BOOKS
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given so much, it seemed only natural to his audience that he would
give more---of the same. When he didn't, the result was that of a land–
slide, disastrous throughout the area it affects. His high-brow friends
threw up their hands in despair; critics foamed at the mouth at seeing
their auguries thwarted; the refined theater-goer, who had delighted in
what struck him as the consecration of Euripides through Freud, stared
aghast at the silly Austrian comedies and morality plays Reinhardt now
proceeded to stage for his darling playwright. But these might still pass
(let the poet relax from his more serious labors): only what was one
to make of those atrocious libretti written for Strauss, those casual
newspaper
articles- causeries
full of charm and subtle intelligence to be
sure, but hardly worthy of one so superbly, so uniquely gifted, one
destined to save German speech from the naturalist miasma! To make
sense, the general hue and cry over Hofmannsthal's defection must be
read in political terms. He was the renegade, the lost leader; for the
most ardent among his one-time worshipers--Stefan George and his
group--something yet more sinister: a false Messiah. (At a more shallow
level, it was a matter of
Literaturpolitik
as well: Hofmannsthal had dis–
appointed the hopes of those who wanted a representative South Ger–
man writer to pit against men like Thomas Mann and Gerhart Haupt–
mann.) How a poet can betray his destiny-rather than the expecta–
tions of his admirers-it would be difficult to tell; yet everybody told
it of this one, glibly, with insouciance, until the occasion of his death
(1929) redressed the balance as quickly as, on that earlier occasion,
it had been disturbed.
Some of the old friends and supporters stood fast; fellow Austrians
like Andrian and Bahr, the great North German poets Borchardt and
Schroeder, Reinhardt of course, and Richard Strauss. But they were a
motley crew, ridden with internal divisions, scarcely equipped to stem
the general tide of disapproval. One should think that the double spon–
sorship of a famous composer and a famous man of the theater were
sufficient to re-establish Hofmannsthal's waning prestige--the others,
though eminently distinguished, carried no weight with the public–
but in actual fact it worked just the other way. The critics and literati
despised Strauss's and Reinhardt's opinions on writing:
to
be liked by
them was, indeed, a calamity. They went further: such an espousal
furnished conclusive evidence that Hofmannsthal had lost caste, that he
was truckling to the idols of the day. Utterly absurd as it seems to us
now, the notion of Hofmannsthal as a meretricious writer was beginning
to take hold in those days and by 1920 had become the orthodox view
of the textbooks and critical journals.
