Franz Werfel realises this ideal in poems thrilling with a mournful humanity, which takes part in the sacrament of misery and death:
We are bound together not only by our common words and deeds, but still more by the dying glance, the last hours, the mortal anguish of the breaking heart. And whether you bow down before the tyrant, or gaze trembling into the beloved’s countenance, or mark down your enemy with pitiless glance, think of the eye that will grow dim, of the failing breath, the parched lips and clenched hands, the final solitude, and the brow that grows moist in the last agony. . . . Be kind. . . . Tenderness is wisdom, kindness is reason. . . We are strangers all upon this earth, and die but to be reunited.”
But the one German poet who has written the serenest and loftiest words, and preserved in the midst of this demoniacal war an attitude worthy of Goethe, is Hermann Hesse. He continues to live at Berne, and, sheltered there from the moral contagion, he has deliberately kept aloof from the combat All will remember his noble article in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung of November 3rd, “0 Freunde, nicht diese Tone in which he implored the artists and thinkers of Europe “to save what little peace” might yet be saved, and not to join with their pens in destroying the future of
Jecler hat’s gehabt
Keiner hat’s geschetzt.
Jeden hat der süsse Quell gelabt.
0 wie klingt der Name Friede jetzt
Klingt so fern und zag,
Klingt so tranenschwer,
Keiner Weiss und kennt den Tag,
J eder sehnt ihn vol Verlangen her.
(“Each one possessed it, but no one prized it. Like a cool spring it refreshed us all. What a sound the word Peace has for us now!
“Distant it sounds, and fearful, and heavy with tears. No one knows or can name the day for which all sigh with such longing.”)
No comments:
Post a Comment