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By means of a few dozen pages a single person had united a dispersed and confused mass.
The first moment, while the idea was still a dream of vague outline, was decidedly the happiest in Herzl’s short life. As soon as he began to fix his aims in actual space, and to unite the forces, he was made to realize how divided his people had become among various races and destinies – the religious on the one hand, the free thinkers on the other, here the socialist, there the capitalistic Jews – all competing eagerly with one another in all languages, and all unwilling to submit to a unified authority.
In my nineteenth year I had suddenly achieved a prominent position overnight, and Theodor Herzl, who remained kindly disposed towards me from that moment on, took the opportunity of writing in one of his next essays that Vienna need not fear the decadence of art. On the contrary, besides Hofmannsthal, there was an entire platoon of young talent of whom the best was to be expected; and he mentioned my name at the head.
In the two thousand years of our history we Jews have not had any practice in creating anything real in this world.
And it was this gigantic outpouring of grief from the depths of millions of souls that made me realize for the first time how much passion and hope this lone and lonesome man had borne into the world through the power of a single thought.
had no intention of “studying” in Berlin. As in Vienna, I went to the university only twice during the semester, once to enroll for the lectures, and the second time to secure a certificate of my supposed attendance. What I sought in Berlin was neither colleges nor professors, but a higher and more complete sort of freedom.
Vienna, bound to the old and worshiping its own past, was cautious and non-committal with respect to young men and daring experiments. But in Berlin, which wished to form itself more rapidly and more personally, novelty was sought after.
Nothing seemed more characteristic to me than the contrast between my landladies in Vienna and in Berlin. The Viennese was a cheerful, chatty woman who did not keep things too clean, and easily forgot this or that, but was enthusiastically eager to be of service. The one in Berlin was correct and kept everything in perfect order; but in my first monthly account I found every service that she had given me down in neat, vertical writing: three pfennigs for sewing on a trouser button, twenty for removing an ink-spot from the tabletop, until at the end, under a broad stroke of the pen, all of her
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Rudolf Steiner,
Whereas most of my Viennese friends had come from the middle classes and nine-tenths of them from the Jewish bourgeoisie, which meant that we merely duplicated or multiplied our inclinations, the young people of this new world came from directly opposite classes, from above and from below, one a Prussian aristocrat, another the son of a Hamburg shipping man, the third from Westphalian peasant stock. Unawares,
I found myself in a circle where actual poverty existed, with torn clothing and worn-out shoes, a sphere which I had never touched in Vienna.
the worse a man’s reputation was, the more eager my interest to meet its bearer.
To this was added the attraction of the exotic, the foreign; nearly every one of them contributed to my eager curiosity from a strange world.
I believe that I never enjoyed so much intellectual companionship in ten years as I did in that one short semester in Berlin, my first in complete freedom.
every strange language at first offers opposition in its most personal turnings to those who would copy it, it invites forces of expression which, otherwise unsought, would never come to light; and this struggle to wrest from a strange language its most intimate essence and to mold it as plastically into one’s own language, was always a particular artistic desire on my part.
in this humble activity of transmitting the highest treasures of art I experienced for the first time the assurance of doing something truly useful, a justification of my existence.
Verhaeren was the first of all the French poets who endeavored to give Europe what Walt Whitman had given America: a profession of faith in the times, in the future. He had begun to love the modern world and wished to conquer it for poetry.
some of his best poems will give evidence for a long time to come of the Europe and the humanity we then dreamed of.
he knew nothing about me, but still he offered me his confidence merely because he heard that I was close to his work.
the two years which I devoted almost exclusively to the translation of Verhaeren’s poetical works and to the preparation of his biography, I traveled much in between, at times giving public lectures.
And now I was outwardly free and all the years up to the present have been devoted to one struggle – a struggle which in our times grows constantly more difficult – to remain equally free inwardly.
decades to come will not be what it was before the First World War. A
In spite of the social and technical progress of this quarter of a century between world war and world war, there is not a single nation in our small world of the West that has not lost immeasurably much of its joie de vivre and its carefree existence.
Oh, one needed to know Berlin first in order to love Paris properly, and to experience the innate servility of Germany with its angular and painfully sharp-edged class consciousness.
The proletarian worker felt himself as free and important a citizen as his employer. In the café the waiter cordially shook the hand of the gold-braided general, the small solid sober bourgeoise did not stick up her nose at the prostitute who lived on the same floor, but chatted with her daily on the staircase, and the children gave her flowers.
Paris knew only a mixture of contrasts, no above and no below; there was no visible barrier between the luxurious streets and the unswept alleys, and in each there was equal life and gaiety.
you never know a people or a city in its depth and its most hidden qualities through books, nor even most persistent poking about in its nooks and crannies, but only through its best people.
One was in Germany, another in France, another in Italy, and yet they were all in the same homeland, for they lived in poetry alone; and, in the firm renunciation of the ephemeral their life, through art, became itself a work of art.
great a joy it was for us to have the presence of such saints, sworn to perfection, in the midst of a world that had already begun to mechanize itself.
My first lesson had been taught me – that the greatest men are always the kindest.
The second was that nearly always they are the simplest in their manner of living.
Great moments are always outside of time. Rodin
And then the incomprehensible occurred, the great lesson: he took off his smock, again put on his housecoat and turned to go. He had forgotten me completely in that hour of extreme concentration. He no longer knew that a young man whom he himself had led into the studio to show him his work had stood behind him with bated breath, as immovable as his statue. He stepped to the door. As he started to unlock it, he discovered me and stared at me almost angrily: who was this young stranger who had slunk into his studio? But in the next moment he remembered and, almost ashamed, came towards me.
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While in Austria and in many other countries when a crime is committed, the complaint follows automatically, that is, the State officially takes justice in its own hands, in France it remains the free choice of the injured party to press or refuse to press a charge. To me personally this manner of legal interpretation seems more just than the so-called rigid justice. For it offers the possibility of forgiving a man for an injury he may have committed,
No sooner had I spoken my decided “no,” when three things occurred. The haggard creature between the two policemen gave me an indescribable look of gratitude that I shall never forget. The prefect contentedly laid down his pen; it was obviously quite agreeable to him that my refusal to prosecute had saved him much additional writing. But my landlord behaved quite differently. He became purple in the face and began to yell at me that I should not do this, that these rascals, cette vermine, must be exterminated, that I had no idea how much damage that type did.
Quickly the thief approached me and said humbly, “Oh, no, Monsieur, I will carry it to your house.” And so I marched off with the grateful thief carrying the large bag behind me through the streets to my hotel.
The insulted middle-class morality not only of the house, but of the entire street and even the entire district, stood firmly against me for having “helped” a thief. Nothing remained for me but to depart with the suitcase I had rescued and to leave the comfortable hotel as wretchedly as if I had been the criminal.
Nowhere did I succeed in connecting myself with any circle or any group. I spent nine-tenths of my time in London in my room or in the British Museum.
And so the literary enjoyment – and this afforded me a new charm – became more of a celebration of poems than a spontaneous reading. I was reminded involuntarily of how Verhaeren read his poems – in shirt sleeves, in order the better to mark the rhythm with his vigorous arms, without pomp or staging; or how Rilke occasionally recited a few poems out of a book, simply, clearly, in tranquil service to the word. It was the first “staged” poetry reading that I had ever attended, and in spite of my love for his work I was somewhat distrustful of this cult treatment.
Yeats had a grateful guest.
William Blake, that lonely and problematical genius who, with his mixture of helplessness and sublime perfection, still fascinates me.
The genius of England, which I tried in vain to recognize in streets and cities, was suddenly revealed to me in Blake’s truly astral figure. And now I had added another to my many world loves.
I agree perfectly with Goethe when he says that to understand completely great creations one must have seen them not only in their perfection but have pursued the process of their creation.
there had always been a particular sense of reverence in me for every earthly manifestation of genius, and besides my manuscripts I collected whatever relics I could lay hands on. At a later time, in my “second life,” one room in my house was devoted to my cult, if I may so call it.
I must confess that it was easier for me to leave house and home than no longer to see the familiar imprint on my books.
had begun to publish at an unseemly early age yet I had an inner conviction that at twenty-six I had not created anything of substance.
as with nearly all of my books written before my thirty-second year – I have never permitted it to be reprinted.
In my stories it is always the man who succumbs to destiny, in my biographies the personality of one who succeeds not in a worldly way but in the moral sense.
The fact that the two greatest actors of Germany had died while rehearsing my verses made me (I am not ashamed to confess it) superstitious.
If one shuts the door upon misfortune it will sneak in through another.
