The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Died on December 10, 1889

Death snatched our two greatest spirits from us Germans in Austria in quick succession. First, Robert Hamerling, the poet of German idealism, who led us up to the heights of world-embracing thought, closed his eyes. A few days ago, he was followed by Ludwig Anzengruber, the great connoisseur and portrayer of the soul of our people.

Our immediate present is almost incapable of coming to a fair, all-round appreciation of both. Party struggle on the one hand, scholarly arrogance on the other are the obstacles that stand in the way of such an appreciation of their greatness. Insensitive to the genuinely artistic, the humanly great in the poet, the party only looks for catchwords in his works to make him one of their own. His writings are only valid to the extent that they are evidence for their party purposes. Contemporary scholarship, on the other hand, which by virtue of the position and task of its bearers should keep its gaze free and open for all that is great and beautiful, contributes less today than ever to the recognition of what the present is achieving that is significant. The most worthless intellectual products of centuries long past, which have never had any influence on humanity, are tracked down and processed in scholarly treatises and academic lectures, but the literature of the present is treated as if it were of no concern to the masters. It will probably be decades before literary historians approach Hamerling and Anzengruber, produce critical editions and write historical appraisals. These circles know nothing of the fact that scholarship actually has the task of helping contemporaries to understand the present, and that all knowledge of the past is only of value if it brings us closer to what is going on around us, touches us directly.

Then there is the mendacity of our daily press, which does not shy away from any shameful act when it wants to distort the image of a contemporary who was either not entirely to its liking or whose achievements go against the grain. We experienced this a few months ago with Hamerling, and now with Anzengruber. The reports about him in the Viennese daily papers testified to an ignorance of his life and his works and were full of deliberate distortions of his work as a person and as a poet. Our experience with Anzengruber was no better. What he really is, what he is for his people and for German poetry, to express this in a worthy manner, one felt absolutely no calling to do so. After all, his fiftieth birthday passed a few weeks ago without any of Vienna's leading daily newspapers running a literary feature on him.

This happens to the greatest sons of our nation! And Anzengruber was one of them. Gifted with an original, naive spirit and strong poetic talent, he conquered a whole new area of German literature. He is a poet of the people, but in the sense that he captures the soul of the people where it rises to the most important questions of humanity, where it is moved by those problems which, in their further development, have led to the most profound works of our generation. The question of right and wrong, of guilt and responsibility, of freedom and lack of freedom of the will, of existence and the goodness of God, insofar as they are reflected in the naïve mind of the common man and stir up the greatest passions in his heart, provoking the strongest conflicts, these are the things that underlie Anzengruber's works. The "Woe to you that you are a grandson" has never been treated more effectively by a classical poet than in Anzengruber's "Fourth Commandment". The fact that all law is a matter of human opinion and that there is no eternal, unchangeable natural law, a question that has occupied the deepest minds, is expressed in her own way by "old Liesl" in "Meineidbauer". How we are the play of fate, how we are dependent on the outside world, which plants the seeds of evil or good in us, so that human responsibility is in a bad way, is the view of "Vroni" as she contemplates her own life's destiny. This is the great thing about Anzengruber, that he portrays the "simple man" as the "whole man", everything human, lives itself out in him. The liberation of the human breast from traditional prejudices, the appeal to the voice of one's own reason, all this takes place in the man of the people no less than in the spirit that walks on the heights of humanity. Everything that takes place on the great plan of world history also spreads its waves into the popular mind. Our poet's works are the sharpest possible proof of this. The great world-historical upheaval that is currently taking place in the religious ideas of mankind has also taken hold of the people with power. Blind faith is giving way to a thinking grasp of the truth. Reason wants to take its place. This trend of the times, as it also appears in the lowest classes of the people, is so masterfully embodied in Anzengruber's "Kreuzelschreibern" and the "Pfarrer von Kirchfeld" that this alone ensures the value of these works for all time.

These poems have been interpreted as tendency poems, but they are by no means so, nor is Hamerling's "Homunculus". If the poet confronts reality and embodies it artistically, then one cannot speak of tendency. For that is his highest task. Anzengruber did not write to say: country clergy, peasants, become this or that, but to show: this is how they are, these country people of today. In him, a whole slice of human life has found its poetic transfiguration.

Goethe sees the poet's perfection in succeeding in bringing his characters to life in such a way that they compete with reality. Anzengruber fulfills this condition like few others. He does not copy reality anywhere, as the school of modern realistic perversity would have it, but he does create characters who, as they appear in the drama, could also exist directly. And that is the task of the true poet. Whatever figure we may take from him, everything is naturally possible, everything psychologically true; nowhere is there a single trait to be discovered that would contradict the nature of the person. Indeed, in the art of characterization Anzengruber is one of the most important dramatists of all time, and this art is precisely the basis of drama, especially modern drama. Here all events, all conflicts are only justified insofar as they flow from the human interior. Fate, which for the ancients was an external force, has been internalized, has become a consequence of the character's disposition. The drama of the present day shows us man insofar as he wants to be the master of his fate and insofar as he himself is the forger of his own happiness. Anzengruber allows everything that happens to follow entirely from the characters. Nothing is left out of this iron consistency, as he imagines it in the human soul. Once we have understood the people who appear, we have understood the entire course of a play. Nothing is sacrificed for the sake of a theatrical effect, a pleasantly touching course of action, etc., as the illusory greats of our dramatic daily literature do. Because of this trait, Anzengruber is a born dramatist. And he is also a dramatist as a storyteller. His great stories: "Der Sternsteinhof", "Einsam" etc., are full of dramatic power and depth; indeed, even his shorter stories are dominated by the same trait. Scholarly aesthetes may rack their brains as to what aesthetic template they can therefore place his prose under; indeed, they may even come to the conclusion that this prose is not significant at all because it does not preserve the character of pure epic representation; but we would like to enjoy the wonderful things that Anzengruber had to produce due to his peculiar nature, even if the traditional terms that could classify it do not apply.

March 20, 1898

Fifty years ago, when the wild storms of revolution roared through Europe, Henrik Ibsen was twenty years old. He greeted the freedom movement with the strongest sympathy. The passion of the revolutionaries was closely related to the feelings that lived in his own soul. Looking back on this time, he later said:

"The time was very turbulent, the February Revolution, the uprisings in Hungary, the Schleswig War - all of this had a powerful impact on my development. I addressed thunderous poems to the Magyars in which I urgently exhorted them in the interests of freedom and human rights to persevere in the just struggle against the tyrants."

The revolution that the twenty-year-old experienced was a harbinger and symptom of a larger one, of the revolutionization of minds. The political revolution could not achieve what the spirits had promised. Movements to reshape the human order are only victorious if they are the expression of new-born world views. Christianity was able to establish a new order of human relations because it emerged from a revolution of the entire emotional life. Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed a new relationship to the world and life. He gave the human mind a new direction. The actual circumstances had to follow the changed direction of the heart. The revolution of the year forty-eight was a purely political one. It was not supported by any new world view.

It was not until ten years after this revolution that Charles Darwin proclaimed to people the gospel that they needed to give content to a new way of life. Goethe already possessed this gospel. He had already come to the great realization of the purely natural, unified entity that brought forth the dead stone, the silent plant, the unreasoning animal, and which also called man into existence, and beside which there is nothing divine in man. He regards man as the most perfect natural being. Nature has the power to bring forth the rational animal at its peak; no divine breath needs to be blown into this rational animal.¹

But Goethe gained his view of life as a spiritual aristocrat. Only through his individual course of development was it possible to read the book of nature in such a way that it made this revelation. Darwin proclaimed the same insight in a democratic way. Everyone could imitate his intellectual steps. It is not what he proclaims that makes a man a prophet, but how he proclaims it.

The great secret was revealed to Goethe at the sight of the Greek works of art in Italy. When he saw these works, he exclaimed: 'There is necessity, there is God. I have the suspicion that the artists, when they produced these works of art, acted according to the same laws according to which nature works, and which I am on the trail of. The work of man is only a continuation of the work of nature: Goethe recognized that at this moment. What man creates does not come to him as a gift of grace from heaven, but through the development of the same forces of nature that are active in plants and animals to a higher level. One would have to emulate Goethe's life if one wanted to arrive at his insight in the same way as he did. Darwin taught the same thing. But he pointed to common facts that express such truth - to facts that are accessible to everyone. He expressed in popular form what Goethe proclaimed for the select few.

It now became an absurdity to attribute to the creative power that comes from above what nature could obviously produce of itself. The entire human emotional life must change under the influence of the new world view. Man sees that he is something higher, something more perfect than that from which he has developed. He used to believe that someone above him had transplanted him into existence. Now his gaze can no longer be directed upwards. He is dependent on himself and on what is below him.

For centuries, the human heart has become accustomed to submitting to this upward gaze. Since Darwin's emergence, it has endeavored to wean itself off such a direction of sensation.

It is relatively easy for the mind to assimilate the new knowledge; it is infinitely difficult for the heart to transform itself in accordance with this knowledge. This is why the most difficult battles between mind and heart took place in the souls of the best minds of the last half-century. Unclear, disharmonious, doubting, searching natures are typical of this half-century.

Most of those who walk among us today with a more serious disposition still feel these struggles within them. And even the best only have the feeling that satisfaction is yet to come, but not that it has already arrived. Countless questions arise from these struggles; we only hope for answers in the future.

The future historian of our time will have to tell of wrestling, of questioning people. And if he wants to describe a single personality in whose soul all the struggles that have moved five decades have been reflected, he will have to describe Henrik Ibsen. All the questionable figures that our half-century had to produce: they confront us in Ibsen's dramas. And all the questions that this time raised: we find them again in these works. And because this time is one of questions to which only the future will provide answers, Ibsen's dramas end with questions; and that is why he had to say of himself:

"I usually ask, but answering is not my office."

One must give the truth its due and admit that Ibsen was not the man who knew the answers to the great questions of his time. He knew how to ask with all his might: he was unable to answer. He felt this himself when he said:

"For my part, I shall be satisfied with the success of my week's work if this work can serve to prepare the mood for tomorrow. But first and foremost, I will be satisfied if it can help to strengthen the spirits for the week of work that follows."

I would like to consider it fortunate that Ibsen is only a questioner. For by not being able to arrive at answers, he is able to question deeply and thoroughly. And because we taste with him the full, deep seriousness of the highest questions, those who follow will arrive at deeper answers. The brokenness and dissatisfaction that we carry within us today when we come from his dramas will turn into happiness for those who will untie what we tie.

This is how I understand Ibsen. To me, he is a nature that is strong enough to feel the problems of our time as its own pain, but not strong enough to realize our highest goals.

I see Ibsen as a master builder who builds the towers from which we are supposed to look out over our world, but who is overcome with vertigo when he himself is supposed to stand on the top of these towers.

I imagine that it must be difficult to be old in our time. Those who are young today believe that they can still keep up with the intellectual culture in which we live. To the old man of today, such a following seems impossible. Ibsen's heart is too deeply intertwined with the sentiments that past centuries have instilled in us for him to be satisfied with the proud tower of knowledge that he helped to create.

In his "Baumeister Solneß", he confessed in the manner of a great man that he was seized by dizziness at his own work.

I think the old master will be pleased if we tell him today, on his birthday, that we have understood him. In fifty years of work, he wanted to lead people to freedom. And we want to preserve our own freedom towards him. Not blind reverence; reverent knowledge is what he should see in us when we greet him on this day.

• 1. We do not consider it superfluous, because today we read quickly and therefore often superficially, to draw attention to the fact that Dr. R. Steiner is not reproducing his own views here, but those of a time that looked at things through Darwin's glasses, which can also be looked at more deeply. Even if it is the same direction in which the modern spiritual researcher looks - the gate of knowledge of nature, it is a different matter to stop in front of the open gate or to walk through it and see new horizons. It is necessary to penetrate through that gate - but then one must go on. (Note by Marie Steiner.)

On the occasion of his hundredth birthday (June 29, 1898)

There are personalities who, when we look at them, we forget everything that is going on around them. They seem to draw all the strength for their existence from themselves. We ask about the peculiar nature of their souls if we want to understand the character of their deeds. The fact that they live in a period of time with quite specific cultural conditions is hardly more important to us than the fact that they breathe the air of a certain part of the world. These personalities appear like self-contained circles filled with their own content. I do not mean merely those spirits who are the leaders of world history, and whom Emerson calls the "representatives of the human race". People whose lives pass without a trace for mankind can also be natures built on their own.

In contrast to these characters, there are others whose actions and activities remind us of their surroundings, the age in which they live and often even the place where they were born. We are more interested in their relationship to their environment than in themselves. And if they belong to the past, then any individual interest in them ceases; we only see them as typical representatives of a certain era. That's how I feel about Willibald Alexis (Wilhelm Heinrich Häring).

His works were written between the third and seventh decade of our century. The world view that the most advanced minds profess today was only just emerging at that time. Ideas in which we are currently being educated were present in individual, particularly enlightened minds. The majority of educated people, however, grew up in a world of ideas that is alien to our present-day sensory life. And in the art and the conception of art of that time, this world of ideas that is alien to us lived on. At that time, people wanted an impersonal, objective art. The artist was supposed to create selflessly, with an expression of his personality. The more he stepped back behind his work, the more he was valued. It was not his subjective idiosyncrasies that people wanted to discover in his creation, but something objectively beautiful that was subject to eternal laws, free of any personal private inclination. Let us remember what Schopenhauer demands of the artist in the spirit of this view: he should "leave his interest, his will, his purpose, completely out of sight, thus completely divesting himself of his personality for a time in order to remain as a purely recognizing subject, a clear world-eye". Philosophers, who incidentally fought each other fiercely, were united in this basic view. Hegel, the man whom Schopenhauer hated like perhaps no other, would hardly have objected to the above sentence. And I have heard a follower of Herbart, Robert Zimmermann, who refuted Schopenhauer and Hegel with the ease so characteristic of philosophers, defend the same conception of art. They were all children of their time, the middle third of our century. And Willibald Alexis was an artist of that very time.

Alexis was so selfless that it almost borders on the psychologically impossible. You can't deny his essence any more than he did. In his history of "German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century", Karl Julius Schröer recounts a conversation he had with the poet. Alexis particularly emphasized his romantic natural disposition. Among other things, he said that as a boy he had heard a poem that began: "Hüll' O Sonne, deine Strahlen..." The meaning of this poem was unknown to him. But the sound of the words "Hüll' O" inspired him. Nevertheless, Alexis became a poet who was primarily interested in the objective representation of real conditions. And anyone looking for something in his works that points to his natural disposition as described above will search in vain. He tries to capture the sense of past times, he tries to be objectively faithful, he strives to suppress the original romantic trait. Alexis' relationship with Walter Scott has the character of a complete self-expression. Scott's manner has often been described as romantic. It always seems to me that this is like describing black as white because it is created when light is removed from it. Even the Brothers Grimm's objective immersion in the German past has been given the epithet romantic, because both the [Brothers] Grimm and the Romantics had a tendency to immerse themselves in the past of our people, and because both have a certain temporal connection. What matters, however, is not the burying in past times, but the tendency from which this burying emanates. And for the Romantics, this is the satisfaction of a tendency towards the mystical, the nebulous, which is met by the history of the past running into obscurity; for the Brothers Grimm, it is the endeavor to comprehend historical development in a clear, scientifically transparent manner. And just as clarity relates to mysticism, so Walter Scott relates to Romanticism. Walter Scott is crude in his grasp of past reality, strictly realistic. And if Willibald, who was born to be a Romantic, took Alexis Scott as his model, this could only happen by completely giving up his personality.

As if to prove this to us, Alexis published two novels in 1823 and 1827: "Walladmor, freely adapted from the English of Walter Scott" and "Castle Avalon, freely adapted from the English of Walter Scott". He imitated the Englishman's style in such a way that the works could have been mistaken for translations. This can only happen with a personality who gives up his own essence.

It was therefore as if Willibald Alexis had been created to artistically depict past times, their battles and victories, their personalities and their circumstances with historical fidelity. In "Cabanis" he depicts German life during the Seven Years' War in this way, in "Roland von Berlin" the battles between the city representatives of Berlin and the old nobility, in "Falscher Waldemar" the conditions of city and knightly life. In his later novels "Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow", "Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht" and "Isegrimm", the same artistic attitude prevails.

Willibald Alexis thought like his time. The only thing he had ahead of his contemporaries was the power to create. That may be a lot, but one must not confuse such natures as he was with the truly productive spirits, who not only create what everyone feels, but who also have unique feelings.

On his hundredth birthday

June 21 [1898] was Wolfgang Menzel's hundredth birthday. He is a forgotten man today, even though he wrote seventy volumes in his lifetime and for a long time was a literary critic who was listened to in Germany. The "Literaturblatt", which he edited and which appeared in Cotta's publishing house, was an authoritative critical organ for decades. It is strange that so little is currently said about Menzel. For quite a few of our contemporaries are filled with his spirit. This spirit is that of a narrow-minded, narrow-minded, moralizing criticism that measures everything great with the yardstick of philistinism and dismisses genius with a philistine mind. Higher artistic sensibilities and an aesthetic world view were alien to Menzel. He fought against Goethe, Heine and "Young Germany". He did not understand the artistic intentions of those he fought against. He had formed certain views of what was morally good and evil, views that only a philistine could have. And because Goethe, Heine and "Young Germany" created works that were not tailored to philistine morals, he fought against them. Even today we find critics and writers who write in his spirit. We have a literary history of König. We also have literary historians who scold Heine, just as Menzel once scolded him. We've got rid of Menzel, but Menzel has remained. Menzel's rant against Goethe is particularly repugnant. He hated Goethe because he did not allow himself to be kept from admiring Napoleon's personality by a narrow-minded national sense; he hated him because he portrayed human nature from all sides and did not want to force it into stereotyped, moralistic forms; he hated him because he took life as it was to be taken and did not fight like a bull against what had become natural. Menzel fought against the healthy sensuality that "Young Germany" strove to portray because he found it "immoral". He was a man of narrow-minded nationalism, so much so that his comments make us think of the anti-Semites and German nationalists of today. However, he surpassed them in terms of the force and accuracy of his expression and the art of his presentation.

It is easy to doubt the sincerity of his judgments. In his youth, he paid homage to revolutionary principles and was a fervent fraternity member. Later, he was an accomplice to reaction and anti-progressive efforts. His denunciatory writings were important documents for the governments that wanted to suppress liberal aspirations. Heine is of the opinion that he was only fibbing about his inclinations for freedom and revolution. Whether this is the case is difficult to decide today. There is no doubt, however, that Menzel is one of those literary figures who, because of their narrow-mindedness, come to impudent judgments expressed with vain confidence. They talk with the air of the know-it-all about things they don't know the first thing about. There is hardly anything more worthless in German literature than the seventy volumes of Menzel's works.

On the centenary of his birth

In Honore de Balzac, a man was born in France on May 20, 1799 who, as an artist, expressed the world view of our century with all the one-sidedness that it initially needed in order to effectively assert itself against the school of thought that centuries of Christology had inculcated in people. If this modern world view is to be characterized in one word, it must be said that it sought to understand man on the basis of scientific knowledge. Just as we seek to understand the composition and movements of the universe purely in terms of natural law, today we also seek to explain the actions of human beings. We no longer think about why God allows evil in the world, but we seek to understand the human organization in order to be able to say how it comes to such expressions that are regarded as evil. Balzac exaggerated this current of thought. He wanted to be the naturalist of human society. Just as Dante wrote a "divine" comedy, he wanted to write a "human" one, because he thought: "There are social species, just as there are zoological species. Just as in the animal world the difference between [lion] and dog, between mammal and bird must be understood, so in human society the difference between civil servant and merchant, between financier and aristocrat by birth. One thing is overlooked. The animal species lion is so exhausted by the single individual that nothing else about it can interest us essentially once we have grasped the peculiarity of its species. The old maid may still have a special interest in the individual peculiarities of her lapdog. Such peculiarities cannot attract general attention. The situation is quite different with humans. Every individual becomes a problem for us here. The species is not limited to the individual. Each person presents us with a riddle. A psychological riddle for the explainer; an artistic task for the performer. Balzac did not understand this. That is why he did not portray individuals. All his characters lack the latter. We see in them representatives of their social types. The interests, goals and lifestyles of their class dominate them and hover over their heads like fixed ideas. The social costume, the milieu alone is drawn. Man is only a specimen. The truth of Balzac's view of the world will only be revealed when the individual, which he ignores, is clearly presented to us in a scientific way. This is how we must understand Balzac today. Then we will see in him the ancestor of many a contemporary representative of the new world view, who basically did not penetrate to the point where the individual begins. To name one of the greatest, it is Nietzsche's intellectual tragedy that he never pursued man into the secrets of individuality. For Nietzsche, so often characterized as an individualist, almost only generic ideas exist in broad areas. Nietzsche saw the proletarian, the Christian, the woman, the scholar and many others only as genera. And this circumstance explains many of Nietzsche's contradictions. Basically, all of Nietzsche's assertions, which he makes as an observer, as a philosopher, contradict the conclusions and judgments he forms. What he should have said of the individual, he asserts as generally characteristic truths. He suffers from the same prejudice under which Balzac wrote novels. Both lack the ability to draw the final conclusions, the truly unbiased view of reality. They cannot apply the truths gained from natural science to human society. They simply transfer what is valid there to here. But this literal transfer is wrong. When we today wind our way through the long series of Balzac's novels, we stand there, like Hölderlin before the people of his time: we see masters and servants, aristocrats and people, peasants and burghers; but we do not see people. Finally, we must realize that we can only understand the great prophets of the modern worldview if we understand how to go beyond them at the right moment. We do not understand Goethe today by organizing celebrations in his honour, by repeating and commenting on his words, but by drawing conclusions from his views that he was not yet able to draw. History only concerns us to the extent that it promotes our own activities.

Ellen Key, the subtle psychologist, aptly pointed out in her book "Essays" (Berlin, S. Fischer Verlag, 1899) the deep meaning behind the catchphrase "The freedom of personality" that is so often heard today. "How many really know what it costs to strive hour after hour, day after day, year after year to realize the content of these words?" Away from the circles that seek new figureheads and hierarchies of intellectual life in Vienna, there lives an artist who fights the battle of the soul that Ellen Key points to: Rosa Mayreder. She has emerged as a writer and painter in recent years. Three years ago, her first collection of novellas "Aus meiner Jugend" (From my youth) was published, soon followed by the other, "Übergänge, Novellen" (both published by Pierson, Dresden [1896 and 1897]), and more recently "Idole", the "Geschichte einer Liebe" (Berlin, S. Fischer Verlag 1899). In the psychological sketches collected in the first two volumes, deep problems of the soul are unrolled; in the last work, the more one delves into it, the more one admires a developed connoisseurship of human nature and a mature art in the depiction of what goes on in the grounds and undergrounds of the mind. Anyone who judges Rosa Mayreder's short stories on first impression can easily come to the conclusion that they are a poem of social struggle, a rebellion against the prejudices with which education and society hold back the free development of our soul life. For a large part of these stories depict personalities who live out their lives in an unnatural way, because misguided upbringing and social perversity have turned them into completely different people than they would have been if they had developed in the air of freedom and freedom from prejudice. But anyone who immerses himself more thoroughly in these small works of art will find that the poet is not concerned with this struggle at all, but with finding artistic means to bring the processes of the human soul to light in their full truth, regardless of whether these processes are brought about by life within an inverted social order or by the natural dichotomies in human nature itself. Rosa Mayreder has a profound urge for knowledge and a strong interest in delving deeper into the essence of man. And the love of liberating the personality is at the center of her emotional life. As an artist, she is not interested in expressing her thoughts as such, nor in portraying her love of freedom. Anyone who still doubted this after the publication of her first collections of novellas must have been swayed by "Idole". All of Rosa Mayreder's ideas about human nature have been incorporated here in a poetic and imaginative way. Sharp observations and deep thoughts have flowed completely into the vivid processes. One must admire this purely artistic expression of the poet all the more because she completely dispenses with the older means of narrative art. Anecdotal stylization of external events is completely alien to her. She does not believe that art must transcend nature in order to depict a higher truth, a special "beauty". She is full of the belief that truth is to be sought within nature alone. But at the same time, it is deeply imbued with the realization that art cannot copy nature, but that its ways and means are something independent, something that must be grasped in its own way if it is to depict the truth of nature. For the painter, color and form are a world of their own. From their essence, he must create something that appears as true as nature, even though nature produces the object he is depicting by means other than color and form alone. The incessant immersion in the means of artistic expression is characteristic of Rosa Mayreder's soul life.

This characteristic of hers comes to the fore most clearly in her last work. Gisa loves Doctor Lamaris. She tells how this love arose from the unfathomable depths of her soul when she saw this man for the first time, and how she seized it with magical power. "When this man entered, indeed as soon as I saw him for the first time, he seemed so strangely familiar to me, as if I had known him for a long time. And after he had spoken to me for a few minutes, polite, meaningless words, as every young man addresses them to every young girl, I suddenly got the impression that I was having a very pleasant conversation, that the whole company, who were standing and sitting around in a rather leathery way, were animated as never before." Love fertilizes Gisa's imagination. And this forms an image of Doctor Lamaris, to whom the girl looks up as if to an ideal. And we get an idea of this image when we hear Gisa's concept of the ideal man: "A man with a woman's heart! That is the highest, that is perfection! A man who has everything that characterizes men, all strength, all will, all knowledge, and who is at the same time full of devotion, full of tenderness, full of kind intimacy, who understands everything because he experiences it in himself, who has nothing foreign, who has no unresolved residue in his heart." How different Doctor Lamaris turns out to be when Gisa gets to know him in his true essence! "The idea of a luminous inner life often returned later, but never in his presence. It did not tolerate any contact with reality. Reality stared at me with hurtful impressions that dug into my soul like pinpricks." Gisa thought she saw in Doctor Lamaris a man whose soul contained the most beautiful human inclinations and whose existence consisted of the all-round living out of an elemental personality. In reality, she was confronted by a man who only wanted to see life according to the principles that the science of the doctor provides. An abstract medical idea of the world, embodied in a human being, stands before Gisa, while she thought she had her ideal man before her. The doctor believes that a girl should be pious because that is the best way for her to adapt to life. Gisa is of the opinion: "One is a believer or an unbeliever from an inner state; but not because one should or should not. So what does that mean, a girl should be pious?" Lamaris replies: "It means that it is not beneficial for a woman's psyche to do without the help that religion provides." Medicine incarnate therefore wants "religion to be considered from the point of view of a diet for the soul, of psychological hygiene". For "cultural mankind will have to learn, if it is not to fall into complete ruin, to regard life exclusively from this point of view; it will have to evaluate all affects from this point of view ... Even love, and love first and foremost. For since it is love that usually decides the weal and woe of the future generation, it happens only too often that the union of two people made on the basis of a love affection represents something downright sacrilegious. It is a sentimental aberration to present love as the most desirable basis of marriage. The illusory character of this affectation makes the person afflicted by it quite incapable of making his choice on rational grounds, namely in the sense of racial improvement." - Like Gisa with Doctor Lamaris, he also has a deep affection for the girl. He does not follow this choice. His medical point of view makes it necessary for him to make his choice in the interests of racial improvement. He comes from a family that includes mentally deranged people among its members; he has a profession that makes use of the mind at the expense of the body. Gisa is a girl who also tends to live in the spiritual sphere. He marries a girl from the "sheltered classes".

In this "story of love", two people are seen standing opposite each other. There is no real common ground between them. Because two idols intervene between their personalities. Gisa believes she loves Doctor Lamaris. She loves an idol of his that came before her soul when she came into contact with him. The real Doctor Lamaris cannot have anything attractive for her soul. Doctor Lamaris really loves Gisa; but as an idol of the mind, he places his medical views between himself and his beloved. - This is the intellectual element of the story. Nowhere does it intrude in a pale intellectual form, but it is absorbed by the artistic view. Gisa's character and the nature of her experiences mean that the narrative of the facts is constantly interspersed with the communication of the feelings and reflections that are linked to the events in this girl's psyche. For these inner processes in a girl's soul are the actual content of the story. This soul can only reveal itself in its true form, with all its intimate nuances of thought and feeling, when it speaks. That is why the form Rosa Mayreder has chosen is the only possible one for her task. It can be called a stylized diary. And given Gisa's character, we certainly believe that this is how she puts her experiences before her soul. We can see how the art form corresponds to the poet's inner need for truth.

The more you delve into the story, the more this need for truth becomes apparent. These are things of such a subtle nature that our ideas, which strive for straightforwardness and sharp outlines, can easily destroy the intimacy of the experiences. Rosa Mayreder finds the artistic means to depict this intimacy in the contexts of things and personalities. Any sharp conceptual interpretation of the reasons why Gisa forms her idol could only show the unconscious forces at work in a coarsened form. In her characterization of Doctor Lamaris, Rosa Mayreder hints at an idea that awakens a mystical, symbolic sense of the subtle relationships that prevail here. "The only thing that was completely beautiful about him were his hands, slender, white, well-groomed doctor's hands, which possessed an extraordinary capacity for expression. - There was so much soul in their movements that one almost got the impression of a facial expression. There was something serious and loving about them; they seemed to reveal the most hidden qualities, everything that remains unacknowledged in a person for the longest time, secret benefits, secret sacrifices, tender feelings, that shy nobility of feeling that is carefully concealed under a mask of taciturn reserve." In organs that are little subject to arbitrariness, to reason, the real soul of this man is expressed, which seems to have become completely unfaithful to itself through the medical world view in the area of consciousness. Another feature of the story is fully consistent with this characteristic of the hands. The woman from a "protected social class" whom Doctor Lamaris has chosen bears a striking resemblance to Gisa: "She is like a healthy translation" of Gisa. The soul forces operating below the threshold of his consciousness have thus taken Lamaris down a path that his mind would not allow him to follow. Rosa Mayreder aptly finds the external means of representation that bring our contemplative imagination into the same waters in which our faculty of ideas moves when we contemplate the unconscious background of the conscious processes of the soul. It may be said that in this poetry the intellectual element appears to us completely dissolved in the artistic style. And the unity of this style is preserved throughout the work. We encounter a figure, the old Miss Ludmilla. One of those personalities that life has always pushed into a corner, a shy, withdrawn, old-fashioned creature. When Gisa once handed the old lady a sprig of lilac during a visit, she took it and "inhaled the scent with a long, trembling breath". She whispered: "Oh God! Oh God!" and tears flowed down her cheeks. Gisa would have loved to know the images that ran through Aunt Ludmilla's soul when a branch of lilac in bloom came before her eyes. She never got around to asking the question. "It was perhaps the most beautiful moment of her life, the only moment of happiness, of rising above the commonplace - but if she had told it with her staid remarks and philistine turns of phrase, it would have been spoiled for ever. She had told it as she wept silently over the blossoming branch." In any case, this way of telling Ludmilla's life secret is the one required by the style in which the "Idols" are written.

The two main characters in the story, Gisa and Lamaris, are juxtaposed with others whose characters significantly heighten the impressions made by the former through contrast. Lieutenant von Zedlitz forms a complete contrast to Lamaris, a man of spirit and intellect, a witless renominee who wants to endear himself to everyone and says silly flattery to all the girls. By describing the impression this character makes on Lamaris and Gisa, the poet sheds light on relationships that are relevant to the character portraits she creates. The doctor speaks about the first lieutenant with the words: "He is the type of a healthy, well-developed person! ... His physique is of a perfection that has unfortunately become rare: he must come from a very healthy family. Not a trace of hereditary strain!" And Gisa says: "These banal muscles in an eternal parade posture, these thoughtless hands -." The antithesis of Gisa is her friend Nelly. She is one of those natures who, thanks to the superficiality of her character, easily jumps over the gulf that separates the idol from reality. She also has her idol of a man: "It would have to be a man, a whole man, before whom everyone trembles and bows down, a man with a strong arm who could protect and shield me in all situations in life, a man with a powerful will who could make me his slave with a wave of his eyebrows." - This "idol" is blown away into empty air when her parents choose a man for her who lacks all these qualities but is a "good match".

Psychological problems are Rosa Mayreder's artistic domain. The novellas and sketches in her first two works should also be seen as psychological studies. In one of her first stories, "Die Sonderlinge" ("From My Youth"), this basic character of her work is immediately apparent. The human being, who is merely an imprint of the social conditions from which he has emerged and the profession into which he has grown, stands here alongside the person who stubbornly, ruthlessly wants to live only according to his nature. And the latter is again shown to us in two shades: in the selfish, tyrannical personality and in the devoted idealist.

Rosa Mayreder traces the manifold forms that the mysterious thing we call the human soul takes; and everywhere she looks for the reasons why this being is of this or that kind, and what suffering and joys life imposes on it because it has received a certain imprint. The typical contrast between intellectual and intuitive natures runs through a number of her stories like a basic motif. The cold souls, dominated by reflection, and the emotional and imaginative people, who draw their impulses from the immediacy of their nature, repeatedly become a problem for the poet. This contrast is particularly stark in the sketch "Klub der Übermenschen" (in "Übergänge"). The relationship between two people is portrayed here, one of whom is entirely sentimental, the other entirely intellectual. The stories that describe the struggle into which the individual soul is driven by the fact that it cannot find a balance within itself between reflection and emotion, reason and passion are particularly appealing. "Lilith and Adam", "His Ideal", in the "Transitions", are captivating depictions of this struggle. This artist knows how to characterize the many-branched currents into which the psyche is torn and which determine the inner fate of a human life from a deep observation. "Das Stammbuch" ("Transitions") depicts one such current in the relationship between a man and a married woman.

Whoever gets to know Rosa Mayreder as a painter will notice how she follows the same paths in this art as in her poetry. In the latter it is the psychological, in painting the coloristic problem that she pursues. She seeks to eavesdrop on the secret of the colors, through which we can express what nature speaks to us. She does not see Cornelius and Kaulbach as painters in the true sense of the word, for they merely used colors and forms to give visible expression to their abstract world of ideas. The eye alone has to judge, not the intellect, when it comes to the world of shapes and colors.

Rosa Mayreder's art was born out of an intense urge to familiarize herself with the contexts of reality, out of the need to solve the riddles of her own existence as well as those of the phenomena that penetrate our senses. And the little stories in which she expresses the highest questions of knowledge in the form of fables bear witness to the depths of this urge. One of these fables is told in this booklet. The higher the thought rises, the less the processes that express it in the outer symbol can lead an independent life. However, Rosa Mayreder must be conceded that she has succeeded in finding such symbolic events for the embodiment of great worldview issues that the ideal is completely absorbed in the image; and that this image does not work like a wooden allegory, but like a symbol in which the thought is clothed without constraint, as if by its own will for illustration. It is as if the poet had not put the thought into the picture, but had taken it out of it.

Rosa Mayreder reveals the same side of her nature in her sonnets. One senses everywhere the necessity with which a stanzaic form expresses a thought structure. A basic idea is divided into two parts, which find their harmonious union again in a comprehensive higher idea. The first two four-line stanzas belong to the first two elements of the idea, the last two three-line stanzas to the overarching idea.

Rosa Mayreder shows us on every page she has written that she has expended considerable energy to discover the organs within herself that show her the world and life in a way that satisfies her. As a result, however, a peculiar atmosphere emanates from all her achievements, which bears witness to the great style of her view of things.

On her seventieth birthday on September 13, 1900

She sees the world as it is; but from the point of view of the distinguished Austrian salon. This sentence could briefly summarize the strengths and weaknesses of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, who celebrates her seventieth birthday on 13 September. The living and educational conditions of the social class emerge as the background to her narrative art, which once allowed Count Anton Auersperg to mature into the much-celebrated poet Anastasius Grün. He was the poet of freedom that emerges when not the son of the people, but the cavalier who descends to the people and is filled with the general ideas of human dignity and cultural progress becomes a singer. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach is the aristocratic lady with a heart filled with infinite kindness for all things human, who unabashedly depicts the darker side of noble circles as well as the life of the working classes, but the latter not without the share that belonging gives, and the latter not without the tinge of strangeness that is created when one has only come into contact with the people as the noble lady of the castle servant. No matter how intimate and warm the poet's description of a child of the people in her story "Bozena" (1876), with its unpretentious sufferings and joys, one does not hear someone speaking who has suffered and rejoiced with her, but the kind lady with the mild view of life and light-heartedness. You can clearly see what is being referred to here if you read a village story by Peter Rosegger immediately after Ebner-Eschenbach's "Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten" (1883 and 1886). Here the man speaks who, as an itinerant journeyman tailor, sat at table with the people, there the lady of the manor who never got much further than shaking hands with the people. Do not misunderstand this. There is no hint of that "condescending" manner in the stories of this poetess that must offend; but nowhere can she deny the count's blood that flows in her veins, nowhere can she deny the aristocratic upbringing she has enjoyed, nowhere can she deny the sentiments of the social circles in which her life has moved.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach was born Countess Dubsky in the Moravian castle of Zdislavic to an aristocratic family. She was an imaginative, exceptionally impressive girl. At an early age, she developed a decided tendency to expand her knowledge of the world and people in all directions. Those who knew her as a girl have much to say about her vivacity and enterprising nature. The Moravian aristocratic circles from which she grew up had long been characterized by liberal, progressive views. This distinguished them favorably from the reactionary Bohemian aristocracy. The people with whom the young countess came into contact had something extraordinarily interesting about their way of life. The Zdislavic estate is not far from the Hungarian border; when you grow up in such an area, you get to know the most diverse customs and habits offered by the mixture of the most varied tribes. Through her marriage, in 1848, to Baron von Ebner, Countess Dubsky was transplanted into Viennese society. She can only be fully understood from the ideas of this society. A prominent trait of this society is the cult of the "good heart". With this good heart alone, it is believed that the great world-shaking issues of the present can be mastered. It is significant that an Austrian member of parliament, whose thoughts are rooted in this society, said publicly not long ago that nothing could be achieved by legal means to equalize the great social differences; the most effective means of combating the suffering of the proletariat could only be private charity, the goodwill of the better-off. Love and benevolence are the leitmotifs that emerge in almost all of Ebner-Eschenbach's works. The same character trait led another Lower Austrian aristocrat, Berta von Suttner, to launch the well-known peace movement.

Another characteristic of this Austrian aristocratic society is a preference for moderation, for a certain beauty of external forms. The poet's art of storytelling accommodated this preference to a high degree. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's portrayal is not without passion; but this passion has something detached about it; it remains within certain limits. Anything tempestuous, anything radical is missing in the calmly flowing description; the desires and demands of life are always accompanied by the admonition to renounce. The calm, balanced view of the world, which has brought her increasing recognition as a storyteller over the last two decades, made it impossible for Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach to achieve success in the field in which she first sought it, as a dramatic poet. Although the most influential and insightful stage directors took an interest in her performances, her dramatic creations remained without effect. Her tragedy "Mary Stuart in Scotland" was performed in Karlsruhe in 1860 and her one-act play "Doctor Knight" in Vienna's Burgtheater in 1871. Neither made a significant impression, nor did the drama "Das Waldfräulein", performed at the Vienna Stadttheater in 1873, which one would have thought would have been captivating through its depiction of modern Viennese society. This artist lacked dramatic power; the quiet beauty of her portrayal could only be expressed in the narrative. When, from the mid-seventies onwards, she turned almost exclusively to this field, she was soon fully appreciated. The academic-literary circles were the most unreserved in their support of her. What the German science of beauty has presented as the ideal qualities of a work of art: Evenness and harmony, can be found realized to a high degree in Ebner-Eschenbach's novellas and novels. They are almost an illustration of many a university lecture on the demands of beauty and art. It is characteristic that the University of Vienna has just awarded the poet an honorary doctorate on the occasion of her seventieth birthday.

A fine observer speaks her mind in the two collections of "Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten" (1883 and 1886) and in the two-volume novel "Das Gemeindekind" (1887). However, all of the characters portrayed there lack something to make them completely comprehensible to us within the social class to which they belong. They are portrayed too little from their very own feelings and imaginations; they only present their outer side, not the intimate traits of their minds. But if one disregards all of this, one must still feel a captivating effect from the deep, intimate way in which the narrator tries to place herself in the souls of others. She is even able to portray the emotional life of animals with warmth, as in the story "Krambambuli", which can be found in the collection "Neue Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten" (1886).

The poet knows how to portray social evils and prejudices in a sympathetic and artistic way. The mildness and kindness of her disposition lends her descriptions, when she comes to such areas, a haunting, poignant language. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach reached her peak in this direction in "Gemeindekind". How a socially uprooted person becomes a burden to his surroundings, how an almost lost person is put back on the right path: this is described here with inner truth and at the same time with a warmth that has compassion and understanding for every human aberration. The love of a broad narrative art is particularly evident in this book. The poet likes to linger in places where it is possible to exhaust people's emotions in all directions, where one can really immerse oneself in the enjoyment of the people and fates portrayed. She is less successful in cutting a plot short and bringing it to a conclusion, which requires a fast pace and strong contrasts. This can be seen in the story "Unsühnbar" (1890), in which a woman who makes a mistake in her marriage seems completely unfounded in her passion. The plot demands rapid developments here, and Ebner-Eschenbach is only equal to the calm, measured steps of fate and the human heart. Perhaps the stories that speak most deeply from the poet's own soul are those that appeared three years ago under the title "Alte Schule". Here she has chosen material that made it necessary to avoid any strong tone. A quiet, contemplative wisdom prevails here, as the artist has always loved it, a devout calm that does not avoid the hardships of life, but wants to put them in a mild light. Because this trait is in her, in one of these stories she juxtaposes the man who has matured to inner harmony and quiet happiness with the young man who is whipped by the storm of his passions; and in the other, we see the contrast between the renunciate, self-satisfied spirit and the man who is floundering in ambition and tormented by his desires.

As a thorough connoisseur, the narrator describes the goings-on and fates of the aristocratic classes. Here she is completely in her element. She knows how to fathom the souls without rest. How the members of this social class suffer from the hollowness of their prejudices, how they long to escape from these prejudices and yet are bound by the strongest ties within them: this is what we see in all its truth when we read stories such as "Die Freiherrn von Gemperlein" or "Muschi". It can be said that the poet has created a style for such material that is characteristic in the highest sense. Nowhere else does the Austrian aristocratic German in which she writes flow so naturally from the material as when she portrays people who have been part of her environment for most of her life. She can also be sharply critical and satirical. There she also deals with people and living conditions that in reality show none of the harshness and unevenness that she loves so little in her art. When she depicts the "noble" circles, she also seems to find the best confirmation of her creed, which is probably that, despite all suffering and hardship, a balancing justice prevails in the world, a benevolent world order that is to be praised.

This creed also appears in numerous passages of her "Aphorisms", a collection of which was published in 1880 and whose serene wisdom was so well received that it went through several editions. These core sayings are as tasteful in form as they are meaningful in content. A striving for clarity in the big and small questions of existence is expressed here. A woman speaks to us who observes sharply and faithfully, who knows how to reflect on herself and who has known how to draw the most beautiful treasure of wisdom and morality from this introspection. And the unpretentious, modest form in which great truths are often presented has a particularly beneficial effect in this proverbial wisdom.

M. E. delle Grazie

I

Today, anyone who talks about modern trends in literature runs the risk of being ridiculed. How many immature, dilettante things are described as modern today! Critics, who often have no idea of what the human spirit has already produced in the course of its development, describe as modern many things which, to the discerning, are merely a modification of something that has long been there. I do not wish to be lumped together with these critics when I say that a radical change is taking place in our time, in artistic creation no less than in scientific conviction. This turnaround has not only recently become apparent. Goethe's youthful poetry was already characterized by it. His "Prometheus" is filled with the spirit that I would describe as modern. But Goethe, despite his depth, despite the universality of his spirit, was not energetic enough to carry out the building for which he had laid the foundation stone. His age does not correspond well with his youth. Nowhere do we find the fulfillment of what he promised us. Let us hold together the proud verses of Prometheus:

Here I sit, forming men
In my own image,
A race that is like me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy and to rejoice,
And not to respect you,
Like me!

with the humble ones in the second part of "Faust":

He who always strives,
We can redeem him.
And if love has even
Participated from above,
The blessed multitude meets him
With a hearty welcome.

The "free spirit", which finds the support of life in itself, has become a spirit of devotion, which expects the salvation of existence from divine grace. This describes the two poles of Goethe's creative work. The transformation took place slowly and gradually. If Goethe had remained in the position of his youth, we would not have "Iphigenia" or "Tasso", but we would perhaps have poems that we can now only expect from the future. Perhaps Goethe's works would not have been as artistically perfect as "Iphigenia" and "Tasso" if he had developed in a straight line from "Prometheus". But they would have been the first great products of a new era. Fate willed otherwise. Goethe abandoned the tendencies of his youth. He did not become the messiah of a new age. But he did bring us the most beautiful, the most mature fulfillment of a now dead epoch. His later poems are mature, overripe, but they are the last products of a series of developments. It is just as well. The time was not yet ripe for problems that we, a hundred years later, can barely guess at in vague outlines. Anyone who has a full awareness of these problems that are about to be born in the bosom of the present, who knows that we live in an age of expectation and have no right to dwell on the past, is what I call a modern spirit. I have never found this characteristic of genuinely modern striving, which dawned in Byron, so succinctly, so clearly outlined in any contemporary as in the Austrian poet M. E. delle Grazie. I have not formed this opinion from her first writings: "Gedichte", "Die Zigeunerin", "Hermann", "Saul"¹, but from her poems which have recently appeared in various magazines. These poems are the strictly lawful reflection of the modern world view from a deep, strongly feeling, clear-sighted soul endowed with great artistic creative power. What a comfortable and proud nature has to suffer from this view is expressed by delle Grazie in her poems. What a noble spirit feels when it sees the collapse of the old, great ideals, when it has to perceive how the modern conception of nature lets these ideals evaporate into nothingness and emptiness as insubstantial bubbles and vaporous formations, that is what we hear from the creations of this poetess. We are confronted with a mood of the present and hopelessness for the future. Only those who close their minds to the spirit that pervades our time, or who are shallow enough to laugh in the face of the bleakness, can fail to recognize the deep meaning of delle Grazie's poetry. There is nothing petty in the painful tones we hear here. Delle Grazie's sufferings do not spring from fate, which reigns over the everyday; they are rooted in the disharmonies of the cosmos and the historical development of mankind. They stand out from a significant background. That is why we do not find despondency and pusillanimity anywhere in them, but proud, bold elevation above pain. The dirty, the lowly, the common are shown ruthlessly in their nothingness, but the artist always proudly raises her head in order to be free of the despised, which she strikes with her scourge. Delle Grazie has seen through the deep irony that lies in human existence. She thinks nothing of knowledge, of ideals. These are things to which humanity aspires, only to feel all the more thoroughly disappointed when they turn out to be worthless and insubstantial appearances. But a proud spirit lives in the poet. She is able to raise herself to the height where one can smile at the nothingness of existence because one has ceased to have any desire for it.

I am looking for the reason for the mood in delle Grazie's latest collection of poems: "Italian Vignettes". There is a point in Rome's development where human greatness clashed most closely with human nothingness. Caesaric power was paired with human weakness, artistic height with ethical rottenness. The mouth that commanded nations greedily craved the kiss of the most wretched woman; a master's mind became a slave's mind when the embraces of high-ranking prostitutes subdued it. These "vignettes" reveal how this is still petrified in the remnants of old times, but how it can be interpreted by the clairvoyant eye:²

Divine dignity and divine rights
You have boldly arrogated to yourselves,
Spirit and virtue became servants,
Where the arbitrariness splashed great.

sings delle Grazie of the Roman Caesars. The mood that took hold of her in the eternal city is reflected in the words:

With elegiac whispers
Looks from the barren Palatine
A single pine tree gloomily
Towards the silent forum.

In addition to these stanzas, which are filled with a truly historical spirit, there is also no lack of those that vividly conjure up Italy's present before our souls. Here, delle Grazie captures the tone of melancholy just as well as that of cheerful humor, when it is in the nature of things. A number of poems have sprung from the impressions that Tasso's traces left in the poet's mind:

At your tomb all vain imaginings die,
Here your glory sits enthroned in majestic peace,
But where man suffered, I found tears,
And I was allowed to sob and dream here like you!

Under the title "Images and Figures", delle Grazie shares with us her feelings at the sight of great Italian works of art, such as Guercino's Sant' Agnese, Maderna's St. Cecilia, Belvedere's Apollo, Otricoli's Zeus and Michelangelo's Moses. - I have to admire the depth of the impressions in these poems as well as the spirituality of their rendering. Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri are sung about in deeply felt poems of great beauty of form. I was particularly moved by the one entitled "Two Madmen" from the cycle "Sorrento". Tasso and Nietzsche, who both walked on this soil, are juxtaposed:

Two great men walked these paths
And often both stand suddenly before my mind:
Tasso, the prince of poets by the grace of God,
And Friedrich Nietzsche ... equal was their
profit, And folly was his name ...

Both spirits had one thing in common: a drive lived in their breasts that strove unbridled into the depths of existence; both forgot that man is bound to the earth and that he must stop breathing when he rises above a certain height. Like the body, the human spirit is also dependent on the medium into which its life is once born. Tasso and Nietzsche, however, wanted to take their standpoint outside this medium in order to look down from the heights of heaven to the earthly. But in doing so, they consumed themselves.

Delle Grazie has seen all the glory that can be seen in Italy:

Like all of them, you drew me to you,
Enchanted, enraptured and beguiled,
On ruins you lied to me of a happiness,
That you destroyed hard in the sun's glare -

But she only found her worldview confirmed in one great example:

But I am not resentful ..., I am going home again,
Even if with a crudely broken walking stick -
I bring back with him the old torments
And here as there I lay him on a grave!

• 1. all published by Leo & Co. (Karl Konegen) in Vienna
• 2. Leipzig 1892, Breitkopf & Härtel (VII, 132 $.) 3 M., geb. 4 M.

M. E. delle Grazie

The principle of modern naturalism is to depict people and their fates as they are. With this aesthetic commonplace, many a so-called critic believes himself justified today when he brazenly praises literary products that are only capable of being given a temporary illusory grandeur by the savagery of our times. At present, a "love drama" is being performed daily in a large theater in Berlin, which is nothing more than a few excellent lyrical scenes set in a dramatic plot that is actually stupid and which is also carried by a stupid person. "Youth" is the name of the thing, it could also be called "imbecility". Because an imbecile ensures the continuation of the constantly faltering plot, the same imbecile brings about the conflict and the catastrophe. Fate itself has become imbecile in this drama, because it becomes reality in the person of an imbecile. I am well aware that there will be "very clever" people who will say to me: I just didn't understand the whole thing in its poignant tragedy, in its character copied from reality. But I also know that today people make judgments about the real character of artistic creations whose eye for real conditions barely exceeds the length of their nose tenfold. Every philistine who has acquired a few aesthetic phrases and who sees nothing more in every human being and every human destiny than the imprint of the template that his dozen brains have turned, speaks today of "figures and relationships copied from reality". I have often heard it said that the old and young pastors in Max Halbe's "Youth" are portrayed entirely in accordance with real life. I have only been able to see that Mr. Halbe has portrayed two clergymen, as the assessor X and the grammar school teacher Y portray themselves. That is why I am not surprised when Assessor X and secondary school teacher Y take pleasure in the "youth". Of course, they only do so if they are "exceptional people" for whom moral indignation is a reactionary prejudice. Overcoming moral indignation is pretty much the only thing that modern naturalistic philistinism can achieve. "Modernism" does not get beyond this abc.

The fact that there are moving forces in the human soul and in the social organism that derive their origin from things other than tickled nerves, that there is a truth that does not have its regulators on the surface of the body: Messrs Bahr and Hartleben, etc., etc., know very little about this. I am bored when a "poet" presents me with people in three acts who would not interest me for a moment in life.

That's why I perk up when, amidst the dull chatter of modern authors, I see a work of art in which a whole person introduces me to people and circumstances that only those whose eyes are not clouded by a slavish attachment to the everyday can see through. And such works of art are the two stories by M. E. delle Grazie that I want to talk about here. Delle Grazie does not portray people as if someone were walking around them, taking pictures of them, but creates figures in such a way that we see the individual soul forces that determine their lives. "The Rebel" is the title of the first story. It centers on a Hungarian gypsy from the Tisza region, where no Western European culture has made people's brains so rigid that we can pretty much guess their character from their title and office. Of course, Lajos the Gypsy did not earn a doctorate in philosophy, but neither did school, his time in office, social chatter and philistine reading determine his feelings and thoughts. And Lajos has risen to the heights of humanity; he has acquired a view of life that is capable of making [him] recognize existence in its true form, that makes him a wise man among fools and that allows [him] to see the truth where others only worship hypocritical masks. Lajos is a personality who has been cheated of his happiness by the world, but who is strong enough to do without this happiness, which he could only have owed to lies. Lajos loved a girl, the natural daughter of a count. A nobleman tries to steal his beloved away from him. She leaves the poor gypsy for the sake of the nobleman's seducer. The gypsy is seized by an almost infinite feeling of revenge against the latter. He seeks out all the places where he suspects the robber of his fortune in order to kill him. He searches in vain for a long time, but finally finds him sleeping by the road, his shotgun beside him. It would be easy to kill the enemy with his own weapon. At that moment, Lajos' revenge turns to contempt; he finds that the wretch's life is not worth being destroyed by him.

Lajos describes the feelings that seized him at the moment when his opponent's life was in his power with the words: "He turned pale to the lips, his knees trembled as if he had caught the Danube fever, and suddenly he pulled down his hat and saluted me deeply ... and smiled like a fool ... Then I felt so well, so well, I tell you, for now I knew that one could do even worse to one's enemy than murder him, and that my torment was over, because I could no longer hate the one standing before me; it came into my throat like disgust - I spat out against him, threw the shotgun back into the reeds, took my fiddle and left ..." And then he says of the man he has humiliated: "Wherever he can, he rants at me to the people, and would love to set the pandurs and the magistrate on my neck, but he can't say anything right against me, and he won't even say that he was too bad to kill me! But he is like air to me; even if I have to breathe it in, I can always give it back - there! That's how indifferent he is to me!" The experience with the nobleman became a source of great insight for Lajos. He realized how to look at the world without hate and love. "What happened to my love, what happened to my hatred?" he says. "It's all over, and back then I thought I was going to die! Anyone who has experienced something like this in himself becomes calm and cannot do wrong even to his enemy!" "If I have bad eyesight and bump my head on a post - is it the post's fault or mine? The post is there and has its right, and I am there and would also have my right if my eyes weren't bad - I could avoid it, couldn't I? And if I could like a good-for-nothing and hate a scoundrel, wasn't I just so blind? They weren't, and that's why I had to bang my heart and skull against them like the post! But who am I to believe when I can deceive myself like that, when every man is twice: as he was born and as I think he is? And do I know what I am like? Many people avoid me - they do me no harm, but they want to do me even less good!

Why is that? Have I done something wrong? Well, they're right too! I think to myself, because everyone who lives only wants themselves, even if they think they like someone else so much!" These are words of wisdom that only a life to which existence has revealed itself without veil can give birth to. There are two ways of speaking such words. On the one hand, they appear to us like distilled products from the retort of scholarship: ethereal, fleeting, abstract, as pure thoughts. At other times they approach us like fate itself, which is embodied in language. Then they are not merely expressed thoughts, but forces that act on us like life itself. And then we feel towards the one who expresses them, as delle Grazie describes the tramp: "His simple figure gradually grew into the infinite for me, and he strode over my native earth like a shadow of the one who taught thousands of years ago in distant India what the tramp only felt darkly and expressed unclearly: "From life is born suffering, from suffering is born fear; he who is redeemed from life knows no suffering - where would fear come from?" People call Lajos a "rebel" because he despises them. And the nobleman says of him: "He is capable of anything." But these words mean nothing more than that the nobleman is incapable of recognizing how the poor gypsy's independent soul can express itself. For him, it is an element that is moved by forces that work from depths of which the average brain has no idea. The unknown, the dark forces in the gypsy's head and heart fill the nobleman with a feeling of dread. He only feels safe with people who, like himself, have inherited their character from their forefathers, or with those who have had their sense of slavery beaten out of them. Aesthetes of experience and slaves to facts will deny me the right to say: I find this gypsy drawn with deep psychological truth. For I will be honest and confess that I have never met a gypsy of this kind. But you don't need to have met a real-life original for every artistic education in order to form an opinion about the truth of the depiction. You only need to have an eye for what is possible in life. The gypsy in delle Grazie's story is true to life, which is possible in every course. In this work in particular, the artist proves herself to be a fine connoisseur of secret soul moods. No idea of the nature of the "gypsy" type obscures her ability to characterize an individuality that is quite unique and different from any other. Anyone who raises the question in the face of this characterization: can a Gypsy be like this, is incapable of understanding the narrative. Only those who have discovered the secret of individuality can characterize it. It is a completely empty saying of people without any artistic sensibility: the great poet does not portray individuals, but "types". In life, too, a person only begins to interest us when he ceases to be a type. A person who is only portrayed according to his typical characteristics is not much more than a puppet. What the real artist depicts is always the individual. But most people's imagination fails where the individual in the other person confronts them. That is why the far too many do not feel the "uniqueness" of genuine fantasy creations at all.

Two other "rebels" stand opposite the gypsy, the rebel of thought and feeling, in delle Grazie's story: Istvän, the former political rebel and hero of freedom, who, at the side of his "practical" Susi, has risen to the much-admired heights of the "real politician", and Bändi, whose rebel soul unleashes itself in the wildest curses, but without the revolutionary fire in his chest preventing him for the time being from serving as a coachman for the nobleman, whom he would like to sic all the devils on. The last two "rebels" are put up with by the society of comfort-seekers, for the Istväns are harmless if their Susis have the opportunity to put on fat comfortably, and the Bändis may grumble, but they make useful beasts of burden. These rebels are not feared, as they integrate themselves into society, albeit reluctantly; but the rebels of the Lajos type are shunned like a mountain that has once acted as a volcano and then closed again. One fears a new eruption at any moment. The average people have no idea that the fire materials pushing outwards have turned into precious substances on the inside.

The second story, "Bozi", is satirical. The subject matter is taken from that part of Hungary where people, buffaloes, pigs and chair judges live so close to each other, are eternally in each other's way and yet cannot leave each other alone; this milieu, which unites the fatalism of half-Asia with Christian beliefs and Turkish legal practice with the theories of the corpus juris and the tripartium so peacefully and unchallenged! "Bozi" is a buffalo. But a very special kind of buffalo. Not a herd buffalo, but a master buffalo. He does not conform to the rules that God and the people in his habitat have given to the buffalo; he leaves his home when he pleases in order to spread fear and terror among the people. He particularly likes it when he can appear among a large crowd of people on festive occasions and wreak havoc. However, he had to pay for such an undertaking with his freedom. He was kept behind strictly locked doors and was only allowed outside at night when people were asleep. But this made things even worse. For if he had previously filled people with horror as a buffalo, now he was a... Devil. Because anyone who encountered the animal at night thought it was the prince of hell incarnate. The "enlightened" village doctor, who owns Meyer's Dictionary of Conversations and can look everything up in it, was no more protected from this by his scientific education than Mr. du Prel was protected from spiritualism by his philosophical education. The good doctor believes for so long that it was a "supernatural" being that attacked him at night, until his coat, which he lost while fleeing from the ghost, is brought to him and he is told that the buffalo has brought home the protective wrapping wrapped around his horns. Another time, part of the village community, led by the mayor and the churchwarden with the holy water at his side, go out because the "devil" has appeared again and even taken one of the village residents. The devil is to be fought. The whole village community can't do anything because they tremble with terror when they come to the place where the "evil one" is raging; only one foolish man, who is also there and believes in neither God nor the devil, sees what is really there - the buffalo, strikes at it and wounds it. The others go away with long noses.

The story is written with the kind of humor that testifies not only to a complete mastery of the art medium, but also to a firm world view. Hypocritical religiosity, undigested enlightenment, the modern superstition of the "clever people" is hit and exposed in this short story. We are dealing with an artist who hits the mark with the arrows of mockery because she has a sure and sharp eye for the targets she is aiming for.

I

In the ninth edition of his "Natural History of Creation", Ernst Haeckel speaks of the new paths and broad perspectives that open up to art from the point of view of the scientific world view. Among the works filled with the spirit of this world view, he mentions "the many interesting poems of the brilliant Viennese poet Eugenie delle Grazie, especially the modern epic "Robespierre". It is now more than fifteen years since the name Marie Eugenie delle Grazie first appeared in a circle within the German intellectual life in Austria. A small collection of poems, a story "The Gypsy Woman", an epic "Hermann" and a drama "Saul" were published by her in quick succession. These were the creations of a lady not yet twenty years old. The intellectual, distinguished Austrian philosopher B. Carneri was not alone in his feelings about the poet, which he summarized in 1894 in the following sentences: "Given the magnificence of the subject matter and its happy mastery (Hermann) is a huge achievement for such a young age. Much of the praiseworthy can also be emphasized in 'Saul', but we would only like to speak of actual genius in the 'Gypsy'. Through her descriptions of nature, vivid sculpture and the passion that breaks through in full, this short story offers us a masterpiece whose melodious prose proves that Fräulein delle Grazie is also naturally gifted with what Friedrich Nietzsche calls 'the third ear'."

A great, unique personality announced itself in these poems. A life, young in years, rich in content, rich above all in those sufferings that lead to the gates of knowledge with a demanding mind, spoke out. There was no doubt that delle Grazie had the great passion that leads from the personal lot into the comprehensive mysteries of the fate of the world and that perceives the questions of the world as problems of one's own heart. Ten years passed before the poetess published any more. Then a collection of poems "Italische Vignetten", "Rebell" and "Bozi", two short stories, the great epic "Robespierre" and a third volume of poetry appeared in quick succession. The basic mood of delle Grazie's first creations is once again expressed; her viewpoint has become that of the modern world view in the highest sense of the word. There is probably no other personality who has experienced the pain of the collapse of an old ideal world and a new world of knowledge so deeply, so shatteringly as Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. Her feelings go in two directions, and in both directions they are great. What Schiller consoled himself with at all times: that man could flee from the common reality into the noble realm of ideals, this consolation was not granted to delle Grazie. The new natural science has directed its gaze to the real, which appears to it as the only thing that exists. The poet cannot believe in an eternal divine order that only uses nature to realize an ideal realm and goal; she is completely filled with the knowledge that the eternal mother, nature, indiscriminately conjures up creatures from her dark womb to satisfy the infinite lust that she has in creating and is unconcerned about the fate of her children. Whatever beautiful, great and sublime things arise in the world: they did not arise for the sake of beauty, greatness and sublimity, they arose because nature has the lustful urge to create. And they were all enthusiasts, the idealists who dreamed of the great goals of life. They owe their existence to the cunning of voluptuous nature. What would people's existence be if a Buddha, a Socrates, a Christ did not come from time to time and tell people that they were born for higher things. But no ideal can deceive those who look deeper. Mankind should only be incited from time to time by its idealists to believe something other than what the omnipotence of nature really accomplishes. Nature is voluptuous and demonic at the same time: it wants to satisfy itself by giving birth to people, and it tricks the poor creatures into believing in the dream and foam of ideals so that they are distracted from the true content of existence.

What a proud, profoundly comfortable nature has to suffer from such sentiments can be seen in delle Grazie's poetry. Anyone who is unable to empathize with the greatness of these poems must lack one of the feelings that have cut so deeply into the heart of contemporary man. Either he has never felt the great longing within himself as a personal destiny, which the mighty ideals of mankind, the urge to go beyond and the belief in the gods have brought forth and kept alive again and again, or the modern world view, which has broken over our intellectual life like a mighty earthquake, must have passed him by more or less without a trace. I have no doubt that this modern view of the world contains within it germs of higher spiritual spheres, more beautiful, more sublime than all the old ideals; but I do not believe that joys will ever fully triumph over suffering; I do not believe that hope will ever conquer renunciation. It seems to me as certain as that light is born of darkness: that the bright satisfaction of knowledge must arise from the deepest pain of existence. And the great pain of existence, that is the lifeblood of delle Grazie's existence, that is the lifeblood of delle Grazie's art. We have this element in our lives as an opponent of the worst thing that can consume us: superficiality. The regions in which delle Grazie walks are those through which anyone who wants to reach the heights of life must pass. Only the dearly bought knowledge, only that which has risen from the abyss, has value. Delle Grazie's poems show the price that every recognizer must pay. No matter where we end up. Delle Grazie's path is rooted in the depths of the human soul. It is true: her poems exude a weariness of the present and a hopelessness for the future. But I don't want to be one of those in whom none of this resonates.

II

There was a point in Rome's development where human greatness coincided most closely with human nothingness. Caesaric power was combined with weakness, artistic height with ethical rottenness. The mouth that commanded nations greedily craved the kiss of the most wretched woman; a master's mind became a slave's mind when the embraces of high-ranking prostitutes subdued it. These "Vignettes" by Marie Eugenie delle Grazie (Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel [1892]) reveal how this is still fossilized in the remnants of the old days, but still clearly visible to the clairvoyant eye:

Divine dignity and divine rights
Have you boldly arrogated to yourselves,
Spirit and virtue became servants,
Where the arbitrariness splashed great.

She sings of the Roman Caesars. She expresses the mood that took hold of her in the Eternal City with the words:

With elegiac whispers
Looks from the barren Palatine
A single pine tree gloomily
Towards the silent forum.

A number of poems have sprung from the impressions that Tasso's traces have left in the poetess:

At your tomb all vain imaginings die,
Here your glory sits enthroned in majestic peace,
But where man suffered, I found tears,
And I was allowed to sob and dream here like you!

Under the title "Images and Figures", delle Grazie shares her feelings at the sight of great Italian works of art, such as Guercino's Sant' Agnese, Maderna's St. Cecilia, Belvedere's Apollo, Otricoli's Zeus and Michelangelo's Moses. The poem "Two Madmen" from the cycle "Sorrento" juxtaposes Tasso and Nietzsche, who both walked on this ground:

Two great men walked these paths
And often both stand suddenly before my mind:
Tasso, the prince of poets by the grace of God,
And Friedrich Nietzsche ... equal was their gain,
And folly was his name ...

Delle Grazie has seen all the glory that is to be seen in Italy:

Like all of them, you drew me to you,
Enchanted, enraptured and beguiled,
On ruins you lied to me of a happiness,
That you destroyed hard in the sun's glare

Your worldview also speaks clearly from this book:

But I am not resentful ... I am going home again,
Even if with a crudely broken walking stick-
I bring back with him the old torments
And here as there I lay him on a grave! -

Lajos describes the feelings that seized him at the moment when his opponent's life was in his power with the words: "He turned pale to the lips, his knees trembled as if he had caught the Danube fever, and suddenly he pulled down his hat and saluted me deeply ... and smiled like a fool ... Then I felt so well, so well, I tell you, for now I knew that one could do worse to one's enemy than murder him, and that my torment was at an end, because I could no longer hate the one standing before me; it came into my throat like disgust - I spat out against him, threw the shotgun back into the reeds, took my fiddle and left ..." And then he says of the man he has humiliated: "Wherever he can, he rants at me to the people, and would love to set the pandurs and the magistrate on my neck, but he can't say anything right against me, and he won't even say that he was too bad to kill me! But he's like air to me; even if I have to breathe it in, I can always give it back - there! That's how indifferent he is to me!" The experience with the nobleman became a source of great insight for Lajos. He realized how to look at the world without hate and love. "What happened to my love, what happened to my hatred?" he says. "It's all over, and back then I thought I would die from it! Anyone who has experienced something like this in himself becomes calm and cannot do wrong even to his enemy!" "If I have bad eyesight and bump my head on a post - is it the post's fault or mine? The post is there and has its right, and I am there and would also have my right if my eyes weren't bad - I could avoid it, couldn't I? And if I could like a good-for-nothing and hate a scoundrel, wasn't I just so blind? They weren't, and that's why I had to bang my heart and skull against them like the post! But who am I to believe when I can deceive myself like that, when every man is twice: as he was born and as I think he is? And do I know what I am like? Many people avoid me - they do me no harm, but they want to do me even less good! Why is that? Have I done something wrong? Well, they're right too! I think to myself, because everyone who lives only wants himself, even if he thinks he likes someone else so much!" These are words of wisdom that only a life to which existence has revealed itself without veil can give birth to. People call Lajos a "rebel elf" because he despises them. And the nobleman says of him: "He is capable of anything." But these words mean nothing more than that the nobleman is incapable of recognizing how the poor gypsy's independent soul can express itself. To him it is an element that is moved by elemental forces, effective from depths of which the average brain has no idea. The unknown, the dark forces in the gypsy's head and heart fill the nobleman with a sense of dread. He only feels safe with people who, like himself, have inherited their character from their forefathers, or those who have been beaten into slavery by the knout.

Two other "rebels" stand opposite the gypsy, the rebel of thought and feeling, in delle Grazie's story: Istvän, the former political rebel and hero of freedom, who, at the side of his "practical" Susi, has risen to the much-admired heights of the "real politician", and Bändi, whose rebel soul unleashes itself in the wildest curses, but without the revolutionary fire in his chest preventing him for the time being from serving as a coachman for the nobleman, whom he would like to sic all the devils on. The last two "rebels" are put up with by the society of comfort-seekers, for the Istväns are harmless if their Susis have the opportunity to put on fat comfortably, and the Bändis may grumble, but they make useful beasts of burden. These rebels are not feared, as they integrate themselves into society, albeit reluctantly; but the rebels of the Lajos type are regarded like a mountain that has once acted as a volcano and then closed up again. A new eruption is feared at any moment. The average people have no idea that the fire materials pushing outwards have turned into noble substances on the inside.

The second story, "Bozi", is satirical. The subject matter is taken from that part of Hungary where people, buffaloes, pigs and chair judges live so close to each other, are eternally in each other's way and yet cannot leave each other behind; this milieu, which unites the fatalism of half-Asia with Christian beliefs and Turkish legal practice with the theories of the corpus juris and the tripartium so peacefully and unchallenged! "Bozi" is a buffalo. But a very special kind of buffalo. Not a herd buffalo, but a master buffalo. He does not conform to the rules that God and the people in his habitat have given the buffalo; he leaves his home when he pleases in order to spread fear and terror among the people. He particularly likes it when he can appear among a large crowd of people on festive occasions and wreak havoc. However, he had to pay for such an undertaking with his freedom. He was kept behind strictly locked doors and was only allowed outside at night when people were asleep. But this made things even worse. For if he had previously filled people with horror as a buffalo, now he was a ... Devil. Because anyone who encountered the animal at night thought it was the prince of hell incarnate. The "enlightened" village doctor, who owns Meyer's Dictionary of Conversations and can look everything up in it, was no more protected from this by his scientific education than Mr. du Prel was protected from spiritualism by his philosophical education. The good doctor believes that it was a "supernatural" being that attacked him at night until he is brought his coat, which he lost while fleeing from the ghost, and is told that the buffalo has brought home the protective covering wrapped around his horns. Another time, part of the village community, led by the mayor and with the sacristan and holy water at their side, go out because the "devil" has appeared again and has even taken one of the village residents. The devil is to be fought. The whole village community can't do anything because they tremble with terror when they arrive at the place where the "evil one" is raging. Only one foolish man, who is also there and believes in neither God nor the devil, sees what is really there - the buffalo, strikes at it and wounds it. The others go away with long noses.

The story is written with the kind of humor that testifies not only to a complete mastery of the art medium, but also to a firm world view. Hypocritical religiosity, undigested enlightenment, the modern superstition of the "clever people" is hit and exposed in this short story.

The epic "Robespierre" was published in 1894. More than in any other work of poetry of our time, one should have seen in this epic a profound expression of contemporary feeling. But the harsh critics of "modernism" passed it by rather carelessly. They do not do much better than the much-maligned professors of aesthetics and literary history, who rarely have a feeling for the truly great of their own time. One of the most lauded literary judges of the present day, Hermann Bahr, found it not beneath his dignity to begin a short review of "Robespierre" with the words: "Otherwise blameless and nice people, who have nothing at all of the artist, are suddenly compelled to ape the gestures of the poets." Anyone who speaks like this knows the airs and graces of "modernism", but not its deeper forces. M. E. delle Grazie's poetry is the reflection of the modern world view from a deep, strongly feeling, clear-sighted soul endowed with great artistic creative power. Just as the image of the French Revolution presents itself to a deep and proud nature, so has delle Grazie portrayed it. Just as Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses and the other heroes of the Trojan War appear before our imagination in vivid figures when we let Homer's "Iliad" work its magic on us, so do Danton, Marat, Robespierre when we read delle Grazie's epic. Only those who are blind to the spirit of our time or only understand its pose can fail to recognize the significance of this poetry. There is nothing petty in the painful tones struck here. When delle Grazie describes suffering and pain, she does not do so because she wants to point out the misery of everyday life, but because she sees disharmony in the great development of humanity. Robespierre is the hero in whose soul lives everything that humanity has always called idealism. He ends tragically because the great dream of the ideals of humanity that he dreams must necessarily ally itself with the mean aspirations of lower natures. Rarely has a poet looked so deeply into a human soul as delle Grazie did into Robespierre's.

A personality who climbs to the heights of humanity in order to come to the terrible realization that life's ideals are illusions, deluded by nature, drunk on existence, to the poor victim man - Robespierre stands before us as such a personality. In the place of the genius of death, he, who wants to lead humanity to the light, hears the words:

"How deceptive is your blind zeal! ... Do you not realize that all around us
The poisonous seed of life grows thick and disgusting?
It is a graveyard on which we stand - yet ourselves,
How pure and happy, because unconsciously and without torment
Germs the young green here from the rot! How unearthly cheerfulness it weaves around
The rotten little crosses all around and almost ashamed
They crumble - what should be the sign
Of the misery of existence in this blessed place?
No, know: here I wander to be happy
And quietly dream of my paradise:
The paradise of unmoved peace.
But a few steps further I dwell,
And, as you see, not lonely: hut after hut
Surrounds the cemetery, and in each one throbs-
What did you call it? -, the warm pulse
Of being: sickness and vice,
Poverty and suffering, the hollow-cheeked skeleton of misery,
And everything, everything that damns, consciously
And feeling to decay! Itself, there is
The cross's own place, there rises
The brazen colossus of pain, there groans
Despair, on the blood-washed torture
Of being strained in vain and unheard
Her gruesome: "My God, why have you left me
Forsaken me?! There I look when the deception
Of being to beguile my mind anew
And want to blind - and that huge cross,
That grows out of the earth, longing for heaven
Ascends and yet finally fearful and shrill
With this call turns from hope:
It then says to me anew, full of majesty:
"Be desireless, and you have redeemed yourself"

If one is to go to the poet's country in the sense of the well-known saying, in order to understand the poet, one must decide, in order to recognize Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, to wander over realms that lie in the regions of the highest spiritual interests of mankind. There one is led over rich worlds of life, full of life and vitality, filled with ardent desire; but in this life pulsate poisonous substances, flowers sprout that bear decay as their innermost destiny - beauty is resplendent, but it is resplendent like mockery and impotent splendor - sublimity glistens, but it is irony in itself. To the veil-covered eye, the greatest appears; remove the veil, and the "greatest" dissolves into haze and mist, into empty, stale nothingness.

The poet devoted ten years, the best of her life, to her work. During this time, her immersion in the history of the great French liberation movement went hand in hand with the study of modern science. She rose to the heights of human existence, where one sees through the deep irony that lies in every human life, where one can smile even at the nothingness of existence because one has ceased to desire it.

In the book of poems that delle Grazie followed "Robespierre", we read the confession of painful renunciation that the poet brought to the contemplation of the world and life. Of "Nature" she says:

.... Pulling her triumphal chariot
We all: panting, sweaty and yet
Blissful too: for as a mirage swings
Hope before us and happiness and every illusion,
That they have created for our scorn,
And we, the addiction-poisoned army of slaves,
Call ideals. - And so we rush in a lustful hurry
And madly we chase along, until treacherously
The strength leaves us, the breath fades and farther
For ever our goal floats on golden clouds,
Until helpless and panting we
Collapse - then she cheers demonically,
Then she shouts her cruel "Evo&!" and directs
Crushing over a thousand victims
The chern spokes of her biga!

In her "Robespierre", Marie Eugenie delle Grazie has admirably mastered the immense material that was available to her in the French liberation movement, with its wealth of ideas, characters, destinies and actions. She is as much a master in the characterization of people as she is a brilliant portrayer of events. The whole gamut of the human heart and mind, from the devoted instincts of goodness to the most hideous instincts of the animal in man, from the impulses of the demon-driven fanatic that rise deep from the undercurrents of the soul to the abstract theorist living in sophisticated conceptual worlds: the poet exposes everything, in the same way the deep motifs, the hidden sources of human characters and temperaments as the small traits in which nature so often hints at the great. Conditions in which the guilt and aberrations of long ages and generations are symbolically expressed, dramatic situations in which tremendous doom is preparing or dramatically rushing towards catastrophe, are depicted in vivid vividness, in deeply penetrating painting. The court of Louis XVI, with its rotten splendor, with its loudly speaking dialectic of guilt and doom, is presented to us in succinct outlines, as is the dull air of the dive in which the hunted human creature, the starved poverty, the thirst for freedom that turns into hatred are discharged. The poet's ability to cope with the diversity of human nature becomes clear when one compares her characterization of Louis XVIL, Marie Antoinette, Necker and the courtiers at Versailles with that of Marat, Danton, Mirabeau, Saint-Just and Robespierre. A dying court milieu, the convulsive convulsions of the popular soul: everything comes into its own artistically. Wherever the storm of feelings of freedom expresses itself in bloody deeds, wherever the spirit announces itself in words, which either age the traditions of the centuries or allow the mysterious fermentations of the human soul to burst forth as if from a dark night: delle Grazie's art of depiction is at home everywhere. The dull dwellings of the cultural slaves, where the enslaved humanity expresses itself in the darkest images, is just as perfectly depicted as the surging turmoil of world-shaking logic and rhetoric in the National Assembly, as is the terrible storm that erupts in the Bastille Storm, as is the hollow splendor, the glistening prejudice, the blind weakness and vain grandeur of the Versailles court. The "mysteries of humanity", which reflect the eternal pondering of world logic, appear no less clearly before our eyes than the arguments of the day and the motives born in haste of man, who in other times lived an animalistic, dull life, but within this movement becomes the driving motor of far-reaching, luminous developments.

See how Danton enters the turmoil in "Saint-Antoine" in the "desolate neighborhood of hunger", where "the bitter misery looks out of half-loose eyes", all-round clear, with all the peculiarities of his personality.

... massive, deeply bowed head,
As if he fears to carry away deck and walls here,
A new spirit enters the smoky room.
Towards him, grinning and devoted
The dirty innkeeper of the tavern; and through
The surprised guests long rows
It travels like a flash of lightning and sweeps them upwards.
"Danton!" "He himself!" "Welcome!" Not a greeting,
It is a single sigh of fainting,
As if he brought air and manhood to their hatred.
A broad laugh around the fleshy lips,
The pining open ones, Danton stands
Motionless there first. The small eye
Only flashes from its deep-set sockets,
Puffing up, breathing in an instant, wide
And greedily the leaf-scarred nostrils open.
'Tis like a smell of sweat of brutal power
Around him, like an alien atmosphere,
Which is pregnant with energy, like lightning
A summer sky. What the crowd loves
And respects - to this it was! Trains, loud
And open like the road, a roadway
Of life and stained by it like them;
Their cynical laughter, their bitter rumbling
And undignified forgiveness, from the crown to
To the sole of the rabble's rough lines,
And no law but that of their own strength!

In this way, the poet knows how to place the personality in the situation in an atmospheric and deeply true way. In this way, she is able to let the unspoken characters that live in the shapeless spirit of the people grow together with the spirit of the individual, the generality with the individuality.

In this way, delle Grazie is also able to find the transition, the harmony between the silent, lifeless nature and the wanderings of the human heart. The poet's depictions of nature carry a rare artistic life, a peculiar grandeur and truth.

If you want to recognize delle Grazie's personality in its full depth, you have to read the volume "Gedichte", which was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig in 1897. The passion and depth of the most direct personal feeling is revealed here in the highest, most general thoughts of humanity, a world view that wrestles with cosmic riddles speaks to us as the pulse of daily life. A hymn may reflect the tone and view of this poetry:

In the circle of the living walks
And walks from mouth to mouth
A terrible whispered word
Its brazen sound, it makes
The rosy cheeks blanch,
The most jubilant dithyrambos
of madness, and the most dazzling fairy tales
Of existence are torn apart by it, and
Fade away with him for eternity.

The crown of thorns of sorrow,
The rosaries of happiness
And diadems of glory
They all, all entwine,
Entangled and overgrown
The pale asphodel of death! Whose wings rustle,
He trembles, and to whom his hollow voice resounds,
He has lied for the last time ...

Decay and rot are fermenting
In our veins, decay guides us
According to its law, and what lives and breathes,
decay has created it,
Decay destroys it too! A filthy vortex
Full of mystery and madness circles
Life, and our pygmy race, it circles
With it: in blind weakness, droll dignity and powerlessness ...

All victorious and free only reigns
The giant Death: with flashing sword he mows
The glistening lie of existence away
And speaks, for eternity
Pointing to dust and decay,
The one, eternal truth: "It is nothing!"

Rarely will one be able to admire the creations of delle Grazies even where one does not share the feelings and views of a poet. Because even where you have to say "no", you are aware that you are saying "no" to greatness.

• 1. "The Rebel", "Bozi". Two stories by M. E. delle Grazie. Leipzig. Breitkopf & Härtel.