Jakob Wassermann

“ I will soon be thirty years old, Eleanore. A man never really wakes up until he is thirty; it is then that he conquers the world. You know what rests within me; you suspect it. You know too how I need you; you feel it. You are my soul; you are created out of my music; without you I am an empty hull, a patchwork, a violin without strings.”
“Oh, Daniel, I believe you, and yet it is not all true,” replied Eleanore. ”

“ THE GLOBE ON THE FINGERTIPS OF AN ELF I
Crammon had been a true prophet. Ten months had sufficed to fix the eyes of the world upon the dancer, Eva Sorel. The great newspapers coupled her name with the celebrated ones of the earth; her art was regarded everywhere as the fine flower of its age.
All those to whose restless spiritual desires she had given form and body were at her feet. The leaders of sorely driven humanity drew a breath and looked up to her. The adorers of form and the proclaimers of new rhythms vied for a smile from her lips. ”

“ At that the joy of the king’s daughter grew so great that her own face became comely and delightful, and every trace of ugliness and coarseness vanished. But when at last the Victorious and Perfect showed her the golden radiance of His majestic body, the devout ecstasy felt by the king’s daughter caused her own body to be changed to a perfection so divine that nothing comparable to it could be found in all the world. In all His splendour the Victorious and Perfect appeared before her; her joyous faith reached its utmost height, and her innermost being became like to the soul of an angel. ”

“ Face to face with this woman, his love, great or small, even his hate, his indifference, becomes a phantom, just as everything that we give out becomes a phantom compared with what is given to us. And there is another woman who is my own creation, the fruit of my dreams; she is my picture; I have created her from my own blood; she lay in me just as the seed lay in the bud. And she must be mine once she has been unveiled and made known to me, or I will perish of loneliness and maddened longing. ”

“ The cries of pity and terror, the weeping and wringing of hands, the thronging at the gates and the noise of the circus men, the image of a clown who stood as though frozen on a drum, a horse that trotted in from the stables, the sight of the bloody, unspeakably mutilated body in its dripping shreds—none of all this penetrated in any connected or logical form the consciousness of Christian. ”

“ Whiteness was a lie.
He got up and walked through the room. The glitter of the sunlight came insolently from the whiteness, and the room was filled with its lying shimmer. He hated it.
He stopped and listened and his eyelids twitched. Something floated before his mind, knocked at its door—not so much a forgotten thing as one suppressed and throttled. From his trousers pocket he drew forth a round, tightly-rolled, blackish brown object. He looked at it and began to shudder. For a moment his eyes had the same brooding look as when he regarded the chessmen. ”

“ In its lacerated body there streams a darkness into which one would like to plunge in order to be born again. A primitive breath is there, and chaos; there the elements thunder and the most terrible dream becomes reality, an epic reality of immemorial ages. Of such life I once had no perception, except in some great marble in which a nameless woe had become rigid and eternal. I feel as though I were looking back on this scene from the height of centuries to come or from a star, and as though everything were vision. ”

“ But there is such a thing as a transformation, and through it one receives absolution. Turn away from your phantom and become a human being—and then you can become a creator. If you once become human, really human, it may be that you will not need the work, symphony or whatever else you choose to call it. It may be that power and glory will radiate from you yourself. For are not all works merely the round-about ways, the detours of the man himself, merely man’s imperfect attempts to reveal himself? ”

“ He now stimulated her to invent for herself, to feel with originality and give that feeling a creative form. He vivified her glance, that was so often in thrall to the technical or merely beautiful, liberated her senses, and gave her a clear vision of that deaf, blind swarm and throng whom her art would have to affect. He inspired her with love for the immortal works of man, armoured her heart against seduction by the vulgar, against a game but for the loftiest stakes, against action without restraint, being without poise. ”

“ Cursed be the mill that clappers, the carpenter who drives the nails, the teamster who calls to his jaded pair, the laughter of children, the croaking of frogs, the twittering of birds! An insensate man looks down upon the scene, one who is deaf and dumb, one who would snatch all clothing and decorations from the world, to the end that neither colour nor splendour of any description may divert his eye, one who mounts to heaven at night to steal the eternal fire, and who burrows in the graves of the dead by day—an outcast. ”

“ Render my ambition, my restlessness, my inner tempo and colourfulness, my great hunger and the time-spirit that is in me. But you must hurry; for I am self-consumed. In a few years I shall have burned out. My soul is tinder. Render this process with the divine objectivity of art, and I’ll reward you like a Medici. But I must be able to see the flame, the flaring up, the dying down, the quiver of it! ”

“ Every step has been a step toward guilt, every yearning has been guilt, and every stirring of gratitude. Every hour of delight has been guilt, every enjoyment an impoverishment, and every rise a fall.”
“Blasphemer,” Susan murmured. “Pride and satiety cause you to sin against yourself and your fate.”
“How you torment me,” Eva answered. “How all of you torment me—men and women. How sterile I become through you. How your voices torture me, and your eyes and words and thoughts. You lie so frivolously; you would not listen, and truth is hateful to you. Who are you? Who are you, Susan? ”

“ It is truth on the contrary that fills my heart, fills it with joy, and helps me along. What nature offers, obedience to nature, that is truth. Truth lies in your thoughts, in your feelings, girl, in your choked feelings, in your blood, in the ‘yes’ you speak in your dreams. Of course I know that they need their lie, for they must be organised, the wolves; they must go in packs, otherwise they are impotent. But I have only my truth, only my truth as I stand on the marble slab above the abyss.”
“Your truth, Daniel,” said Eleanore, “your truth. ”

“ In hours of spiritual insight I have looked deeply into the secrets of creation. The human soul, poor and rich at once, has endless capacities and powers of transformation. The stars gleam over us and we know them not, neither their influence nor their power. The fissures of the earth have been closed, and we know but as through the memory of a dream that there are demons seeking to rule us. ”

“ In the sharp light reflected from the snow, her eyes were green as malachite. “What are you doing with yourself?” she asked. “Your eyes look lonesome.”
“I have been living rather alone for some time,” answered Christian. His utterances were dry and precise. “Crammon too has left me.”
“Ivan Becker wrote me about you,” Eva said in muffled tones. “I kissed the letter. I carried it in my bosom, and said the words of it over to myself. Is there such a thing as an awakening? Can the soul emerge from the darkness, as a flower does from the bulb? But there you stand in your pride, and do not move. ”

“ So that you can go to masquerade balls and parties of all kinds, I will try to beat a little music into some twenty-odd unmusical idiots. I will do more than that: I will promise never to bother myself about your behaviour: I will never ask you where you have been or where you are going. But listen, Dorothea,” he said, as his face flushed with anger and anxiety, his voice rising as if by unconscious pressure, “don’t you ever dare dishonour my name! It is the only thing I have. I owe humanity an irreparable debt for it. ”

“ I am to forget what I have done and abandon hope, and be lowly and loathed and an outcast, and deny principles and break fetters and bow down before the spirit of evil, and bear pain and cause pain, and tear up and plough the earth, even though beautiful harvests be destroyed. Traitor—how little that means! I wander about and hunger after myself. I flee from myself, and yet cry out after myself, and am the sacrificer and the sacrifice. ”

“ Who was happier than Jason Philip Schimmelweis?
He was like a man who gets up from the table with a full stomach, after having sat down at it fearing lest he starve to death. On his way home he whistled and laughed alternately and with well balanced proportion.
“There you see it again,” he said to his daughter, as she walked along at his side, “you see it again: you cannot get blood from a turnip any more than you can get happiness from misery. A jackass remains a jackass, a culprit a culprit, and loafing never fails to bring the loafer to a disgraceful end. ”

“ Eva saw him too, gently thrust Johanna aside, arose, and approached the threshold. When she saw the man in his strange and absorbed ecstasy, she felt as though she had been spattered with filth, and uttered a soft, brief cry. Amadeus Voss twitched and dropped the shawl. His eyes were wild and guilty. With a light laugh and an expression of transcendent contempt, which summed up a long dislike, Eva raised the little silver whip and struck him [333] full in the face. His features grew very white, in a contortion of voluptuousness and terror. ”

“ Letitia did not, indeed, worry. She enjoyed herself and was radiant. Every day was so full of delight and pleasure that it seemed rank ingratitude to think of the morrow except under the same aspect. Life clung to her as pliantly and adorningly as a charming frock. Since her inner life was unshadowed and all men smiled upon her, she believed the world at large to be in a lasting condition of content. Rumours of pain and misfortune, she thought, must somewhere have their ground in reality. ”

“ I am only human, and I must know woman’s love, or I shall freeze to death or be turned to stone or utterly destroyed. Yet I am a Christian, and it is hard for a Christian who bears a certain image in his heart to give himself up to woman. Help me to find a woman, brother, I beseech you.”
Christian looked out upon the dark sea. “How can I help him?” he thought, and felt all the coldness of the world and the confusion of mortal things.
While he stood and reflected he heard from afar across the dunes a cry, first dulled by the distance, then nearer and clearer, and then farther away again. ”

“ It would be futile to act as the spy of Daniel and show how he left the attic room in the dead of night and crept down the stairs in felt slippers. We have no desire to hear of Eleanore’s pangs of conscience and her longings, her flights, her waiting in burning suspense; to relate how she endeavoured to avert the inevitable to-day and succumbed to-morrow would be to tell an idle tale. It is best to overlook all these things; to draw a curtain of mercy before them; for they are so human and so wholly without a trace of the miraculous. ”

“ Her heart was like a wound with compassion and yearning. She pressed her lips against the forehead of the image of Christ. The metal body stirred and grew and grew, and assumed the stature of life; and she, more and more tenderly giving herself, infused blood into the image, and gave its skin the colour of life, so that even the wounds of the nails flushed red. ”

“ Beside herself with grief, the Baroness made up her mind to tell him, for the first time in her life, of the thousand wrongs that burned within her heart. And she did: “Oh, you monster! Why did Fate bring you into my life? Where is there another woman in the world whose lot has been like mine? Where is the woman who has lived without joy or love or esteem or freedom or peace, a burden to others and to herself? Show me another woman who goes about in silk and satin longing for death. ”

“ He knew the bribe-takers and the stiff-necked ones, the braggarts and the slinkers, the thieves and forgers, ladies’ men and cowards, the harlots and their procurers, the respectable women with their hypocrisy and envy, their pretence and masquerade and play-acting; he knew it all, and it couldn’t impress him no more. And there were no real things in the world except stench and misery and avarice and greed and treachery and malevolence and lust. The world was a loathsome thing and had to be destroyed. ”

“ Herr Carovius would never have believed that the reserved misanthrope was capable of such a display of emotion. He felt that Eberhard had disclosed to him the most secret chambers of his heart. He was terrified at the voluptuousness revealed to him by the unveiling of the mystery of his soul. They are human beings after all, those members of the nobility, he exclaimed with a feeling of personal triumph. They throw themselves away; they meet some slippery imp, and fall; they lose control of themselves as soon as they hear a skirt rustle. ”

“ He bent down his face, and learned an unheard-of thing from the beseeching, horror-stricken glance that sought him as from fathomless depths. Passionately he pressed Michael’s body against his own, which was so wet but no longer aware of its wetness. He pressed the boy to his heart, as though he would open to him his breast as a shelter, and the boy, too, clung to Christian with all his might. The convulsive rigidity relaxed, and from that unbelievably emaciated body there broke forth a sobbing like the moan of a wind of doom.
The boy knew. No one could be so shattered but one who knew. ”

“ Study the situation from all sides, so that we may make no false calculations. Fate, you know, is fate. Love can get control of me more than I can get control of myself, and when this takes place I will do everything in my power. But I must have confidence, unlimited confidence. If I were to lose confidence, I should be like a mortal proscribed to Hell, an outcast, an evil spirit. Examine yourself, Dorothea. You must know what you are doing; it is your affair, and it is a sacred one.”
“I cannot do otherwise, Daniel!” cried Dorothea, and threw herself on his bosom. ”