Messages from a Lost World

by Stefan Zweig

  What has such a man achieved? Take the external. He has, should he be a musician, selected a jumble of notes from the tonal range and grouped them in a particular way to bring forth a melody which has the gift of emotionally resonating with hundreds of thousands of listeners, for ever stirring the souls of millions across the most distant continents. If he is a painter, then with the aid of the seven colours of the spectrum and the alternation of light and shade he creates a painting which, once we have gazed on it, is projected deep into our soul. If he is a poet, he has taken a few hundred words of the 50,000 or 100,000 of which our language is composed, and assembled them in such a way that they constitute an immortal poem. Or if he is a dramatist, a teller through forms, he has created characters who seem so familiar to us that they might as well be brother or friend, people who—like him—possess the divine power to outlast time. Through this external act he has turned the law of nature on its head: he has forged a substance that defies death. Out of a sound in the air he has formed something that moves us deeply, something far more lasting than the wood or stone of this house. In him lies the imperishable and—we can state it with confidence—the divine is revealed through the earthly.

  Yet by what means has this solitary being accomplished this marvel? By what means has he and only he among the millions of men, using the same materials available to all, language, colour, sound, created his work of art? What is this secret force with which he is endowed? How does the genuine artist create? How can such a miracle still emerge in a godless world?

  I believe all of us have at one time or another asked ourselves this question, either standing before the canvas of an old master, or when a line of poetry touches the deepest recess of our soul, or on listening enrapt to a symphony by Mozart or Beethoven. I think everyone has asked himself or herself with awed astonishment, and precisely because of this astonishment, how a single individual could produce this superhuman work. And I would even venture to say that whoever stands before a work of art and does not pose these questions, does not wonder at their secret configuration, has no meaningful relationship with art and never will have. It is the finest element of our human heart to be touched by the greatness and mysteriousness of these works and it is the finest element of the human spirit to unravel this mystery. Whosoever seeks a relationship proper with these works should do so with a double feeling. He must first humbly acknowledge that they exist beyond his own faculty, beyond ephemeral life. But at the same time he must strive with vigorous thought to grasp how this divine inner spark can occur in our earthly domain. He must seek to comprehend the incomprehensible.

  Is this possible? Are we really able to monitor the events which precede the birth of a masterpiece? Can we really witness its procreation, its birth? To that I can answer categorically: no. The conception of a work of art is purely an interior process. In every case it remains individual, as enveloped in shadows as the creation of our world—an unobservable phenomenon, an enigma. The only thing we can do is retroactively to reconstruct it, and this only up to a point. But in the end we can only take a step nearer the perplexing labyrinth. We cannot explain the mystery of creation itself, any more than we can explain the phenomena of electricity, gravity and magnetism, contenting ourselves with the establishment of a handful of basic laws. In our search we must conserve the greatest humility and be ever conscious that the act in question occurs in a space inaccessible to us. Even with the most powerful harnessing of our imagination and logic we can only bring to mind the shadowy image of this process, but it is only an image. We are not permitted to witness the artist at the moment of his creation, but we can try to be in at the afterlife.

  To reconstruct this mysterious phenomenon I shall employ a method which at first sight does not seem sympathetic: that of criminology, the practice of which in the last 100 years has developed into a new scientific discipline. In criminology, one must deal with a severe deed or misdeed, murder, thievery; but here on the other hand we are dealing with the noblest acts, the greatest of which humanity is capable. But in essence the task is the same: to illuminate what is hidden, the incident, to reconstruct it precisely using sophisticated and proven methods.

  So what is the ideal case in criminology? It is when the guilty party—the murderer or thief—stands before the court and explains for what reasons and in what manner, at what moment and in what location, he committed his act. Through such a spontaneous avowal, the police and magistrates are relieved of all effort. In the same way, in our study, the ideal case would be that where the creator himself articulates the whole process, divulging his technique and enabling understanding of that which is incomprehensible to us. If in doing so the poet were explaining how he writes, the musician how he composes and how for each work the inspiration came to him, how the creative idea took form, then that would make all our research superfluous.

  But we find ourselves before that strange phenomenon of creators, whether they be poets, musicians or painters, as much as hardened criminals, who are not able to make any definitive statement on that intimate first moment of creation. It is this that Edgar Allan Poe remarks on regarding the evolution of his poem ‘The Raven’, when he says: “I have often thought how interesting an article might be, written by any author, who would—that is to say, who could—detail, step by step, the process by which any one of his compositions attained the ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has not been given to the world, I am at a loss to say.”

  So I ask, if it is not too immodest a question in the case of these great poets, why do we have so few representations by them on the process of their creation? The stock answer given is that they simply did not provide any. The fact that we have so few seems really surprising. For in what consists the gift of a poet or a writer if it is not to tell, to explain? Each journey, each adventure, each inward convulsion is transmitted to us through their books with marvellous forcefulness. It would seem natural then that as a consequence they might furnish precise information, something clear, concerning the way in which inspiration came to them, the rapture and suffering which enabled their labour of creation. Indiscretion, loss of the self, even renunciation of the most intimate being—what the poet professes to undergo—is what makes any first-hand explanation, any declaration of these mysterious states of the soul so vital to us. But if artists speak so little about their moments of inspiration, the reason is that when they are in that moment they are not conscious of the process that is evolving within them; that during the actual creative labour they find it difficult to spy on themselves in any psychological sense, to look over their shoulder while writing. To remain with our criminology example, the artist then resembles the murderer; after having acted in a state of febrile passion, he faithfully states to the magistrate or prosecutor who cross-examines him: “I have no idea why I did it, nor do I remember how I did it. I was not in my right mind.”

  I know that this non-presence of the artist at the moment of creation does not seem at first sight entirely logical. But let us reflect a moment. In reality, creation is only possible in a particular state of advancing-beyond-self, a state of ecstasy, a Greek word which, translated literally, signifies nothing more than “to be outside of oneself”.

  But if the artist really is outside of himself, where is he then? He is in his work, his melodies, his characters, his visions. Whilst creating—and this explains why he cannot be a witness—he is no longer in our world, but in his. The poet who in a moment of inspiration draws on his memories of a landscape on a spring day, of meadow, sky, tree, field, is not at that moment in his room, within four walls, for now he sees the greenery, breathes the air, hears the wind that sighs over the grass. At the moment when he enters Othello, Shakespeare leaves his own body, his real soul, to penetrate that of an Othello seething with envy. Whilst the artist in that instant of extreme concentration is with all his senses in the other, occupying the body of another, absorbed in his work, he is as if closed to all competing impressions from the outside world. To mak
e this state somewhat clearer, I will recall a classic example we learnt at school. At the taking of Syracuse, the ramparts long breached, soldiers were engaged in plundering the town. One of them broke into the house of Archimedes and found him in the garden, absorbed in drawing geometric figures in the sand with a stick. As the soldier advanced towards him sword in hand, Archimedes, deeply engrossed in his work, said without turning around: “Do not disturb my circles.” In that divine state of intense concentration he only saw one thing: that someone was going to mess up the figures he had traced. He did not even know it was the foot of a soldier, that enemy forces were in the city, he had not heard the thunderous crash of the battering rams, nor the cries of the fleeing and murdered, nor the jubilation of trumpets. In this moment of creation he was no longer in Syracuse, but in his work. Or let us take another example, from the modern era. A friend pays a visit to Balzac, who appears in state of emotion, tears in his eyes, and welcomes him by announcing the death of the Duchess of Langeais. The visitor is taken aback. He does not know the Duchess of Langeais, or anyone in Paris by that name. But Balzac created this character, whose death he had just described in his book; the artist was so embedded in his visionary world that he had not yet returned to the real one, and it was only on seeing the look of surprise on his friend’s face that he came to his senses.

  Perhaps these two examples suffice to demonstrate the extraordinary state of complete inner concentration that must accompany any creative act. The true artist is then as occupied by his creation as the believer by his prayer, the dreamer by his dream. As a result, in contemplating the internal, he is unable to see clearly the external, or himself. This is why artists, poets, painters, musicians are incapable, whilst they are creating, of observing themselves, still less of explaining themselves, or by what manner they have produced the work. They are bad witnesses, useless witnesses for the creation courtroom, and, like incautious criminologists, it would be a mistake on our part to rely blindly on their testimony.

  What do the police do when the leading witnesses are inadequate or their testimony is flaky? They welcome all information they can find from other sources—and that is what we too must do when we question our contemporaries—for ultimately, to learn anything properly one must visit the scene of the crime, reconstruct it from traces left behind. Let us attempt to do the same.

  But where is it then, this place of artistic creation? It does not exist, you will claim. Creation is an invisible process, born of the primary word inspiration—inspiratio—which shows clearly that it acts like a breath or afflatus, that is to say a purely immaterial phenomenon, one which cannot be registered with eyes or ears, or touch. That is true up to a point. But we live in a terrestrial world and we are people who can only grasp anything with the senses we have at our disposal. For us a flower is not yet a flower when it is enclosed, germinating as a seed in the soil, but only when it evolves into form and colour; a butterfly is only a butterfly when from a caterpillar in a chrysalis it transforms into a winged miracle. For us a melody is only such when we hear it and not when it is heard for the first time in the brain of a musician; a painting is only a painting when it is visible; a thought is only a thought when it is expressed; a form is only a form when it is realized. To pass from the soul of an artist into our life, inspiration is obliged on every occasion to take earthly form, one perceptible to our senses. It must, if I can dare to express it in such a way, pass through a material medium. Even the most sublime poem must, in order to reach us, be rendered with the aid of a material object, pen or pencil, be expressed upon a material object, written on paper or painted with colours on a canvas, or carved in stone or wood. The artistic process—and here we take a step closer—is not pure inspiration, nor merely a process going on behind the brain’s wall or passing over the retina, but an act of transference from the spiritual to the sensory world, from vision to reality. And because, as I have shown, this act is occurring to a greater extent in sensory material, it leaves behind firm traces that constitute an intermediary state between indeterminate vision and definitive accomplishment. I think of the preliminary works, the draft scores of musicians, the sketches of painters, the multiple versions of poets, of manuscripts, studies, of all the material of formulation now preserved. Since these works left by the artist are silent witnesses, they are more impartial, the only ones we can really trust. Just like the objects left behind by the murderer at the crime scene, the prints he leaves, constitute the most dependable evidence in criminology, so the studies and plans that the artist has left offer the sole possibility of reconstructing the interior process. They are the Ariadne’s thread which we can hold on to in the labyrinth which is the creator’s brain. If sometimes it’s possible at least to approach the secret of creation, we can do it only through its traces.

  I say sometimes we might approach the secret, for we do not have the self-revealing documents of all the great artists to hand. It’s a fatal tragedy that we lack those of the greatest. We have not a single page of Homer, no line from the Bible in its primary form, no Plato, Sophocles or Buddha, nothing of Zeuxis or Apelles. Some of this can be explained by the sheer distance in time, but it seems strange that we have nothing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Molière, Cervantes 0r Confucius; perhaps this is the will of Nature, who wants to say to us: “It is precisely in these great works born of the human spirit that you must possess no earthly knowledge. They must ever remain an inscrutable miracle to you.” But there are still other remnants of the geniuses of humanity, from Beethoven and Shelley, Rousseau and Voltaire, Bach and Michelangelo, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, whether the houses where they lived or the objects they handled. We also have their manuscripts and their drafts, and whilst we ponder these artists and their work, we can glance indiscreetly into their workshop or studio and get some vague sense of the secret of creation.

  Let us try it then. Let us enter a museum, a library, those unique places where one can see objects in which the process of creative production has left a visible trace. Let us reveal the scores of Mozart, of Beethoven and Schubert, the studies of the great painters, the rough drafts of poets, and let us attempt to draw from these witnesses some clarity on what exactly happened during those mysterious hours of creative application, which are at once the most joyful and the most tragic.

  First let us hold up a few manuscripts of Mozart, from a purely objective standpoint, and see how the composer worked, first the finished manuscript of a sonata and alongside that the drafts which preceded it, so we might better understand the way in which the definitive work was formed. To our great surprise we learn that there are no sketches and that all we possess are the finished articles, the definitive texts, jotted down in one go in that light, effortless, winged hand. Our first thought when viewing these pages is that these are copied manuscripts. He had someone dictate them and he had them drawn up in a hurry. It’s the same with the manuscripts of Haydn and Schubert. In their case we can find no preparatory work and in a general sense no evidence of laborious effort or application. Indeed we know, after the testimony of contemporaries, that Mozart would elaborate his musical themes whilst playing billiards and that Schubert, chatting with his cronies, could select a poem from a book, disappear into the adjoining room, jot down his composition in a notebook and the next thing a song would be born, an immortal one. This ease of composition we see again in the manuscripts of Walter Scott, where over 400 or 500 pages not a single crossing-out, correction or amendment is visible, which further reinforces the sense that this is not a work of composition per se or an act of creation, but rather a transcription under dictation. And then we have certain painters like Frans Hals or Van Gogh, for example—no sketch, no plan. They merely fix their object with a magical eye and immediately the quick and lively brush darts to and fro. They eschew order, assemblage, arrangement. For them creation is all flow, momentum, fluency.

  A simple glance over these manuscript pages is sufficient for us to gain a first insight into our secret. The art
ist when seized by inspiration acquires a higher level of buoyancy. A sleepwalker-like assurance takes possession of him and bears him beyond all those difficulties without steering or guiding his intellect. The creative spirit passes into him and over him just as the air passes into a flute and is transformed into music. The artist is the unconscious medium of a higher will. He himself has nothing more to do than faithfully to execute what this will demands of him, to know how to express purely an inward vision. The state of creation is, then, if we are to believe these manuscripts, a wholly passive state, excluded from all personal human labour.

  But let’s not pass too rapid a judgement. The process of creation is in reality far more complex, the most mysterious of secrets. Let us then proceed with our researches. And after Mozart’s manuscripts, we’ll now take a look at those of Beethoven.