Volume Ii Part 10 (1/2)

110.

THE PIRATE-GENIUS.-The pirate-genius in art, who even knows how to deceive subtle minds, arises when some one unscrupulously and from youth upwards regards all good things, that are not protected by law, as the property of a particular person, as his legitimate spoil. Now all the good things of past ages and masters lie free around us, hedged about and protected by the reverential awe of the few who know them. To these few our robber-genius, by the force of his impudence, bids defiance and acc.u.mulates for himself a wealth that once more calls forth homage and awe.

111.

TO THE POETS OF GREAT TOWNS.-In the gardens of modern poetry it will clearly be observed that the sewers of great towns are too near. With the fragrance of flowers is mingled something that betrays abomination and putrescence. With pain I ask: ”Must you poets always request wit and dirt to stand G.o.dfather, when an innocent and beautiful sensation has to be christened by you? Are you obliged to dress your n.o.ble G.o.ddess in a hood of devilry and caricature? But whence this necessity, this obligation?”

The reason is-because you live too near the sewers.

112.

OF THE SALT OF SPEECH.-No one has ever explained why the Greek writers, having at command such an unparalleled wealth and power of language, made so sparing a use of their resources that every post-cla.s.sical Greek book appears by comparison crude, over-coloured, and extravagant. It is said that towards the North Polar ice and in the hottest countries salt is becoming less and less used, whereas on the other hand the dwellers on the plains and by the coast in the more temperate zones use salt in great abundance. Is it possible that the Greeks from a twofold reason-because their intellect was colder and clearer but their fundamental pa.s.sionate nature far more tropical than ours-did not need salt and spice to the same extent that we do?

113.

THE FREEST WRITER.-In a book for free spirits one cannot avoid mention of Laurence Sterne, the man whom Goethe honoured as the freest spirit of his century. May he be satisfied with the honour of being called the freest writer of all times, in comparison with whom all others appear stiff, square-toed, intolerant, and downright booris.h.!.+ In his case we should not speak of the clear and rounded but of ”the endless melody”-if by this phrase we arrive at a name for an artistic style in which the definite form is continually broken, thrust aside and transferred to the realm of the indefinite, so that it signifies one and the other at the same time.

Sterne is the great master of _double entendre_, this phrase being naturally used in a far wider sense than is commonly done when one applies it to s.e.xual relations. We may give up for lost the reader who always wants to know exactly what Sterne thinks about a matter, and whether he be making a serious or a smiling face (for he can do both with one wrinkling of his features; he can be and even wishes to be right and wrong at the same moment, to interweave profundity and farce). His digressions are at once continuations and further developments of the story, his maxims contain a satire on all that is sententious, his dislike of seriousness is bound up with a disposition to take no matter merely externally and on the surface. So in the proper reader he arouses a feeling of uncertainty whether he be walking, lying, or standing, a feeling most closely akin to that of floating in the air. He, the most versatile of writers, communicates something of this versatility to his reader. Yes, Sterne unexpectedly changes the parts, and is often as much reader as author, his book being like a play within a play, a theatre audience before another theatre audience. We must surrender at discretion to the mood of Sterne, although we can always expect it to be gracious. It is strangely instructive to see how so great a writer as Diderot has affected this _double entendre_ of Sterne's-to be equally ambiguous throughout is just the Sternian super-humour. Did Diderot imitate, admire, ridicule, or parody Sterne in his _Jacques le Fataliste_? One cannot be exactly certain, and this uncertainty was perhaps intended by the author. This very doubt makes the French unjust to the work of one of their first masters, one who need not be ashamed of comparison with any of the ancients or moderns. For humour (and especially for this humorous att.i.tude towards humour itself) the French are too serious. Is it necessary to add that of all great authors Sterne is the worst model, in fact the inimitable author, and that even Diderot had to pay for his daring? What the worthy Frenchmen and before them some Greeks and Romans aimed at and attained in prose is the very opposite of what Sterne aims at and attains.

He raises himself as a masterly exception above all that artists in writing demand of themselves-propriety, reserve, character, steadfastness of purpose, comprehensiveness, perspicuity, good deportment in gait and feature. Unfortunately Sterne the man seems to have been only too closely related to Sterne the writer. His squirrel-soul sprang with insatiable unrest from branch to branch; he knew what lies between sublimity and rascality; he had sat on every seat, always with unabashed watery eyes and mobile play of feature. He was-if language does not revolt from such a combination-of a hard-hearted kindness, and in the midst of the joys of a grotesque and even corrupt imagination he showed the bashful grace of innocence. Such a carnal and spiritual hermaphroditism, such untrammelled wit penetrating into every vein and muscle, was perhaps never possessed by any other man.

114.

A CHOICE REALITY.-Just as the good prose writer only takes words that belong to the language of daily intercourse, though not by a long way all its words-whence arises a choice style-so the good poet of the future will only represent the real and turn his eyes away from all fantastic, superst.i.tious, half-voiced, forgotten stories, to which earlier poets devoted their powers. Only reality, though by a long way not every reality-but a choice reality.

115.

DEGENERATE SPECIES OF ART.-Side by side with the genuine species of art, those of great repose and great movement, there are degenerate species-weary, blase art and excited art. Both would have their weakness taken for strength and wish to be confounded with the genuine species.