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PARTISAN REVIEW
Few great writers of our era-and I think there can be no ques–
tion of his stature-have baffled, divided, disconcerted their audience
as Hofmannsthal did. Many of his endowments worked against him, at
least in later life: his amazing versatility, which increased right up to
his death, and which to some seemed pure magic, to others prestidigita–
tion; his constant command of
melos,
which made the driest bones of
contention sing out and smoothed every wave of party quarrel; the
peculiar conjunction, in this mind, of intuitive depth and
esprit,
Attic
salt; his frank exploitation of every resource of rhetoric, especially in
the plays, fit to arrest the average attention as well as the ear attuned
to niceties of diction and prosody-all this was weighed in the scales and,
by most of Hofmannsthal's critics, found wanting. Although through
his libretti and productions like
Everyman
he achieved a measure of
fame-indeed international fame-it is quite plain that he could never
become a popular poet ; but his main objectors came from the ranks of
the elite, not from those who favor the middle ground. For a very
few he rose too high (a notion which never ceased to hurt him, since he
liked to appeal largely) but for many more he had fallen from grace
when, early in life, he deserted the highly-wrought mode of his lyrics
and chamber plays for a speech that, while eloquent and vibrant with
passion, was fundamentally plain. What happened to the young Hof–
mannsthal-he was still this side of thirty-during the crisis so pro–
foundly portrayed in the "Letter of Lord Chandos" will never be known
in full, yet one thing is certain: that crisis was not one of style alone
but involved his whole affective and imaginative range, together with the
possibilities of speech and knowledge. A crisis as complete, as desperate,
as one is likely to find in the annals of poetry; and Hofmannsthal saved
himself as best he could. To this writer at least, he was saved in more
ways than one. Not only did he rise whole from the vortex of unbeing
but the new path he now chose to pursue spelt his salvation as a poet.
1
The end, in a sense, of his private was the beginning of his public
difficulties. He had started his career early, a child prodigy, the quality
of his achievement as miraculous as Mozart's; by his verse he had
garnered success of a rare kind, the approval of men like George and
Borchardt; his first plays on classical
themes-Electra
(1903),
Oedipus
and the Sphinx
(1906)-had been given widely and received with ac–
claim; he had managed, in short, to please both the elect and those
not
quite
chosen-a thing rare in any culture and rarest in Germany,
where the waste is known to start directly below the high peaks. Having
1.
It should be pointed out, for the sake of accuracy, that the crisis exposed in
the Chandos letter was not fully resolved until 1910, the date of
Everyman.
