Andreas

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  How, in the smallest, subtlest detail, the body is to be persuaded—that is the secret and the difficulty. At the same time, attention to and reverence for that which does not return.

  “To destroy the principle of contradiction is perhaps the supreme task of higher logic” (Novalis).

  “Gradual increase of inward responsiveness is thus the chief concern of the artist of immortality” (Novalis).

  Conversation with Maria on suicide: “Above all, one must be sure of destroying oneself entirely.”—Here Sacramozo smiles.

  Sacramozo: “Every morning the sun rises on millions of men, but where among those millions is the one heart that responds to it in pure music like the pillar of Memnon?—I stood with ten thousand on a hill, a pilgrimage, etc.,—but my heart was separated from theirs. When has the morning sun ever really illuminated me? Once, perhaps, in that brief dream. But I shall go where a virgin light will meet me on virgin shores.”—“Every beginning is serene. Hail to him who can always begin again!”

  DAY OF SACRAMOZO’S DEATH.

  The preparation. Fasting. Aspect of the world. Onset of doubt. Anxiety, resolve wavers, grows firm again.

  Last conversation with Maria: farewell and meeting again: the power of this conversation on her.

  The last afternoon, evening. His thoughts during. The drops: the realization that he can stop between one drop and the next. Ecstasy of dissolution, how it fades at the thought that he can stop. The aspect of the world between life and death: the finality sanctifies the ecstasy: an enormous honouring of God in His creatures: a moving into the temple of God. Onset of fear of death: paroxysm. Transfiguration.

  Before death: hears water flowing, desire to conjure up all water he has ever heard flow.

  Stages of dissolution: a wonderful drawing near to every being that is borne towards him by a gentle, shining river; the beings rise like swimmers out of a holy stream: he knows that nothing he has done in his life has been in vain. The approaching beings singular, like a kiss dissolving the soul—the blueness of a garment, the breath of a lip, the voice of a bird (the objects in the room: sky-blue stuff, a mask, silver candelabras, flowers, fruit, bowls of water)—he takes it for the promise of an ineffable union, and now knows he cannot turn back.

  The death-room of the Knight with alabaster lamps and flowers. His ecstatic letter of farewell: universal love. For him, this is no vague dissolution, but the most sublime preservation of personality.

  AT THE same time, Andreas wins Zustina in the lottery. She wants to give herself to him, hoping by that to win him so that he will remain her husband. Confesses the trick by which she made him win, which was very cleverly contrived. Her tears and her recovery: evidence that Nina too is in love with him.—News of Romana.—Zustina speaks of the way in which Nina loves him in contrast to her own, deduces both, very acutely and delicately, from their physical constitution. At this moment, Zustina is extraordinarily beautiful. Zustina: “When Nina is in love, everything stops for her soul: the world has changed—she cannot understand how she can have lived yesterday. Till now I was never in love—and if there is no way of being in love but Nina’s, I still don’t know love. For the world is always the world for me, even though it contains a being whom it is delicious to meet.”

  LAST CHAPTER

  As Andreas takes flight and travels up the mountains, he feels as if the two halves of his being, which were torn asunder, were reuniting.

  At San Vito, he finds a farmhand driving home by night. When he reaches Castle Finazzer the next day, Romana is not there. Bit by bit he hears that she has fled to the alp on his account; then that she has had a terrible fever, has constantly spoken of him, then taken a vow never to see him again unless he comes from Vienna to make her his wife. (Modesty now as infinitely exaggerated as previous freedom).

  He leaves a decisive letter for Romana.

  Last Chapter. He leaves at daybreak. They arrive at sunrise. Up to the Alps with the mother. Romana creeps into the farthest cranny and, in the end threatens to throw herself down from the precipice.

  ANDREAS OR THE UNITED

  THE LADY WITH THE SPANIEL

  GENERAL PLAN (rough), 12. IX. 1912.

  I. Arrival. Lodging. Lottery. Visit to the cocotte. First meeting. II. The Knight of Malta. Conversation. Visit to the Countess after another visit to Nina. III. Developments in the affair with the widow. Amorous friendship with the Countess. Jealous of the Knight. IV. The Countess is moved: her story. The widow: the present in its most fiery form, impish, knowledge of the “other.” V. The Countess begins to withdraw (change of confessor). Evening visit. The billet with the threat. VI.…VII. Evening visit; feeling in Andreas, as he goes up, how completely he has changed. The weight of experience: nothing that could not have happened.

  ANDREAS—Reason for sending him on the tour: difficult, protracted convalescence after a mental crisis, some listlessness, loss of a sense of value, confusion of ideas.

  Influence of a Father Aderkast who has suspended life for Andreas, made it illusory (performances of Calderón).—The meeting with Father Aderkast (who bears down on him fulsomely—he feels as if his whole past were breaking in upon him, inescapably) interwoven with an adventure with Mariquita: the more distraught Andreas grows, owing to the repeated meetings with Father Aderkast, whose insistence he can hardly understand, the more charming he appears to Mariquita.

  Andreas does not really believe in his experiences; what happens to him, of all people, cannot be worth much: he is always at extremes, on the one hand sensual, on the other idealistic.—He always assumes that people must know what is going on in him.—His demands were gentle, without insistence, he was content with little.

  Andreas’s apprenticeship: to recognize the existence of higher things, to realize the value of life.

  In his memories of childhood, there remains a painful confusion which his whole life will hardly suffice to unravel. To die reconciled to one’s childhood. (Journal: “I should like to die reconciled to my childhood.”)

  His grandfather, a carter at Spitz, came down from the forest. Drives Princess Brunswick who notices him and hires him as a groom in place of one who has fallen ill. The Emperor rides to meet her with a hundred horsemen, has himself presented to her last under the incognito of Count Falkenstein, but as he kisses her hand, presses it, so that she jumps up, startled and falls into his arms, and he now kisses both of her hands in turn. (This in 1716, the grandfather born 1699; Andreas’s father, born in 1731, is now forty-eight.) The Spanish genre in these stories.

  CLOSE of the tour chapters: encounter with the “woman on the Aar”—the adventure with the inconsolable widow.

  Leaving the Finazzer farm: he does not believe in himself; he creates in himself the figure of another, who will return. Now startled in the house on the river, where the mourning widow comes towards him with her “Really you! It is really you! You cannot escape yourself!”—The mood of supreme exaltation, which has lasted for several days since the moment of the mountain, suddenly reversed in this adventure (the widow’s hand on his breast in the night).

  A German-speaking widow from the lowest-lying of the Sette Communi. The picture of the accident painted on paper, the wedding-ring attached. Sends her sixteen-year-old daughter to kneel and weep by the river. Her cough (hysterically exaggerated by herself)—at times she tells the story in fuller detail. The picture is her prayer-book, her all.—Impression on Andreas: “A single moment!”—from this moment on he can pray, it comes home to him. (In between, the merchant’s servant, looking after his luggage, abrupt revulsion from prayer. Idle, empty chatter with a fellow traveller about the gentry of the terra ferma)—The widow’s complaints and monologues, have not stopped for seventeen years: the daughter’s callous way of detailing it all, saying in a weary drawl, “Nothing gives her pleasure, she feels the world as her coffin”—the mother says the same thing, but in a raving way, so that even in her anguish there is still a trace of the breath of God, of the inexhaustibility of nature
and life. On the other hand, even the daughter’s bearing is dreadful, listlessly dragging herself along by her mother’s side, listlessly answers, “Yes, yes”—with side-long looks, listlessly saying, “Father has been dead for eighteen years now, and she will not stop, she will never get over it till she lies in her grave.”—Here Andreas becomes aware of how mysteriousness is the connection that rules between the moment and the year, even between the moment and life as a whole: how in a way a moment can devour a whole life (—something similar in the Countess’s fate).

  He hears her talking, interrupted by weeping; she means to drown herself. The daughter hard beyond her years. He begins to feel that the whole of existence rests on a healthy feeling of self-confidence, like Mount Kaf on an emerald. After all these imaginings, he feels inseparably united to Romana—in very truth her spouse.

  The scene where the daughter tries to drag her mother away to stop her making herself a nuisance to the stranger, saying to her mother, who is clinging to the stranger’s breast, the bitterest, most frigid truths. “That is a strange man. Chance, which he will curse, made him stop here for the night. He cares nothing about what has happened to you, he curses the place and your screams; they pierce his ears. His carriage will hardly have turned the corner when he will have forgotten you and me like the vermin in a dirty inn.”—Andreas’s feelings terribly torn, confronted by misery—absolutely infinite. He despises himself for every comfort he possesses—here the journal of the tour breaks off abruptly.

  He did not reflect on all these experiences in detail, yet they were all present in him; each one was in some way always there, his soul was like a quivering magnetic needle: all these things perpetually diverted it from its pole; he was empty and overburdened. His nature needed and longed for passion which, by carrying us away, relieves us of the burden of self.

  The house on the river, with the inconsolable widow, in all the rooms, outhouses, etc., encompasses him completely.—In her grief-worn face a sudden brightness, the eyes kind, the mouth pretty, the natural in its greatest truth and purity.—Question: whether the existence of his parents is not hell in disguise.

  Andreas roaming sadly about: these quite small details: picking up a twig, throwing it away with love, but gently, not far from him, still feels it as it lies there, licks blades of grass for joy.

  He has listened to the widow as no one has for a long time past: that is why she comes to him in the night, touches his breast—where, after such a long lapse of time, she feels a human response, something of him she has lost wakes and lives again.

  The evening, at supper: she walks up and down, raving of the dead man. The daughter says: “The wind is in the south.”—She takes the stranger’s hand “Oh take that—only that from me—that I did it of set purpose, with full knowledge. Do I not stand like a stone in the wall? It is on the point of collapsing, that is just why it must stand fast! Can you understand me? The lust of murder (imp of the perverse) is nothing compared to it. I did it out of frozen horror of the world”—(at once contradicts herself, accusing herself of devilish selfishness). Frightful pause, in which life, even movement, stands still, transfixed. The daughter pushes her away: “The gentleman’s supper is ready, leave him alone!”—how young the mother looks in her moments of greatest anguish.—The daughter: the priest dismisses her from the confessional for obdurate despair.

  Andreas: in a generally dull, a dispirited state of mind, certain subtleties, certain improbable, favourite associations, which his mind constantly pursues, which he feels to be reality itself, while he is never aware of the rest of life as unalloyed. He is thus visited by a sense of the actual that evening by the river where the mourning widow’s house stands. Then the strange adventure in the night when the half-mad woman kneels on his breast. Previously, he identifies himself with the dead man, imagines that that look came from his eyes. In bed, thinks intensely of Romana.

  Later, reversing the roles, he puts himself in the place of the wretched murderess, Romana in the place of the man. He is morbid enough to imagine the murder. All his mania of self-abasement converges on this point: he pictures to himself all that he has destroyed in Romana: he does not let her die completely, but live on, a joyless spirit—by this the richness of her life is just revealed to him—he feels bound to her as never before, the value of life dawns upon him—he is happy.—“By what are we moved—by what power—from what point?” he asks, and he is appalled by his ignorance of the power which is above all things.

  Constant elevation of the substance Romana by all that happens. He can only possess Romana when he believes her.

  In the widow’s house. At the window, at sunrise, clouds over the river. Profoundest experience: the presentiment of all love and no love in himself: the presentiment: Nothing can happen to me. I shall not be a loser in the end. Before, in stages, deepest temptations; his chief fear, to be cheated of the essential, of the substance of life.—To himself: “Whoever you are, religious or irreligious, child or father, you cannot be cast away, something sustains you.” He imagines he can comprehend this something. What he did not believe himself worthy of, what he did not believe possible, what he refused to believe himself capable of—in the past it seemed possible, in dreams it was unassailably his.—One thing above all he found toilsome—to attain to himself, and in this toil his nature was fulfilled.

  ANDREAS’ path: first to become capable of love, then to learn that body and spirit are one. He has suffered all the time from this dualism: now the one, now the other in himself, seemed worthless. Now he learns to feel, one behind the other, to feel the one always sustaining the other.

  How Romana comes to life in him: single traits, a smile as of a secret understanding with him. These moments, when she comes to life in him, always bring anxiety, which alternates with serenity. Once he thinks he sees Romana sitting on the Riva on a trunk: she is beginning to unpack. He does not dare to approach her.

  Chapter I, end: Andreas sitting on the bed. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for him to become, in the real sense of the word, the lover of the Spanish woman, of Zustina, or of Nina—anyone else could. Now, thinking of Romana, beautiful radiance: the walk. Four castles in the air in which he lives with each of the four.

  Episode of the tailor’s wife—at the same time, estrangement from the Knight. The wife of a tailor, who would like to be married to him. The little tailor humours her. Humble surroundings, full of backstairs gossip, about strangers in the town too. Offers to belong to him and to procure others for him: at the same time, immense respect for virtue. Quite primitive lower-class life, like the life of the people in ancient times. The tailor’s wife has sixteen brothers and sisters. Kindly eyes and a pretty mouth, accommodant, at the first meeting she treats him like a great gentleman, afterwards more as one of her own class. Her husband dies. The woman’s children: the grave boy, as he gazes at him, seeming to forget himself, the girl nestling up to him with a rather deceitful look.

  Here Andreas is, in a way, at home: with the Countess he feels as if he were not alive, but only dreaming; he wonders if he has ever lived. This life in the tailor’s house, which he mentions to nobody, makes him feel a liar and traitor.—During this time Andreas sits to Zorzi for his portrait, maliciously breaks off the sittings. To frighten him, Zorzi threatens him with intervention by the authorities. The catastrophe caused by the death of the husband, the children change towards him, their bitterness. Andreas reproaches himself: “Can I say that I am bound to anyone?”—He cannot bear the sight of the pictures in the churches, they humiliate him, the figures in them are so manifold. He is disgusted by his own capacity to understand everybody with his mind and his heart—even the spy Zorzi, an old hunchbacked messenger, and so on. He wants to confess this self-contempt to the Knight, but does not do so. The Knight realizes his state, sees in his changed, contemptuous way of speaking that he is at odds with himself.

  THE KNIGHT gives Andreas Ariosto to read on account of the wonderful “world�
�� that is his. He does not read Ariosto with an eighteenth-century mind. He understands what the Knight means when he says that there is no such thing as the past: everything that exists is present, more is born at the present moment (feeling when listening to Bach’s music).

  For Andreas, Fate is fulfilled in what is most individual—in what is most individual lies power. Nothing that is to work, magically is in any way vague or general, but most particular, most momentary. Love—illuminated by a sudden ridiculous fancy, an awkwardness, a hesitation, as well as by a gesture of courage, of freedom. The ordinary “I” an insignificant construction, a scarecrow.

  Andreas and the two women: “The nature of things is completely exhausted in opposition and intensification” (Goethe at eighty)—on the one hand, demands more of each every time—to what end? (Tact embodied in the bearing of the Knight)—on the other hand, sense of polarity; in each he loves the other with the most delicate, chaste love, and in this way learns to abandon the search for the absolute in the world.

  Andreas fears to become aware, in Maria or Mariquita, of the other being, and hence to lose the unique quality of the loved one. He is on the point of murdering Mariquita in order to save Maria for himself. (The temptations to which his weakness is here exposed—“learn to live!”)

  Andreas’s humble wish to be Mariquita’s husband. Gradual realization of the impossibility of the step: imagines letter to his parents announcing the plan.

  MARIA AND MARIQUITA.—Novalis: “all evil is isolated and isolating, it is the principle of separation”—by union, separation is abolished and not abolished, but wickedness (evil) as apparent separation and conjunction is actually abolished by true separation and union, which only exist in reciprocity.