'Wisconsin or Kansas; there he will certainly be better off than in decaying Europe.
Those who cannot will stay to l ive out their lives, as patterns of thP beautiful dream dreamt by humanity. They have lived too much by fantasy and ideals to fit into the age of American good sense.
Tht>n• is no great misfortune in this: we are not many, and we shall soon be extinct.
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But how is it men grow up so out of harmony with their environment? . . .
Imagine a hothouse-reared youth, the one, perhaps, who has described himself in Byron's The Dream; imagine him face to face with the most boring, with the most tedious society, face to face with the monstrous Minotaur of English life, clumsily welded together of two beasts-the one decrepit, the other kneedeep in a miry bog, weighed down like a Caryatid whose muscles, under a constant strain, cannot spare one drop of bloo_d for the brain. If he could have adapted himself to this life he would, instead of dying in Greece at thirty, now have been Lord Palmerston or Lord John Russell. But since he could not it is no wonder that, with his own Childe Harold, he says to his ship: Nor care what land thou bearest me to,
But not again to mine.
But wha t awaited him in the distance? Spain cut up by Napoleon, Greece sunk back into barbarism, the general resurrection after 1814 of all the stinking Lazaruses; there was no getting away from them at Ravenna or at Diodati. Byron could not be satisfied like a German with theories sub specie aeternitatis, nor like a Frenchman with political chatter; he was broken, but broken like a menacing Titan, flinging his scorn in men's faces and not troubling to gild the pill.
The rupture of which Byron, as a poet and a genius, was conscious forty years ago, now, after a succession of new experiences, afte1· the filthy transition from 1 830 to 1 848, and the abominable one from 1 848 to the present, shocks many of us.
And we, like Byron, do not know what to do with ourselves, where to lay our heads.
The realist Goethe, like the romantic Schiller, knew nothing of this rending of the spirit. The one was too religious, the other too philosophical. Both could find peace in abstract spheres.
When the 'spirit of negation' appears as such a jester as Mephistopheles, then the swift disharmony is not yet a fearful one; his mocking and for ever contradictory nature is still blended in the higher harmony, and in its own time will ring out with everything-sic ist gerettet. Lucifer in Cain is very different; he is the rueful angel of darkness and on his brow shines with dim lustre the star of bitter thought; he is full of an inner disintegration which can never be put together again. He does not make a jest of denial, he does not seek to amuse with the impudence of
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his unbelief, he does not allure by sensuality, he does not procure artless girls, wine or diamonds; but he quietly prompts to murder, draws towards himself, towards crime-by tha t incomprehensible power with which at certain moments a man is enticed by still, moonlit water, that promises nothing in its comfortless, cold, shimmering embraces, nothing but death.
Neither Cain nor Manfred, neither Don Juan nor Byron, makes any inference, draws any conclusion, any 'moral.' Perhaps from the point of view of dramatic art this is a d_efect, but it gives a stamp of sincerity a nd indicates the depth of the gulf.
Byron's epilogue, his last word, if you like, is The Darkness; here is the finish of a life that began with The Dream. Complete the picture for yourselves.
Two enemies, hideously disfigured by hunger, are dead, they are devoured by some crab-like animals . . . their ship is rotting away-a tarred rope swings in the darkness of dim waters; there is fearful cold, the beasts a re dying out, history has died already and space is being cleared for new life: our epoch will be reckoned as belonging to the fourth geological formation-that is, if the new world gets as far as being able to count up to four.
Our historical vocation, our work, consists in this: that by our disillusionment, by our sufferings, we reach resignation and humility in face of the truth, and spare following generations from these afflictions. By means of us humanity is regaining sobriety; we are its head-ache next morning, we are its birthpangs; but we must not forget that the child or mother, or perhaps both, may die by the way, and then-well, then history, like the Mormon it is, will start a new pregnancy . . . .
f� scmpre bene. gentlemen !
We know how Nature disposes of individuals: later, sooner, with no victims or on heaps of corpses, she cares not; she goes her way, or goes any \vay that chances. Tens of thousands of years she spends building a coral reef, every spring abandoning to death the ranks that have run ahead too far. The polyps die without suspecting that they have served the progress of the reef.
\Ye, too, shall serve something. To enter into the future as an element in it does not yet mean that the future will fulfil our ideals. Rome did not carry out Plato's idea of a republic nor the Greek idea in general. The Middle Ages were not the development of Rome. Modern \Vestern thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?
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Now I am accustomed to these thoughts; they no longer frighten me. But at the end of 1849 I was stunned by them ; and in spite of the fact that every event, every meeting, every contact, every person vied with each other to tear away the last green leaves, I still frantically and obstinately sought a way out.
That is why I now prize so highly the courageous thought of Byron. He saw that there is no way out, and proudly said so.
I was unhappy and perplexed when these thoughts began to haunt me; I tried by every means to run away from them . . .
like a lost traveller, like a beggar, I knocked at every door, stopped people I met and asked the way, but every meeting and every event led to the same result-to meekness before the truth, to self-sacrificing acceptance of it.
Three years ago I sat by Natalie's sick-bed and saw death drawing her pitilessly, step by step, to the grave ; that life was my whole fortune. Darkness spread around me; I was a savage in my dull despair, but did not try to comfort myself with hopes, did not betray my grief for one moment by the stultifying thought of a meeting beyond the grave.
So it is less likely that I should be false to myself over the impersonal problems of life.
2. P 0 S T S C H. I P T
O N P E T I T B O U H. G E O I S
I KNOW that my view of Europe will meet with a bad reception at home. We for our own comfort want a different Europe and believe in it as Christians believe in paradise. Destroying dreams is always a disagreeable business, but some inner force which I cannot overcome makes me come out with the truth even on occasions when it does me harm.