Friedrich Hölderlin

“ Yes, it is admitted that one is a Philistine; but, a barbarian?—No, not at any price! Unfortunately, poor Holderlin could not make such fine distinctions. If one reads the reverse of civilisation, or perhaps sea-pirating, or cannibalism, into the word "barbarian," then the distinction is justifiable enough. But what the aesthete obviously wishes to prove to us is, that we may be Philistines and at the same time men of culture. Therein lies the humour which poor Holderlin lacked and the need of which ultimately wrecked him. ”

“ True, a stronger mental organization might have overcome these or even greater difficulties; Schiller, Herder, Fichte are examples; but not all of Hölderlin's failures and disappointments were the result of his weakness, and so while it is right to state that a stronger and more robust nature would have conquered in the fight, it is also fair to say that Hölderlin would have had a good chance of winning, had fortune been more kind. For this reason these external influences must be reckoned with as an important cause of his Weltschmerz and subsequently of his insanity. ”

“ Hyperion expresses himself on one occasion in the words: "O ein Gott ist der Mensch, wenn er träumt, ein Bettler, wenn er nachdenkt, und wenn die Begeisterung hin ist, steht er da, wie ein missrathener Sohn, den der Vater aus dem Hause stiess, und betrachtet die ärmlichen Pfennige, die ihm das Mitleid auf den Weg gab," [25] which further illustrates the extravagant idealism by which he allowed himself to be carried away, and the etherial and thoroughly unpractical trend of his mind. The flights of fancy of which Hölderlin is capable are well illustrated by another passage in "Hyperion." ”

“ He is afraid the Pope would forbid them to assemble at his house. By February 1870 difficulties increased vastly. "The situation," wrote DÖllinger to Hohenlohe "becomes more grave and threatening." It was just announced that the Archbishop of Munich intended to go over to the Infallibilists. Friedrich was by this time lodged with Cardinal Hohenlohe in Rome, who was "managing to keep him in spite of all enemies." [7] "Stupidity and fanaticism," wrote the Cardinal, "are dancing a Tarantella together, accompanied by such discordant music that one can hardly see or hear." ”

“ Schubart was one of Hölderlin's earliest favorites, so that the latter was doubtless in this way imbued with sentiments which could only grow stronger under the influence of his more mature observations and experiences. Even in his eighteenth year, in a poem "An die Demut," [41] he gives expression in strong terms to his patriotic feelings, in which his disgust with his faint-hearted, servile compatriots and his defiance of "Fürstenlaune" and "Despotenblut" are plainly evident. So too in "Männerjubel," 1788:
Es glimmt in uns ein Funke der Göttlichen! ”

“ They were happy in their worship of beauty in art and in nature, and above all, happy in their creativeness. The question suggests itself here, whether a poet can ever be a genuine pessimist, since he has within him the everlasting impulse to create. And to create is to hope. Hyperion himself says: "Es lebte nichts, wenn es nicht hoffte." [62] But we have already distinguished between pessimism as a system of philosophy, and Weltschmerz as a poetic mood. [63] It is certainly un-Hellenic that Hölderlin allows Hyperion with his alleged Greek nature to sink into contemplative inactivity. ”

“ And my soul also is the song of a loving one.
Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me; it longs to find expression. A craving for love is within me, which speaks itself the language of love. ”

“ How beautiful it is, and, so far as we can yet see, how practicable! The ages have waited for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on our mortal existence in love and mutual help! Hollingsworth, I would be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience."
"Then let it rest wholly upon mine!" he answered, knitting his black brows. "I see through the system. It is full of defects,—irremediable and damning ones!—from first to last, there is nothing else! I grasp it in my hand, and find no substance whatever. There is not human nature in it." ”

“ That is why the nature foreordained, through which music expresses itself to this world of appearance, is one of the most mysterious things under the sun—an abyss in which strength and goodness lie united, a bridge between self and non-self. ”

“ Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long.
You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a victory! ”

“ We shall feel as though Siegfried from some place far away were relating his deeds to us: the most blissful of touching recollections are always draped in the deep mourning of waning summer, when all nature lies still in the sable twilight. ”

“ For ever dwelling in some kind of love and some kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment! Powerful and at the same time obscure and resigned! Constantly basking in sunshine and the soft light of grace, and yet knowing the ladder, which leads to the sublime, to be near at hand! ”

“ This love grew out of that hate, as its crown, as its triumphant crown, circling wider and wider amid the clarity and fulness of the sun, and pursuing in the very kingdom of light and height its goal of hatred, its victory, its spoil, its strategy, with the same intensity with which the roots of that tree of hate sank into everything which was deep and evil with increasing stability and increasing desire. ”

“ Hollingsworth, I think you'll be the lucky man to-night, such luck as it is."
We floated past the stump. Silas Foster plied his rake manfully, poking it as far as he could into the water, and immersing the whole length of his arm besides. Hollingsworth at first sat motionless, with the hooked pole elevated in the air. But, by and by, with a nervous and jerky movement, he began to plunge it into the blackness that upbore us, setting his teeth, and making precisely such thrusts, methought, as if he were stabbing at a deadly enemy. ”

“ All the elegant people have reason to beware of this German fire; it may one day devour them with all their wax dolls and idols. The prevailing love of "good form" in Germany may have a deeper cause in the breathless seizing at what the moment can give, the haste that plucks the fruit too green, the race and the struggle that cut the furrows in men's brows and stamp the same mark on all their actions. ”

“ He stands astounded in face of the enormous way that man has run, and his gaze quivers before the mightier wonder, the modern man who can see all this way! He stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process: and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge, he seems to cry aloud to listening Nature: "We are at the top, we are the top, we are the completion of Nature!" ”

“ From all mountains do I look out for fatherlands and motherlands. But a home have I found nowhere: unsettled am I in all cities, and decamping at all gates.
Alien to me, and a mockery, are the present-day men, to whom of late my heart impelled me; and exiled am I from fatherlands and motherlands.
Thus do I love only my children's land, the undiscovered in the remotest sea: for it do I bid my sails search and search.
To my children will I make amends for being the child of my fathers: and to all the future- for this present-day!-
Thus spoke Zarathustra. ”

“ THE HOUR-HAND OF LIFE.—Life consists of rare single moments of the greatest importance, and of countless intervals during which, at best, the phantoms of those moments hover around us. Love, the Spring, every fine melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea—all speak but once fully to the heart, if, indeed, they ever do quite attain to speech. For many people have not those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of actual life. ”

“ Zarathustra, said he, wilt thou even sing consolation to the sea?
Ah, thou amiable fool, Zarathustra, thou too-blindly confiding one! But thus hast thou ever been: ever hast thou approached confidently all that is terrible.
Every monster wouldst thou caress. A whiff of warm breath, a little soft tuft on its paw—: and immediately wert thou ready to love and lure it.
LOVE is the danger of the lonesomest one, love to anything, IF IT ONLY LIVE! ”

“ But it is rather a liberation, a removal of all the weeds and rubbish and vermin that attack the delicate shoots, the streaming forth of light and warmth, the tender dropping of the night rain; it is the following and the adoring of Nature when she is pitifully-minded as a mother;—her completion, when it bends before her fierce and ruthless blasts and turns them to good, and draws a veil over all expression of her tragic unreason—for she is a step-mother too, sometimes. ”

“ At the approach Of extreme peril, when a hollow image Is found a hollow image and no more, Then falls the power into the mighty hands Of nature, of the spirit-giant born, Who listens only to himself, knows nothing Of stipulations, duties, reverences, And, like the emancipated force of fire, Unmastered scorches, ere it reaches them, Their fine-spun webs, their artificial policy. ”

“ Ye love your virtue as a mother loveth her child; but when did one hear of a mother wanting to be paid for her love?
It is your dearest Self, your virtue. The ring's thirst is in you: to reach itself again struggleth every ring, and turneth itself.
And like the star that goeth out, so is every work of your virtue: ever is its light on its way and travelling—and when will it cease to be on its way? ”

“ And as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of Gehenna, where, as I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this moment!"
"And bellowing, I suppose," said I,—not that I felt any ill-will towards Fourier, but merely wanted to give the finishing touch to Hollingsworth's image, "bellowing for the least drop of his beloved limonade a cèdre!"
There is but little profit to be expected in attempting to argue with a man who allows himself to declaim in this manner ”

“ Methought there could not be two such men alive as Hollingsworth. There never was any blaze of a fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings and shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.
Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die! and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,—as most probably there will not,—he had better make up his mind to die alone. How many men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would choose for his deathbed companions! ”

“ Ye, my old friends! Look! Ye turn pale, filled o'er With love and fear! Go! Yet not in wrath. Ye could ne'er live here. Here in the farthest realm of ice and scaur, A huntsman must one be, like chamois soar. ”

“ Jealous is every virtue of the others, and a dreadful thing is jealousy. Even virtues may succumb by jealousy.
He whom the flame of jealousy encompasseth, turneth at last, like the scorpion, the poisoned sting against himself.
Ah! my brother, hast thou never seen a virtue backbite and stab itself?
Man is something that hath to be surpassed: and therefore shalt thou love thy virtues,—for thou wilt succumb by them.—
Thus spake Zarathustra. ”

“ Plümacher maintains: "Der Weltschmerz ist entweder die absolute Passivität, und die Klage seine einzige Aeusserung, oder aber er verpufft seine Kräfte in rein subjectivistischen, eudämonischen Anstrengungen," [282] —a characterization which certainly holds good in the case of Lenau and Hölderlin respectively. Hölderlin, although in a visionary, idealistic way, remains, en in his Weltschmerz, altruistic and constructive. Lenau is passive, while Heine is solely egoistic and destructive. ”

“ There was a mysterious tremor that shook the magic veil. The spectators, it may be, imagined that she was about to take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the society of those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned her so near akin. Hollingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the platform, and now stood gazing at the figure, with a sad intentness that brought the whole power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance.
"Come," said he, waving his hand towards her. "You are safe!" ”

“ It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life, Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people (among whom I include humorists of every degree) , it required all the constancy of friendship to restrain his associates from pronouncing him an intolerable bore. Such prolonged fiddling upon one string—such multiform presentation of one idea! His specific object (of which he made the public more than sufficiently aware, through the medium of lectures and pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the construction of an edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment. ”

“ We grow lonelier for the very reason that the whole flood of humanity is surging round us. The fire within us, which is glowing for all that is human, is ever on the increase—wherefore we look upon all that surrounds us as though it had become more indifferent, more shadowy. ”

“ Things are pretty insufferable when in one's own room one can feel the frigid breath of death when one withdraws to one's room not as to a fastness, so to speak, but as if one were drawn back to prison. ”