Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

as a Critic

By Egon Schwarz

RANGE

Every ... perfect thing we find lying in our path is a fragment that has strayed from a strange harmonious world, like meteorites which have somehow fallen down upon the paths of our earth. The task is now to call forth from the lost fragment, through a great exertion of the imagination, a momentary vision of that strange world. Whoever can accomplish this and is capable of such an exertion and concentration of the reproductive imagination will be a great critic. He will also be very just and very conciliatory because he will measure every work of art by an ideal, but a subjective ideal gained from the artist's personality, and he will sense the beauty of all that has been conceived and born in truth.

THESE WORDS, written by the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal and published in a Viennese journal in 1894 under the pseudonym "Loris," aim at describing the critical stance of Walter Pater. But they reveal several features just as characteristic of Hofmannsthal himself.

One of these is Platonism, a characteristic to remain with him to the end of his days in spite of many troubling challenges: art partakes of perfection and perfection in turn exists in a higher realm of the spirit, "a strange harmonious world." Tokens from this sacred sphere descend upon our commonplace earth only infrequently and mysteriously. The observer does not examine the laws governing their trajectory. He is content with noticing that they arrive "somehow." His task is to create for his readers, through an extraordinary exertion of his imaginative powers, a momentary vision of the spiritual world whence these fragments came. He who is capable of such feats of restoration, Loris decrees, is a great critic. He might as well have said "poet" for even though he is speaking of "reproductive imagination" the poet's mission on earth is likewise that of a mediator. The meteorite, to remain within the same metaphor, is of his own making but it is incomplete, a mere atom from that yonder world, allowing creator and receiver alike no more than a glimpse.

Similarly expressive of Hofmannsthal, and of impressionistic criticism in general, is the demand that the yardstick by which art is measured should be gained by an immersion in the work itself and not brought to it from without. The standards of judgment, no matter how benevolent and lenient with the imperfect condition of everything that takes on discernible shape, must be derived from an ideal. But the ideal ought not to be an alien abstraction; it should be a living form distilled from what the artist intended and not so much from what he accomplished.

Even the seemingly innocuous postulate at the end of this amazing passage, half hidden by the syntax, rather than openly proclaimed, is profoundly Hofmannsthalian. An insistence on the ethical origins of beauty is certainly not startling nor is it necessarily alien to Pater, Impressionism, or earlier intellectual currents; but we shall have occasion to observe that it is central to Hofmannsthal's personal development.

Hofmannsthal as a critic? This sounds like Leonardo as a designer of military fortifications or Casanova as the author of a Venetian history: both undeniable dimensions of the men but not the accomplishments that are conjured up immediately by the mere mention of their names. Of the millions of opera-goers who are fond of, say, the Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose), not all remember the name of the librettist. But the educated among them know that without his unique collaboration with the composer there would be neither this opera nor such favorites of the repertoire as Ariadne, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), Arabella, or Die agyptische Helena.

There also is a growing awareness that, together with Max Reinhardt, Hofmannsthal is the founder of the Salzburg Festspiele, the oldest and most prestigious of Europe and that he wrote three distinguished morality plays for the occasion, thus rejuvenating the age-old theatrical form, Jedermann; its sequel, Das Salzburger Grosse Welttheater (The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World); and the apocalyptic tragedy Der Turm (The Tower). The latter two were fashioned after decades of creative effort from the Calderonian plays El gran teatro del mundo and La vida es sueño. But it is the former, Jedermann, embedded in the European Everyman tradition, that has become the center of the Salzburg Festspiele and has grown so well-known that it is regarded by countless spectators as an anonymous gift of nature for their edification. Thus the name of Hofmannsthal is paradoxically overshadowed even by his most popular contribution.

Above all, Hofmannsthal is for the literate public the author of a series of delightful comedies, the precious possession of a national literature not exactly abounding in comic masterpieces. It does not take great literary sophistication to recognize that in a play like Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man) the highest demands of what the French call "Ie comique sérieux" have been met: wit is wed to philosophical profundity, social satire coupled with character portrayal, symbolism with a touch of lightness and gaiety altogether rare in German letters. Similarly, Der Unbestechliche of 1922-23, largely true to such French models as Moliere and Marivaux, can be regarded as a variation of the farcical servo padrone theme and is nevertheless, to the initiated observer, a political allegory with strong theological overtones. Knowing that Hofmannsthal wrote these plays immediately after World War I, at a low point of his country's history and cognizant of Novalis' prescription that one must write comedies after a lost war, helps us understand this strange but eminently successful double perspective.

However, those who are old enough to remember directly or who are otherwise familiar with the fin de siècle know that the original Hofmannsthal cult goes back to the 1880's and had as its object a pupil of the Viennese Academic Gymnasium. At the ripe age of seventeen, when he still wore short trousers and had a nurse to watch over his comings and goings, he wrote the most intoxicatingly mellifluous German poems since Goethe, or at least Brentano, and such enchanting lyrical one-act plays that he immediately became the darling of the fastidious avant-garde of the day. Such precociousness was paralleled in literary history only by Wunderkinder like Keats and Rimbaud, and Hofmannsthal's contemporaries did not hesitate to assign him the same rank as that of these famous predecessors. His early fame was obscured when he ceased writing poetry and turned to nonlyrical pursuits which his erstwhile admirers did not understand. One of them, the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr, went so far as to proclaim regretfully that Hofmannsthal should have died at twenty-five to retain his place of glory in the history of literature.

It was not until...