühl, 177 (tr. ChatGBT—couldn’t but mention that, as my German is still not that great to translate a poem properly):
As when, in frost-bound winds that kill,
Summer’s last blossom sickens, wan,
And here and there, upon the chill,
A single leaf, red-gold, sways on:
So over all my life there steals
A gloomy, cold, nocturnal day;
Why tremble, O! heart, while death draws near,
Beneath thy ceaseless beat, why fear?
Look round: the thicket stands stripped bare!
Why play, as winds play in the boughs,
With joy’s last withered remnant there?
Be still, give up! Soon that, too, dies.
Photos taken in Munich, 28 October 2026.
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York & Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993), 28:
Nonetheless, after one acknowledges that no taxonomy ever neatly fits the realities of a situation, and that in particular the definition of a tool-using culture lacks precision, it is still both possible and useful to distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.
The obsession with life is to be viewed as a manifestation of excessive full-bloodedness, to remain in the terminology of the life-philosophy. Through the technical perfection of all comforts of life, the in every way increased security of life, the greater accessibility of all types of pleasure, and the vast and still lingering growth of material prosperity, society has got into a state which in the old pathology might have been called a “plethora.” We have been living in spiritual and material superabundance. We are so preoccupied with life because it is made so easy for us. The ever-growing power of observation and the facility of intellectual communication have made life strong and bold. Till well into the middle of the nineteenth century even the well-to-do section of European society was in much more direct and constant contact with the miseries of existence than we are to-day and think our due. Our own grandfathers were given only very limited possibilities of killing pain, healing wounds or fractures, shutting out cold, expelling darkness, communicating with others directly or indirectly, avoiding filth and stench. On all sides man was continually made to feel the natural limitations of earthly well-being. The efficient minis- tering of the technical, hygienic and sanitary appliances with which man has surrounded himself is spoiling him. He is losing the good-humoured resignation in the daily imperfections of human well-being which formed the discipline of earlier generations. But at the same time he runs the risk of losing the natural ability to take human happiness as it offers itself, as well. Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
In earlier civilizations, whether Christian, Moslem, Buddhist or any other, there was always this contrast: in principle the value of earthly happiness is deprecated relatively to celestial bliss or union with the All. As all these religions, however, do recognise a relative worth of earthly pleasures, and consider them as God-given, denial of the value of life meant ingratitude. It was the very realisation of the precariousness of every moment of human well-being which caused it to be appreciated at its true value. A steady orientation on the hereafter may lead to a renunciation of the terrestrial, but it does not permit of Weltschmerz.
In the present there is a contrast also, but it is a very different one. The increase of security, of comfort, and of the possibilities of want-gratification, in short the greater ease of living, has had two results. On the one hand, it has prepared the soil for all forms of renunciation of life: philosophical denial of its value, purely emotive spleen or aversion from life; on the other, it has instilled the belief in the right to happiness. It has made people expect things from life. Related to this there is another contrast. The ambivalent attitude which wavers between the renunciation and the enjoyment of life is peculiar to the individual alone. The community, however, without hesitation and with more conviction than ever before, accepts earthly life as the object of all striving and action. It is indeed a true worship of life. Now it is a question for serious consideration whether any advanced culture can survive without a certain measure of orientation on Death. The great civilizations of the past have all had it. There are signs that the philosophical thought of to-day is also coming to it. It seems only logical, moreover, that a philosophy which rates “living” above “knowing” should also include the end of life in its vision.
The most fundamental characteristic of true play, whether it be a cult, a performance, a contest, or a festivity, is that at a certain moment it is over. The spectators go home, the players take off their masks, the performance has ended. And here the evil of our time shows itself. For nowadays play in many cases never ends and hence is not true play. A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place. The two spheres are getting mixed. In the activities of an outwardly serious nature hides an element of play. Recognised play, on the other hand, is no longer able to maintain its true play-character as a result of being taken too seriously and being technically over-organised. The indispensable qualities of detachment, artlessness and gladness are thus lost.
To a certain extent something like this contamination has been present in all cultures as far back as we can see. But it is the dubious privilege of modern Western civilization to have given this diffusion of the two spheres of life its greatest intensity. With great numbers of both the educated and the ignorant, the play-attitude towards life of the adolescent has become permanent. At an earlier stage we have already alluded to the prevalence of a state of mind which might be called one of permanent adolescence. It is characterised by a lack of sense of decorum, a lack of personal dignity and of respect for others and the opinions of others, and an excessive concentra- tion on self. The general weakening of judgment and of the critical impulse has prepared the soil for the spread of this attitude.
Now it is both interesting and disquieting to note that the emergence of this state of mind is facilitated not only by a decreased desire for individual judgment, by the standardising effect of group organisations providing a set of ready-made opinions, and by the ever-available opportunities for trivial diversion, but also by the marvellous development of technical facilities. In his world full of wonders man is like a child in a fairy tale. He can travel through the air, speak to another hemisphere, have a continent delivered in his home by radio. He presses a button and life comes to him. Will such a life give him maturity? On the contrary.
In making mention of the contamination of play and seriousness in modern life, we enter upon a fundamental problem of culture which cannot be investigated in this book. The phenomenon shows itself partly in a semi-serious attitude towards work, duty, fate and life, partly in the attribution of great importance to what a clear judgment would qualify trivial, and in the treatment of truly important things with the instincts and gestures of play. Political speeches of leading figures which should properly be described as mischievous pranks are not rare.
It would be interesting to investigate how in the different languages the words for play continually overflow into the sphere of the serious. American English would offer an especially promising field for a study of this kind. The American reporter speaks of his profession as “the newspaper game.” The politician who, though by nature honest, finds himself forced to howl with the wolves of corruption, offers as his justification that he had “to play the game.” The customs official is implored to close his eyes to an infringement of the prohibition law with the words “be a good sport.” It is clear that far more is involved here than a mere question of popular speech. It is a fundamental change of a moral-psychological nature. [...]
The slogan belongs to the field of publicity, whether commercial or political. Now it is one of the fundamental features of all modern publicity, that hypertrophic product of our time, that it is based on this attitude of semi-seriousness characteristic of over-refined civilizations. It is perhaps to be viewed as a symptom of old age. Puerilism is the proper word for it.
This widely prevalent attitude of semi-seriousness at once explains the close connection between heroism and puerilism. The moment the motto becomes “Let us be heroes” a great game has started. It could be a noble game if it were consummated entirely within the sphere of Spartan matches of youths, or the Olympic games. But as long as it is played in the form of political action, in parade and national drill, in oratorical bombast and “officially inspired” newspaper articles, and with all this yet takes itself seriously and demands to be taken seriously, it is truly puerilism.
The confusion of play and seriousness which lies at the bottom of all that was here classified as puerilism, is no doubt one of the most important aspects of the malady of our time. There remains the question as to how far puerilism is connected with that other trait of modern life, the glorification of youth. The two should be clearly distinguished. Puerilism knows no ages, it attacks young and old alike. The adoration of youth, superficially a sign of fresh strength, may also be viewed as a symptom of old age, an abdication in favour of the coming heir. While most strong cultures have loved and honoured youth they never cajoled or exalted it, and they always demanded from it obedience and respect for its elders. Typically decadent and puerile were the quickly evaporated movements which called themselves Futurism. One cannot say that youth was to blame for them.
Erasmus, ‘‘The Abbot and the Learned Lady,’’ Colloquies (tr. Craig R. Thompson):
Learning costs immense toil, and after all you must die.
Said by Antronius to Magdalia.
Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 11.1-2 (tr. J. W. Cohoon):
[1] I am almost certain that while all men are hard to teach, they are easy to deceive. They learn with difficulty—if they do learn anything—from the few that know, but they are deceived only too readily by the many who do not know, and not only by others but by themselves as well. For the truth is bitter and unpleasant to the unthinking, while falsehood is sweet and pleasant. [2] They are, I fancy, like men with sore eyes—they find the light painful, while the darkness, which permits them to see nothing, is restful and agreeable. Else how would falsehood often prove mightier than the truth, if it did not win its victories through pleasure?
Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Disavowal of the Intellectual Principle,’’ in The Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: The Norton Library, 1936), 102-104:
Have earlier generations ever renounced the intellectual principle in this way? It seems impossible to find historical parallels. Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing, appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture. To be sure, the past has often known reactions of thought whereby a too exclusive primacy of the understanding was succeeded by a revindication of the will. This is what happened, for instance, when the thought of Duns Scotus took its place beside that of Thomas Aquinas. These spiritual reactions, however, were not concerned with practical life or the worldly order but with the Faith, the striving for the ultimate meaning of life. And this striving itself always remained an “apprehending,” however far reason was left behind. The modern mind too often confuses intellectualism with rationalism. Even those forms of approach which, transgressing the purely intellectual, were intended to attain through insight and contemplation what was inaccessible to the understanding, always remained directed towards knowledge of truth. The Greek or the Indian word for it, gnosis or jñāna, makes it clear enough that even the purest mysticism remains a “knowing.” It is always the spirit which moves in the world of the intelligible. To have truth was always the ideal. There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.
When earlier currents of thought repudiated allegiance to Reason it was always in favour of the super-rational. What parades as the culture of today does not only disavow Reason but also the knowable itself, and this in favour of the sub-rational, the passions and the instincts. It votes for the will, not in the sense of Duns Scotus, however, but for the will to worldly power, for “existence,” for “blood and soil,” instead of “understanding” and “spirit.”
Bearing the burden of his tumultuous heart and of his dedicated poethood, Lenau lived life fully; he drank gladly at the “forest pool” of life and love, tasting their bliss as well as their pain, and never hesitated to drink deeply. Although he suffered keenly, he embraced the suffering (and the joy) and with the magic of the creative artist transformed what he suffered (and enjoyed) into melodious verse. In spite of its tendency to focus on the shadows of human existence (to the point, as he himself puts it, of “monotony”) his poetry is not that of a victim of life, crushed by its burden, but that of a strong man who, turning his burden into a source of creativity, achieved his life’s purpose before his tragic breakdown overwhelmed him.
Anonymous (A Lover of Flowers), The Lover’s Language of Flowers; Expressive of the Sentiments of the Heart (London: W. Nicholson & Sons, c. 1872), 11-12:
O lovely flowers, this world would be drear and desolate without you! Are you not the reminescences of the former paradise,—left unscathed by sin, to tell how much man has lost? . . .
Winthrop H. Root, in his Introduction to: Poems and Letters of Nikolaus Lenau (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964), 39-41:
Lenau was haunted continuously by an all too vivid awareness of the transitory nature of existence, the evanescence of things physical and human, as the romantic poet so often is, seeing only “how life crumbles in time’s to-and-fro” (“The Sick in Heart”). The tumultuous heart experiences the changing and not the enduring, since it measures all things by its own violent beating. The breeze blowing over the ruined castle tells Lenau that
All things pass and die.
The graveyard merely bears witness that the fickle human heart cannot keep alive even its memory of the dead. Though the heart vainly tries
To keep its heaven in eternal holding,
its emotions are swept away in “the mad flood” of existence; the very self changes; “the joyful tones of childhood” have
Died with love’s magic song on some far shore;
joy itself is fleeting; “its last tone fades and fading dies” (“Evanescence”). The tree under which he was once happy warns that
Bliss and blooming, bloom and blisses
All too quickly pass away.
—“The Tree of Memory”
He tries to retain his faith in love and happiness but the lesson the tree teaches is so obvious that his heart is filled with mourning. The distant tone of the post horn tells him that “human hearts can never stay,” that “onward never ceases,”
Though the cruel lashes’ crack
Tears our hearts to pieces.
The lovely night itself lasts but a moment (“The Post Horn”). Time cannot be held from its onward rush “by any human passion”; the bough sways only briefly as the raven leaves it, he tells his sorrowing love, and
Thus soon will cease the brief laments you utter.
—“Parting”
Lenau knows that
“... To mourn what cannot tarry
Is man’s autumnal fate. .. .”
—“Song of Autumn”
In an early philosophical poem, “The Skeptics,” he creates an apocalyptic vision of transience: it floods all life’s labyrinth, drawing all streams into its whirlpool; no dam can protect against its flood which sweeps away every living creature and overwhelms the human heart. “And if I look with trembling yearning to the stars that they may rescue my spirit, I yield to an illusion; they hear the roaring flood, they have a presentiment that they are not safe in their courses; they see the flood grow and are affrighted, as their trembling flicker tells me. Some day their shining array will sink down like weary swallows from their rapid flight.” “And then over the ocean only night will brood; then death’s great work will have been accomplished.” At times the thought that all is transitory is a welcome one, for it means that pain and suffering are also transitory and that there is an escape from them (“The Forest Chapel’’). The final release is death.
The transient nature of existence, its inability to preserve intact what is, makes Lenau's relation to the present and the past problematic. The stream of time flows on and carries away with its flood our happy youth. The innocence of childhood and youth do not last; time robs us of our youthful joys, dreams and ideals, leaving in their place disillusionment, loss of faith and guilt. The youth lingers in a flowery garden, amid roses and singing birds, happy in the dawn, a lovely expectation lighting his face; the world is heaven, man is god. ‘‘Be quiet lest you drive away the fleeting guests from him; for know that these dreams of youth are the best thing granted him in this world. But, alas, with iron stride reality approaches him, the birds fly forth forever, and the youth feels fear as he sees them take farther and farther flight’’ (‘‘Youthful Dreams’’). A man, lost in sadness, sees a vision of his youthful playmates in the gaiety of innocence and among them his own youthful self ‘‘with its happy mien of a stranger to earth’s realm of pain;’’ he laments that he ‘‘trusted the sweet fairy tale of existence’’ and so lost his happiness. In the vision, his youthful beloved appears and again the nightingales of youth sing; but the vision fades and youth and the flowers wither; where he saw the happy vision, he now sees only the pale, bare stone (‘‘The Rock’’).
H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1922), II., 12. Honor, 51-2:
Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized. In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who has been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and natural instincts—that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to his own ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this commonweal is always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good to the greatest number—of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons.
The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this cheese-monger’s civilization is far more marked in men than in women, and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher categories. It must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor of history that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race have been, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employed in newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther, Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar, Hannibal, Alexander, and to come down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Bismarck, Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.
Paolo Mantegazza, The Book of Love (New York: American-Neo-latin Library, 1917), ch. XVII, The Hell of Love, 191-92:
Neither the most patient and long observation of human phenomena nor the most lively imagination could enable us to divine all the petty tortures that lovers inflict upon themselves, perhaps to obey that cruel law which, according to some persons, has decreed that no one shall be happy on this planet
In this field of evil, temperament is everything; to some individuals the phrase of Linnæus concerning the loves of the cat may be applied: ‘‘Clamando misere amat.’’ For these unfortunates (we have already described them) love is imbued with so much bitterness and surrounded by so many nettles that it actually resembles a bramble, all thorns and wormwood. Suspicious, fastidious, melancholy, they fear everything, scrutinize everything; they pass everything through the sieve, they pulverize everything, looking for the mite or the poison. In the kiss they suspect ice, in the caress indifference; of the impulses they feel only the shock, only the blows. And then, even that little honey that love has for all they wish to keep under watch in so many tabernacles and under so many seals that they are very fortunate when they can find and relish it! From a jealous jeremiad they fall into an hysterical soliloquy, and have hardly emerged from a gloomy meditation on the infidelity of man when they fall into the autopsy of a love-letter. These creatures were certainly born under an unlucky star, and even if nature should make them a gift of a Venus draped by the Graces, or an Apollo with the brain of Jupiter, they would still be always unhappy, because bitterness is on their lips and not in the cup of love.
Plutarch, ‘‘Of Garrulity, or Talkativeness,’’ tr. John Philips (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies, Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1911, vol. IV.), §8, 230:
For never any word spoken did so much good, as many locked up in silence. Thus at one time or other a man may utter what heretofore has been kept a secret; but when a secret is once blurted forth, it can never be recalled; for it flies abroad, and spreads in a moment far and near. And hence it is that we have men to teach us to speak, but the Gods are they that teach us silence; silence being the first thing commanded upon our first initiation into their divine ceremonies and sacred mysteries. And therefore it is that Homer makes Ulysses, whose eloquence was so charming, to be the most silent of men; and the same virtue he also attributes to his son, to his wife, and also to his nurse. For thus you hear her speaking:
Safe, as in hardened steel or sturdy oak,
Within my breast these secrets will I lock.
And Ulysses himself, sitting by Penelope before he discovered himself, is thus brought in:
His weeping wife with pity he beheld,
Although not willing yet to be revealed.
He would not move his eyes, but kept them fast,
Like horn or steel within his eyebrows placed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From my Own Life, tr. John Oxenford, bks. I-XX (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897), 478-9:
My capacity of giving life to things, and rendering them present to me out of their real connexion, put me in the position that I could be perfectly at home in a certain century or in a department of science, without being in any degree instructed as to what preceded or what followed. Thus a certain theoretico-practical sense had been awakened in me, by which I could give account of things, rather as they should be than as they were, without any proper philosophical connection, but by way of leaps. To this was added a very easy power of apprehension, and a friendly reception of the opinions of others, if they did not stand in direct opposition to my own convictions.
Paolo Mantegazza, The Book of Love (New York: American-Neo-latin Library, 1917), ch. XVII, The Hell of Love, 186-189:
Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean’s abysses, has reserved its greatest bitterness, its most cruel torments for love. And so it was to be; the warmest passion was to turn into the most inflexible frigidity; the deepest was to precipitate itself into the somberest depths; the richest in joys to be the most fecund in sorrows. From the fleeting breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the lightning, more evanescent than a word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to the certain consciousness of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience of him who for one instant awaits his beloved, to the prolonged desperation of him who can no longer wait, love evinces all the notes of affliction, all the torments of the senses, all the tortures of sentiment. Of the bones which are scattered every day on the long path through which the human family passes on this planet, many were left by love; and suicide, homicide and insanity count in cemeteries and hospitals a much greater number of victims than are reckoned in the summary statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, is for those who love with heart and mind and not with senses only. He who sees in love a question only of régime and hygiene recovers from the loss of his sweetheart with a tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with betrayal, and with licentiousness heals every malady of the heart and drowns all his sorrows in his libertinism. . . .
If you wish to open just a little the door of this hell, if you want to sound its abysses with a passing glance, imagine on one side all the hopes, all the voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other all the fears, all the bitternesses, all the miseries. And after this cruel exposition of the joys and sorrows of love, you will not have ended yet, because the fields of sufferance are a hundred times larger than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one; the tortures of a man beholding the fruit near without his being able to touch it are thousands; and this example will suffice for all.
Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, in its presence all the arrows of our pride lose their sharpness, all our hopes are torn, all our joys shattered. In the delirium of passion and pride we all repeat hundreds of times: ‘‘I would have her dead rather than belonging to another—a thousand times buried, but not unfaithful.’’ And frequently the man who utters this blasphemy, his lips livid and his hair standing on end, stains his hands with blood by plunging them into the bosom of a victim. Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of the heart where love and hatred, pride and love, crime and torture clash and blend in the tumult of a dreadful storm. But love, which truly loves, infinite love which transforms man into the half of a creature that suffers and desires, ideal love that few feel and few see dimly in the twilight of a suprasensible region which their hands cannot reach, recognizes no greater torture than the death of the beloved. Oh, yes; let indifference, contempt, hatred, betrayal come, but that the dear one may live. Let others have this creature whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have poured our blood; let this temple, perfumed with the incense of our thoughts, with the durable love of all our passions, become the temple of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken, ourselves driven away by the rough broom of the sexton, but let the god live who sojourns there, let the idol of our life shine on the altar. Dejected like a fugitive, despised like a criminal, vituperated like a spy, in the cold and distant solitude we drink drop by drop a bottomless cup of gall, and every drop is bitterer than the last; but we know that she breathes the air of our planet, which we too breathe; we know that she is inebriated by the same sun that warms us; we know that among the numberless shadows that wander through the spaces of the invisible there is a creature around whom the air becomes mellower and the light brighter; that there are certain clods of earth which yield to the weight of a body that we love. No; as long as the woman we love lives, hope does not lose all its feathers, and far, far away, less tangible than a dream, more invisible than the regions of heaven, more inconceivable than eternity, it still soars on our horizon, perhaps not believed, not confessed, but it still lives and keeps us alive.
But when we still live and she is dead; when we are still so cowardly as to live, to breathe, to eat, and she is buried in the humid miasma of a wooden coffin; when all the world still exists and she is dead; when the joy of a thousand flowers that blossom in every ray of light, the trills of a thousand birds that sing of love, the groups of the fortunates who embrace each other, and the benedictions of so many happy creatures are nothing but a frame to a gelid void, a dark world; when we remain suspended between an infinity of joy that was ours and an infinity of sorrow that is ours and shall be ours tomorrow and as long as we are so cowardly as to live,—then we may look upon suicide as the supreme joy of life, as the most sublime of human prides; then we may understand how man can in a flash dream of the great voluptuousness of mingling his bones with those of another creature; then we can understand how imagination can smile at the idea of the embrace of two corpses, of the fusion of two ashes, of the resurrection of two existences extinguished in the perfume of two flowers grown upon a human grave and which the wind blandly brings together that they may kiss again.
In the silence of the cemeteries there are some flowers that kiss each other and to which, perhaps, from under the earth responds the quivering of certain bones; there are certain lips on our planet, which closely pressed against each other one day, which death cruelly separated and which a second death has reunited forever. And when we survive, it is because a new organism has been created in us, and today we are no longer what we were yesterday. The thoughts of the past, the limbs of the past, all that we were yesterday is dead, dead forever; from the withered trunk of our existence, science, duty, friendship, paternal or maternal or filial love cause a new branch to shoot forth, which reproduces the ancient tree; and the common passer-by, seeing the same leaves, the same flowers, the same fruits, believes that only one corpse is buried there—but he is in error. We can survive certain sorrows on one condition only: to accomplish the miracle of dying today in order to be born anew tomorrow with the same name, but with a new life. And for the honor of human nature, these survivors remain the faithful and silent priests of the vanished god, like those Peruvians who, on the summits of the Andes, amidst the eternal glaciers of the Sorata or of the Illimani, still worship the god of their fathers. To understand certain sorrows is the proof of a lofty mind; to have experienced them is the glory of a martyr which exalts and purifies us.
Josiah Royce, ‘‘Tennyson and Pessimism,’’ in Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New York & London: D. Appleton & Co., 1915), 87-88:
One hears nowadays, very often, of youthful pessimism, prevalent, for instance, among certain clever college students. When I hear of these things, I do not always regret them. On the contrary, I think that the best man is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can absorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil of life but by virtue of his readiness to take his part in the struggle against this evil. Therefore, I am often glad when I hear of this spread of pessimistic ideas among studious but undeveloped youth. For I say to myself, if these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hinders our human life, will some day arouse them to fight this evil in dead earnest, while, if they are not brave men, optimism can be of no service to cowards. But in any case I like to suggest to such brave and pessimistic youth where the solution of their problem must lie. It surely cannot lie in any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world, far off somewhere in the future, in Heaven, or in Isles of the Blessed. These things are not for us. We are born for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of our destiny, we may pos sibly have some good part in the Wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right to hope, and to an honest man that is enough.
