Hugo von Hofmannsthal
The Letter of Lord Chandos
THIS is the letter Philip,
Lord Chandos, younger son of the Earl of Bath, wrote to Francis Bacon, later
Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, apologizing for his complete abandonment of
literary activity.
IT IS kind of you, my
esteemed friend, to condone my two years of silence and to write to me thus. It
is
more than kind of you to give
to your solicitude about me, to your perplexity at what appears to you as
mental stagnation, the expression of lightness and jest which only great men,
convinced of the perilousness of life yet not discouraged by it, can master.
You conclude with the
aphorism of Hippocrates, "Qui gravi morbo correpti dolores non sentiunt,
us mens aegrotat" (Those who do not perceive that they are wasted by serious
illness are sick in mind), and suggest that I am in need of medicine not only
to conquer my malady, but even more, to sharpen my senses for the condition of
my inner self. I would fain give you an answer such as you deserve, fain reveal
myself to you entirely, but I do not know how to set about it. Hardly do I know
whether I am still the same person to whom your precious letter is addressed.
Was it I who, now six-and-twenty, at nineteen wrote The New Paris, The Dream
of Daphne, Epithalamium, those pastorals reeling under the splendour of
their words-plays which a divine Queen and several overindulgent lords and
gentlemen are gracious enough still to remember? And again, was it I who, at
three-and-twenty, beneath the stone arcades of the great Venetian piazza, found
in myself that structure of Latin prose whose plan and order delighted me more
than did the monuments of Palladio and Sansovino rising out of the sea? And
could I, if otherwise I am still the same person, have lost from my inner
inscrutable self all traces and scars of this creation of my most intensive
thinking-lost them so completely that in your letter now lying before me the
title of my short treatise stares at me strange and cold? I could not even
comprehend, at first, what the familiar picture meant, but had to study it word
by word, as though these Latin terms thus strung together were meeting my eye
for the first time. But I am, after all, that person, and there is rhetoric in
these questions-rhetoric which is good for women or for the House of Commons,
whose power, however, so overrated by our time, is not sufficient to penetrate
into the core of things. But it is my inner self that I feel bound to reveal to
you-a peculiarity, a vice, a disease of my mind, if you like-if you are to
understand that an abyss equally unbridgeable separates me from the literary
works lying seemingly ahead of me as from those behind me: the latter having
become so strange to me that I hesitate to call them my property.
I know not whether to admire
more the urgency of your benevolence or the unbelievable sharpness of your
memory, when you recall to me the various little projects I entertained during
those days of rare enthusiasm which we shared together. True, I did plan to
describe the first years of the reign of our glorious sovereign, the late Henry
VIII. The papers bequeathed to me by my grandfather, the Duke of Exeter,
concerning his negotiations with France and Portugal, offered me some
foundation. And out of Sallust, in those happy, stimulating days, there flowed
into me as though through never~ongested conduits the realization of form-that
deep, true, inner form which can be sensed only beyond the domain of rhetorical
tricks: that form of which one can no longer say that it organizes
subject-matter, for it penetrates it, dissolves it, creating at once both
dream and reality, an interplay of eternal forces, something as marvellous as
music or algebra. This was my most treasured plan.
But what is man that he
should make plans!
I also toyed with other
schemes. These, too, your kind letter conjures up. Each one, bloated with a
drop of my blood, dances before me like a weary gnat against a sombre wall
whereon the bright sun of halcyon days no longer lies.
I wanted to decipher the
fables, the mythical tales bequeathed to us by the Ancients, in which painters
and sculptors found an endless and thoughtless pleasure decipher them as the
hieroglyphs of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom whose breath I sometimes seemed
to feel as though from behind a veil.
I well remember this plan. It
was founded on I know not what sensual and spiritual desire: as the hunted hart
craves water, so I craved to enter these naked, glistening bodies, these sirens
and dryads, this Narcissus and Proteus, Perseus and Actaeon. I longed to
disappear in them and talk out of them with tongues. And I longed for more. I
planned to start an Apophthegmata, like that composed by Julius Caesar:
you will remember that Cicero
mentions it in a letter. In it I thought of setting side by side the most
memorable sayings which-while associating with the learned men and witty women
of our time, with unusual people from among the simple folk or with erudite
and distinguished personages I had managed to collect during my travels. With
these I meant to combine the brilliant maxims and reflections from classical
and Italian works, and anything else of intellectual adornment that appealed to
me in books, in manuscripts or conversations; the arrangement, moreover, of
particularly beautiful festivals and pageants, strange crimes and cases of
madness, descriptions of the greatest and most characteristic architectural
monuments in the Netherlands, in France and Italy; and many other things. The
whole work was to have been entitled Nosce te ipsum.
To sum up: In those days I,
in a state of continuous intoxication, conceived the whole of existence as one
great unit: the spiritual and physical worlds seemed to form no contrast, as
little as did courtly and bestial conduct, art and barbarism, solitude and
society; in everything I felt the presence of Nature, in the aberrations of
insanity as much as in the utmost refinement of the Spanish ceremonial; in the
boorishness of young peasants no less than in the most delicate of allegories;
and in all expressions of Nature I felt my-self. When in my hunting lodge I
drank the warm foaming milk which an unkempt wench had drained into a wooden
pail from the udder of a beautiful gentle~yed cow, the sensation was no
different from that which I experienced when, seated on a bench built into the
window of my study, my mind absorbed the sweet and foaming nourishment from a
book. The one was like the other: neither was superior to the other, whether in
dreamlike celestial quality or in physical intensity-and thus it prevailed
through the whole expanse of life in all directions; everywhere I was in the
centre of it, never suspecting mere appearance: at other times I divined that
all was allegory and that each creature was a key to all the others; and I felt
myself the one capable of seizing each by the handle and unlocking as many of
the others as were ready to yield. This explains the title which I had intended
to give to this encyclopedic book.
To a person susceptible to
such ideas, it might appear a well-designed plan of divine Providence that my
mind should fall from such a state of inflated arrogance into this extreme of
despondency and feebleness which is now the permanent condition of my inner
self. Such religious ideas, however, have no power over me: they belong to the
cobwebs through which my thoughts dart out into the void, while the thoughts of
so many others are caught there and come to rest. To me the mysteries of faith
have been condensed into a lofty allegory which arches itself over the fields of
my life like a radiant rainbow, ever remote, ever prepared to recede should it
occur to me to rush toward it and wrap myself into the folds of its mantle.
But, my dear friend, worldly
ideas also evade me in a like manner. How shall I try to describe to you these
strange spiritual torments, this rebounding of the fruit-branches above my
outstretched hands, this recession of the murmuring stream from my thirsting
lips?
My case, in short, is this: I
have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently.
At first I grew by degrees
incapable of discussing a loftier or more general subject in terms of which
everyone, fluently and without hesitation, is wont to avail himself. I
experienced an inexplicable distaste for so much as uttering the words spirit,
soul, or body. I found it impossible to express an opinion on the
affairs at Court, the events in Parliament, or whatever you wish. This was not
motivated by any form of personal deference (for you know that my candour
borders on imprudence), but because the abstract terms of which the tongue must
avail itself as a matter of course in order to voice a judgment-these terms
crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi. Thus, one day, while reprimanding my
four-year-old daughter, Katherina Pompilia, for a childish lie of which she had
been guilty and demonstrating to her the necessity of always being truthful,
the ideas streaming into my mind suddenly took on such iridescent colouring,
so flowed over into one another, that I reeled off the sentence as best I
could, as if suddenly overcome by illness. Actually, I did feel myself growing
pale, and with a violent pressure on my forehead I left the child to herself,
slammed the door behind me, and began to recover to some extent only after a
brief gallop over the lonely pasture.
Gradually, however, these
attacks of anguish spread like a corroding rust. Even in familiar and humdrum
conversation all the opinions which are generally expressed with ease and
sleep-walking assurance became so doubtful that I had to cease altogether
taking part in such talk. It filled me with an inexplicable anger, which I
could conceal only with effort, to hear such things as: This affair has turned
out well or ill for this or that person; Sheriff N. is a bad, Parson T. a good
man; Farmer M. is to be pitied, his sons are wasters; another is to be envied
because his daughters are thrifty; one family is rising in the world, another
is on the downward path. All this seemed as indemonstrable, as mendacious and
hollow as could be. My mind compelled me to view all things occurring in such
conversations from an uncanny closeness. As once, through a magnifying glass, I
had seen a piece of skin on my little finger look like a field full of holes
and furrows, so I now perceived human beings and their actions. I no longer succeeded
in comprehending them with the simplifying eye of habit. For me everything
disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would
anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me;
they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to
stare back-whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into
the void.
I tried to rescue myself from
this plight by seeking refuge in the spiritual world of the Ancients. Plato I
avoided, for I dreaded the perilousness of his imagination. Of them all, I intended
to concentrate on Seneca and Cicero. Through the harmony of their clearly
defined and orderly ideas I hoped to regain my health. But I was unable to find
my way to them. These ideas, I understood them well: I saw their wonderful
interplay rise before me like magnificent fountains upon which played golden
balls. I could hover around them and watch how they played, one with the other;
but they were concerned only with each other, and the most prof6und, most
personal quality of my thinking remained excluded from this magic circle. In
their company I was overcome by a terrible sense of loneliness; I felt like
someone locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues. So once more I
escaped into the open.
Since that time I have been
leading an existence which I fear you can hardly imagine, so lacking in spirit
and thought is its flow: an existence which, it is true, differs little from
that of my neighbours, my relations, and most of the landowning nobility of
this kingdom, and which is not utterly bereft of gay and stimulating moments.
It is not easy for me to indicate wherein these good moments subsist; once
again words desert me. For it is, indeed, something entirely unnamed, even
barely nameable which, at such moments, reveals itself to me, filling like a
vessel any casual object of my daily surroundings with an overflowing flood of
higher life. I cannot expect you to understand me without examples, and I must
plead your indulgence for their absurdity. A pitcher, a harrow abandoned in a
field, a dog in the sun, a neglected cemetery, a cripple, a peasant's hut-all
these can become the vessel of my revelation. Each of these objects and a thousand
others similar, over which the eye usually glides with a natural indifference,
can suddenly, at any moment (which I am utterly powerless to evoke), assume
for me a character so exalted and moving that words seem too poor to describe
it. Even the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can acquire the
mysterious function of being filled to the brim with this silent but suddenly
rising flood of divine sensation. Recently, for instance, I had given the order
for a copious supply of rat-poison to be scattered in the milk cellars of one
of my dairy-farms. Towards evening I had gone off for a ride and, as you can
imagine, thought no more about it. As I was trotting along over the
freshly-ploughed land, nothing more alarming in sight than a scared covey of
quail and, in the distance, the great sun sinking over the undulating fields,
there suddenly loomed up before me the vision of that cellar, resounding with
the death-struggle of a mob of rats. I felt everything within me: the cool,
musty air of the cellar filled with the sweet and pungent reek of poison, and
the yelling of the death cries breaking against the mouldering walls; the vain
convulsions of those convoluted bodies as they tear about in confusion and
despair; their frenzied search for escape, and the grimace of icy rage when a
couple collide with one another at a blocked-up crevice. But why seek again
for words which I have foresworn! You remember, my friend, the wonderful
description in Livy of the hours preceding the destruction of Alba Longa: when
the crowds stray aimlessly through the streets which they are to see no more .
. . when they bid farewell to the stones beneath their feet. I assure you, my
friend, I carried this vision within me, and the vision of burning Carthage,
too; but there was more, something more divine, more bestial; and it was the
Present, the fullest, most exalted Present. There was a mother, surrounded by
her young in their agony of death; but her gaze was cast neither toward the
dying nor upon the merciless walls of stone, but into the void, or through the
void into Infinity, accompanying this gaze with a gnashing of teeth!-A slave
struck with helpless terror standing near the petrifying Niobe must have experienced
what I experienced when, within me, the soul of this animal bared its teeth to
its monstrous fate.
Forgive this description, but
do not think that it was pity I felt. For if you did, my example would have
been poorly chosen. It was far more and far less than pity: an immense
sympathy, a flowing over into these creatures, or a feeling that an aura of
life and death, of dream and wakefulness, had flowed for a moment into them-but
whence? For what had it to do with pity, or with any comprehensible
concatenation of human thought when, on another evening, on finding beneath a
nut-tree a half-filled pitcher which a gardener boy had left there, and the
pitcher and the water in it, darkened by the shadow of the tree, and a beetle
swimming on the surface from shore to shor~when this combination of trifles
sent through me such a shudder at the presence of the Infinite, a shudder
running from the roots of my hair to the marrow of mv heels? What was it that
made me want to break into words which, I know, were I to find them, would
force to their knees those cherubim in whom I do not believe? What made me turn
silently away from this place? Even now, after weeks, catching sight of that
nut-tree, I pass it by with a shy sidelong glance, for I am loath to dispel the
memory of the miracle hovering there round the trunk, loath to scare away the
celestial shudders that still linger about the shrubbery in this neighbourhood!
In these moments an insignificant creature-a dog, a rat, a beetle, a crippled
apple tree, a lane winding over the hill, a moss-covered stone, mean more to me
than the most beautiful, abandoned mistress of the happiest night. These
mute and, on occasion, inanimate creatures rise toward me with such an
abundance, such a presence of love, that my enchanted eye can find nothing in
sight void of life. Everything that exists, everything I can remember,
everything touched upon by my confused thoughts, has a meaning. Even my own
heaviness, the general torpor of my brain, seems to acquire a meaning; I
experience in and around me a blissful, never-ending interplay, and among the
objects playing against one another there is not one into which I cannot flow.
To me, then, it is as though my body consists of nought but ciphers which give
me the key to everything; or as if we could enter into a new and hopeful
relationship with the whole of existence if only we begin to think with the
heart. As soon, however, as this strange enchantment falls from me, I find
myself confused; wherein this harmony transcending me and the entire world
consisted, and how it made itself known to me, I could present in sensible
words as little as I could say anything precise about the inner movements of
my intestines or a congestion of my blood.
Apart from these strange
occurrences, which, incidentally, I hardly know whether to ascribe to the mind
or the body, I live a life of barely believable vacuity, and have difficulties
in concealing from my wife this inner stagnation, and from my servants the
indifference wherewith I contemplate the affairs of my estates. The good and
strict education which I owe to my late father and the early habit of leaving
no hour of the day unused are the only things, it seems to me, which help me
maintain towards the outer world the stability and the dignified appearance
appropriate to my class and my person.
I am rebuilding a wing of my
house and am capable of conversing occasionally with the architect concerning
the progress of his work; I administer my estates, and my tenants and employees
may find me, perhaps, somewhat more taciturn but no less benevolent than of
yore. None of them, standing with doffed cap before the door of his house while
I ride by of an evening, will have any idea that my glance, which he is wont
respectfully to catch, glides with longing over the rickety boards under which
he searches for earthworms for fishing-bait; that it plunges through the
latticed window into the stuffy chamber where, in a corner, the low bed with
its chequered linen seems forever to be waiting for someone to die or another
to be born; that my eye lingers long upon the ugly puppies or upon a cat
stealing stealthily among the flower-pots; and that it seeks among all the poor
and clumsy objects of a peasant's life for the one whose insignificant form,
whose unnoticed being, whose mute existence, can become the source of that
mysterious, wordless, and boundless ecstasy. For my unnamed blissful feeling is
sooner brought about by a distant lonely shepherd's fire than by the vision of
a starry sky, sooner by the chirping of the last dying cricket when the autumn
wind chases wintry clouds across the deserted fields than by the majestic
booming of an organ. And in my mind I compare myself from time to time with the
orator Crassus, of whom it is reported that he grew so excessively enamoured of
a tame lamprey-a dumb, apathetic, red-eyed fish in his ornamental pond-that it
became the talk of the town; and when one day in the Senate Domitius reproached
him for having shed tears over the death of this fish, attempting thereby to
make him appear a fool, Crassus answered, "Thus have I done over the death
of my fish as you have over the death of neither your first nor your second
wife."
I know not how oft this
Crassus with his lamprey enters mv mind as a mirrored image of my Self,
reflected across the abyss of centuries. But not on account of the answer he
gave Domitius. The answer brought the laughs on his side, and the whole affair
turned into a jest. I, however, am deeply affected by the affair, which would
have remained the same even had Domitius shed bitter tears of sorrow over his wives.
For there would still have been Crassus, shedding tears over his lamprey. And
about this figure, utterly ridiculous and contemptible in the midst of a
world-governing senate discussing the most serious subjects, I feel compelled
by a mysterious power to reflect in a manner which, the moment I attempt to
express it in words, strikes me as supremely foolish.
Now and then at night the
image of this Crassus is in my brain, like a splinter round which everything
festers, throbs, and boils. It is then that I feel as though I myself were
about to ferment, to effervesce, to foam and to sparkle. And the whole thing is
a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more immediate, more
liquid, more glowing than words. It, too, forms whirlpools, but of a sort that
do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of language, into the abyss, but into
myself and into the deepest womb of peace.
I have troubled you
excessively, my dear friend, with this extended description of an inexplicable
condition which is wont, as a rule, to remain locked up in me.
You were kind enough to
express your dissatisfaction that no book written by me reaches you any more,
"to compensate for the loss of our relationship." Reading that, I
felt, with a certainty not entirely bereft of a feeling of sorrow, that neither
in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life
shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin: and this for an odd and
embarrassing reason which I must leave to the boundless superiority of your
mind to place in the realm of physical and spiritual values spread out harmoniously
before your unprejudiced eye: to wit, because the language in which I might be
able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither
Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me,
a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day
have to justify myself before an unknown judge.
Fain had I the power to
compress in this, presumably my last, letter to Francis Bacon all the love and
gratitude, all the unmeasured admiration, which I harbour in my heart for the
greatest benefactor of my mind, for the foremost Englishman of my day, and
which I shall harbour therein until death break it asunder.
This 22 August, A.D. 1603
PHI. CHANDOS