Hugo von Hofmannsthal

“ But the spirit is the subtlest of all poisons; inside of a century Rome was hollowed out, and in place of a relatively young and naïve, half-peasant civilization, it housed the mightiest and most portentous mixture of minds and religions that the world has ever seen. ”

“ The great pagan conceptions of fate and the gods live in his poetic world along with deeply Christian attitudes and intuitions—Aether and Bacchus with Christ. So the generation of the living sees its deepest yearning, the germ of its new religious dream, pre-existing in this mystic leader. ”

“ He will see that this European present is also his American future, from which there is so little chance of his withdrawing himself or withdrawing his great young sea-encircled continent; that, rather, all the potentialities and catastrophes of geographic and racial destiny which are slumbering in this young continent will be released through no other conflagrations than that of Europe's intellectual future. We are now facing such an effect of the intellectual undercurrent of Europe upon the intellectual undercurrent of America. ”

“ Incited and consolidated by the urge to arrive at new combinations of all things and to see something like order and sense in a dual—political and spiritual—catastrophe, they devoted themselves to two streams of thought and feeling. One is more Christian or mystic: the fusion of all things in a recognition of God which soars, so to speak, above and beyond the rational. ”

“ I mean the gradual penetration of American imaginative life by the strong, subtle dream-toxins of the European imagination—a process whereby New York, the capital of the world (as it has now become in a certain sense owing to the war) has begun magically to attract all those individuals who are the carriers, in any sphere, of Europe's artistic and intellectual life. ”

“ For such an intellectual infusion swiftly penetrates the blood vessels and the lymphatic chambers, and I believe that the United States, in the obscure depths of its becoming, conceals all those elements which are predestined, in making a contact with such enormous ferment as is contained in the intellectual life of Europe, to take on quite astonishing new extensions—especially of a religious nature, perhaps also artistic. ”

“ They abandoned the conceptions which the nineteenth century respected most: the conception of complete individual freedom, and the conception of evolution by which all the mysteries of existence have been more obscured than clarified. The conception of authority rose higher and purer, when all the actual bearers of authority had fallen. The effort was made as profoundly as possible to give the strongest possible foundation to the conception of authority in feeling and thinking (for when we are young we strive especially for a synthesis between feeling and thinking) . ”

“ It is not easy to tell foreigners what it is that can take a long-dead lyric poet—whose hymns and elegies are of a wonderful rhythmic strength, but at the same time are linguistically very difficult and in places truly obscure—and with a single stroke make him the leader of a whole fated generation, so that they recover themselves in him after a stupor of several years, and begin building the greatest structures in accordance with him. ”

“ The more pitilessly and confusingly the real world encircled him, the more powerfully his soul struggled to construct within itself a vision embracing all the forces in the world and reconciling them with one another. ”

“ In some day not far off, with the keenness of a besetting fever, with the poignancy of a dream, and the oppression of a nightmare, he will become conscious that all these European matters are by no means things of an unrelated past, but the living and fermenting present, a ferment in which so tremendously much of the past is a factor. ”

“ Perhaps it is well to remind American readers, who are accustomed to dealing with large, simple, and plainly demarcated political and economic units, that in Europe there are many millions of Germans outside the German Empire who take an active part in their nation's essential and ultimate destiny—by which I do not mean its political destiny. ”

“ This neither purely spiritual nor purely vitalistic attitude—which can no longer be reached by the categories of optimism or pessimism prevailing in the nineteenth century, because it operates, figuratively, on an entirely new plane—holds in thrall the minds of men who can be considered as forming one generation, and who will determine by their pressure all intellectual developments. ”

“ Thus, approximately, a contemporary of Shelley, evoked by the faith and will of a whole generation to serve as the symbol of a leader in one of the most sinister conditions in all history. And yet I am speaking of things which are utterly real, in any case possessing much more reality in thousands of heads than all that is going on between ministers and ministers, party leaders and party leaders, and which is filling up the ephemeral columns of the newspapers ”

“ It would be idle and trivial to desire to ascertain the numerical ratio between these individuals and the totality of available young men; yet I believe that there is a great body of these people who are filled with a religiosity which is not dogmatized, but living and pulsating, that they have swept through all classes of the nation, and are banding together in small conventicles everywhere throughout the German-speaking countries. ”

“ But I fear that Americans must be forced to take an interest in this weather, since somehow there will begin to be, not a European and an American weather, each independent of the other, but one general condition spreading over the whole planet. ”

“ The other is more ancient, or rather, oriental and pagan; starting from a magnificent comprehension of the material life, it arrives at the conception of life's flow, and likewise moves in a dark bed beneath the rational. ”