13. Modern Poetry II

M. E. delle Grazie

The principle of modern naturalism is to depict people and their fates as they are. With this aesthetic commonplace, many a so-called critic believes himself justified today when he brazenly praises literary products that are only capable of being given a temporary illusory grandeur by the savagery of our times. At present, a "love drama" is being performed daily in a large theater in Berlin, which is nothing more than a few excellent lyrical scenes set in a dramatic plot that is actually stupid and which is also carried by a stupid person. "Youth" is the name of the thing, it could also be called "imbecility". Because an imbecile ensures the continuation of the constantly faltering plot, the same imbecile brings about the conflict and the catastrophe. Fate itself has become imbecile in this drama, because it becomes reality in the person of an imbecile. I am well aware that there will be "very clever" people who will say to me: I just didn't understand the whole thing in its poignant tragedy, in its character copied from reality. But I also know that today people make judgments about the real character of artistic creations whose eye for real conditions barely exceeds the length of their nose tenfold. Every philistine who has acquired a few aesthetic phrases and who sees nothing more in every human being and every human destiny than the imprint of the template that his dozen brains have turned, speaks today of "figures and relationships copied from reality". I have often heard it said that the old and young pastors in Max Halbe's "Youth" are portrayed entirely in accordance with real life. I have only been able to see that Mr. Halbe has portrayed two clergymen, as the assessor X and the grammar school teacher Y portray themselves. That is why I am not surprised when Assessor X and secondary school teacher Y take pleasure in the "youth". Of course, they only do so if they are "exceptional people" for whom moral indignation is a reactionary prejudice. Overcoming moral indignation is pretty much the only thing that modern naturalistic philistinism can achieve. "Modernism" does not get beyond this abc.

The fact that there are moving forces in the human soul and in the social organism that derive their origin from things other than tickled nerves, that there is a truth that does not have its regulators on the surface of the body: Messrs Bahr and Hartleben, etc., etc., know very little about this. I am bored when a "poet" presents me with people in three acts who would not interest me for a moment in life.

That's why I perk up when, amidst the dull chatter of modern authors, I see a work of art in which a whole person introduces me to people and circumstances that only those whose eyes are not clouded by a slavish attachment to the everyday can see through. And such works of art are the two stories by M. E. delle Grazie that I want to talk about here. Delle Grazie does not portray people as if someone were walking around them, taking pictures of them, but creates figures in such a way that we see the individual soul forces that determine their lives. "The Rebel" is the title of the first story. It centers on a Hungarian gypsy from the Tisza region, where no Western European culture has made people's brains so rigid that we can pretty much guess their character from their title and office. Of course, Lajos the Gypsy did not earn a doctorate in philosophy, but neither did school, his time in office, social chatter and philistine reading determine his feelings and thoughts. And Lajos has risen to the heights of humanity; he has acquired a view of life that is capable of making [him] recognize existence in its true form, that makes him a wise man among fools and that allows [him] to see the truth where others only worship hypocritical masks. Lajos is a personality who has been cheated of his happiness by the world, but who is strong enough to do without this happiness, which he could only have owed to lies. Lajos loved a girl, the natural daughter of a count. A nobleman tries to steal his beloved away from him. She leaves the poor gypsy for the sake of the nobleman's seducer. The gypsy is seized by an almost infinite feeling of revenge against the latter. He seeks out all the places where he suspects the robber of his fortune in order to kill him. He searches in vain for a long time, but finally finds him sleeping by the road, his shotgun beside him. It would be easy to kill the enemy with his own weapon. At that moment, Lajos' revenge turns to contempt; he finds that the wretch's life is not worth being destroyed by him.

Lajos describes the feelings that seized him at the moment when his opponent's life was in his power with the words: "He turned pale to the lips, his knees trembled as if he had caught the Danube fever, and suddenly he pulled down his hat and saluted me deeply ... and smiled like a fool ... Then I felt so well, so well, I tell you, for now I knew that one could do even worse to one's enemy than murder him, and that my torment was over, because I could no longer hate the one standing before me; it came into my throat like disgust - I spat out against him, threw the shotgun back into the reeds, took my fiddle and left ..." And then he says of the man he has humiliated: "Wherever he can, he rants at me to the people, and would love to set the pandurs and the magistrate on my neck, but he can't say anything right against me, and he won't even say that he was too bad to kill me! But he is like air to me; even if I have to breathe it in, I can always give it back - there! That's how indifferent he is to me!" The experience with the nobleman became a source of great insight for Lajos. He realized how to look at the world without hate and love. "What happened to my love, what happened to my hatred?" he says. "It's all over, and back then I thought I was going to die! Anyone who has experienced something like this in himself becomes calm and cannot do wrong even to his enemy!" "If I have bad eyesight and bump my head on a post - is it the post's fault or mine? The post is there and has its right, and I am there and would also have my right if my eyes weren't bad - I could avoid it, couldn't I? And if I could like a good-for-nothing and hate a scoundrel, wasn't I just so blind? They weren't, and that's why I had to bang my heart and skull against them like the post! But who am I to believe when I can deceive myself like that, when every man is twice: as he was born and as I think he is? And do I know what I am like? Many people avoid me - they do me no harm, but they want to do me even less good!

Why is that? Have I done something wrong? Well, they're right too! I think to myself, because everyone who lives only wants themselves, even if they think they like someone else so much!" These are words of wisdom that only a life to which existence has revealed itself without veil can give birth to. There are two ways of speaking such words. On the one hand, they appear to us like distilled products from the retort of scholarship: ethereal, fleeting, abstract, as pure thoughts. At other times they approach us like fate itself, which is embodied in language. Then they are not merely expressed thoughts, but forces that act on us like life itself. And then we feel towards the one who expresses them, as delle Grazie describes the tramp: "His simple figure gradually grew into the infinite for me, and he strode over my native earth like a shadow of the one who taught thousands of years ago in distant India what the tramp only felt darkly and expressed unclearly: "From life is born suffering, from suffering is born fear; he who is redeemed from life knows no suffering - where would fear come from?" People call Lajos a "rebel" because he despises them. And the nobleman says of him: "He is capable of anything." But these words mean nothing more than that the nobleman is incapable of recognizing how the poor gypsy's independent soul can express itself. For him, it is an element that is moved by forces that work from depths of which the average brain has no idea. The unknown, the dark forces in the gypsy's head and heart fill the nobleman with a feeling of dread. He only feels safe with people who, like himself, have inherited their character from their forefathers, or with those who have had their sense of slavery beaten out of them. Aesthetes of experience and slaves to facts will deny me the right to say: I find this gypsy drawn with deep psychological truth. For I will be honest and confess that I have never met a gypsy of this kind. But you don't need to have met a real-life original for every artistic education in order to form an opinion about the truth of the depiction. You only need to have an eye for what is possible in life. The gypsy in delle Grazie's story is true to life, which is possible in every course. In this work in particular, the artist proves herself to be a fine connoisseur of secret soul moods. No idea of the nature of the "gypsy" type obscures her ability to characterize an individuality that is quite unique and different from any other. Anyone who raises the question in the face of this characterization: can a Gypsy be like this, is incapable of understanding the narrative. Only those who have discovered the secret of individuality can characterize it. It is a completely empty saying of people without any artistic sensibility: the great poet does not portray individuals, but "types". In life, too, a person only begins to interest us when he ceases to be a type. A person who is only portrayed according to his typical characteristics is not much more than a puppet. What the real artist depicts is always the individual. But most people's imagination fails where the individual in the other person confronts them. That is why the far too many do not feel the "uniqueness" of genuine fantasy creations at all.

Two other "rebels" stand opposite the gypsy, the rebel of thought and feeling, in delle Grazie's story: Istvän, the former political rebel and hero of freedom, who, at the side of his "practical" Susi, has risen to the much-admired heights of the "real politician", and Bändi, whose rebel soul unleashes itself in the wildest curses, but without the revolutionary fire in his chest preventing him for the time being from serving as a coachman for the nobleman, whom he would like to sic all the devils on. The last two "rebels" are put up with by the society of comfort-seekers, for the Istväns are harmless if their Susis have the opportunity to put on fat comfortably, and the Bändis may grumble, but they make useful beasts of burden. These rebels are not feared, as they integrate themselves into society, albeit reluctantly; but the rebels of the Lajos type are shunned like a mountain that has once acted as a volcano and then closed again. One fears a new eruption at any moment. The average people have no idea that the fire materials pushing outwards have turned into precious substances on the inside.

The second story, "Bozi", is satirical. The subject matter is taken from that part of Hungary where people, buffaloes, pigs and chair judges live so close to each other, are eternally in each other's way and yet cannot leave each other alone; this milieu, which unites the fatalism of half-Asia with Christian beliefs and Turkish legal practice with the theories of the corpus juris and the tripartium so peacefully and unchallenged! "Bozi" is a buffalo. But a very special kind of buffalo. Not a herd buffalo, but a master buffalo. He does not conform to the rules that God and the people in his habitat have given to the buffalo; he leaves his home when he pleases in order to spread fear and terror among the people. He particularly likes it when he can appear among a large crowd of people on festive occasions and wreak havoc. However, he had to pay for such an undertaking with his freedom. He was kept behind strictly locked doors and was only allowed outside at night when people were asleep. But this made things even worse. For if he had previously filled people with horror as a buffalo, now he was a... Devil. Because anyone who encountered the animal at night thought it was the prince of hell incarnate. The "enlightened" village doctor, who owns Meyer's Dictionary of Conversations and can look everything up in it, was no more protected from this by his scientific education than Mr. du Prel was protected from spiritualism by his philosophical education. The good doctor believes for so long that it was a "supernatural" being that attacked him at night, until his coat, which he lost while fleeing from the ghost, is brought to him and he is told that the buffalo has brought home the protective wrapping wrapped around his horns. Another time, part of the village community, led by the mayor and the churchwarden with the holy water at his side, go out because the "devil" has appeared again and even taken one of the village residents. The devil is to be fought. The whole village community can't do anything because they tremble with terror when they come to the place where the "evil one" is raging; only one foolish man, who is also there and believes in neither God nor the devil, sees what is really there - the buffalo, strikes at it and wounds it. The others go away with long noses.

The story is written with the kind of humor that testifies not only to a complete mastery of the art medium, but also to a firm world view. Hypocritical religiosity, undigested enlightenment, the modern superstition of the "clever people" is hit and exposed in this short story. We are dealing with an artist who hits the mark with the arrows of mockery because she has a sure and sharp eye for the targets she is aiming for.