by Stefan Zweig
I would like to try to give another example of these heroic and poetic moments, which I named in one of my books, entitled Shooting Stars. Let us consider the European centuries which followed the barbarian invasions. In poetic terms they are not very productive. There are a handful of great figures, such as Attila and Charlemagne, and in Italy the sudden appearance of Dante. But these isolated great figures and their fascinating times, as interesting as they might be, do not meld into that exciting sequence which the true work of art requires. In a work of drama or a novel, it is never enough when the poet introduces only one major figure: a complete work of art must, if it is to excite interest, employ an opposing figure, for each needs the power to develop fully and reveal his true dimensions, which comes from a creative tension. In the same way, History, to articulate its stirring poetical character, must show several great figures at the same moment, and these truly impassioned moments are always uniquely those where some rupture occurs, or where mighty forces collide with destiny, like water plunging over a rock. For years it flows normally with an almost monotonous rhythm, then in a few sublime moments its banks suddenly draw together, a cataract arises, a raging torrent, feverish excitement, and at a stroke the historical scene consummates itself and overflows with a whole crowd of inspired contrasting figures.
Let us take by way of example the overcrowding of the historical scene during the epoch of Charles V. For centuries Europe had been fragmented. Suddenly, in a single blow, the greatest power disposed to any man fell into the hands of one monarch, one man. Charles V was at the same time King of Spain, Emperor of Germany, Lord of Italy, of Flanders, of Austria, possessor of a whole world of colonies; he could proudly state that his was an empire on which the sun never set. Had such an extraordinary profusion of dramatic moments ever been forged in so short a time by any power? It formed a vast tableau, poetry of colossal dimensions, bringing to the fore a number of fascinating and dynamic leading players, providing the prince with adversaries worthy of his own qualities, genuine monarchs. So in a short space of time Charles V faced three great rivals: François I, King of France, Suleyman, the all-powerful Padishah of the Turks, and Henry VIII of England. But three princes, even as allies, were not enough to destroy such a mighty power over a period of twenty years. So then History, be bolder! Be unstinting! To bring down Charles V new explosive forces needed to emerge, on the heels of the hitherto unrivalled explosive power of gunpowder and the printing press. These forces gathered in the shape of the soul of a minor Augustinian monk named Martin Luther. This man stood up out of the people and, the pen his only weapon, totally laid waste to the unity of the Catholics. The drama really took off when opposing forces entered the fray; an army of rebels with Thomas Müntzer at its head caused an insurrection and the Reformation saw Charles V, the most powerful man on earth, mercilessly defeated. On an icy winter’s night, abandoned by all his loyal lieutenants, he was forced to flee across the mountains and find sanctuary in a Spanish monastery. What artist, what poet could have dreamt up a more thrilling spectacle, where the most powerful man on earth becomes the only one in an endless line of princes who had reigned for centuries willingly and with humble abhorrence to relinquish power? Could any outcome be as logical but at the same time as surprising as this one? And what a cast of supporting players makes up this drama! I’ll mention a few names and facts: Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, the great reformers; Titian, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Leonardo and their Rome, defiled, destroyed, its artworks stolen; Machiavelli and Erasmus in Rotterdam; Holbein and the great German masters; Cervantes, whose arm was broken in a storm during the naval battle off Algeria; the discovery of new land in America, the spread of printing across the entire globe; the grotesque scenes during the absurd episode of Anabaptism, the tragedy of the peasants’ revolt and the Fiesco conspiracy: dozens, hundreds of such dramas assembled into a living space of thirty years—thirty years so dense with magnificent upsurges and calamitous downfalls, only to be compared perhaps with our own epoch since 1914. This is how History creates poetry, in her “Michelangeloesque” moments.
Or let’s view another fresco: the French Revolution, which in five years disintegrated and transformed as much historical matter as a whole century—an epoch that manages to express each phase of thought and feeling in a living person. I am thinking now of the following figures: Mirabeau, the true statesman, Danton, the agitator, Robespierre, the cold and clear-sighted politician, Marat, the demagogue, and alongside them, in all their infinite variety and nuances, a whole host of idealists and the corrupt, a wild maelstrom of wills, permanently locked in struggle with one another. And that unimaginable walk to the guillotine, with each of the condemned following the one before, each knowing that there is yet another awaiting the same fate behind him. What a dance of death worthy of Holbein; and it rampages on and on and on, until due to its own overstretch it finally expires and the heir Napoleon attempts to reach out his hand and snatch the abandoned throne.
And Napoleon in his turn, what a prodigious and unrivalled invention of History! As a young student at military school he happens to write on a sheet of paper: “St Helena, a tiny island that lies in the Atlantic”, unaware that twenty years later his path will lead him to that very place, from all the great battlefields of Europe and the most formidable power one man has possessed since Charles V, and that he will lose it all just as suddenly as his illustrious predecessor.
Here, then, it seems a moment of history is to be repeated. And yet no; nothing ever happens in the same way twice. History is so rich in material that she can always draw new situations and hypotheses from her inexhaustible arsenal. She never repeats, she only transposes, like a musician transposing a theme. Of course, sometimes we think we see analogous situations, but this is merely an illusion; and woe to the head of state who allows himself to be steered by these superficial analogies and thinks to act according to a rigid schema, who imagines he can manipulate a current situation by mimicking an event in the past. Louis XVI tried this when the Revolution broke out; he thought he could act wisely by studying books showing how his predecessor Charles I conducted himself during Cromwell’s Revolution. This is how he hoped to save his head. But precisely because he wanted to avoid the same mistakes and was too conciliatory, he committed others. History will never allow you to guess the path she will take, for she is too richly endowed for repetitions. She even surpasses the poet or writer who composes a poem, a novel or tragedy, who does not allow the reader or listener to guess the denouement until the last possible moment, who makes reality out of what seems most unlikely, and again and again History exceeds the greatest of expectations. The course of history is always unpredictable and is as random as roulette or any other game of chance, for the events that happen do so in the midst of dimensions and circumstances so unimaginable that our poor human reason cannot possibly foresee them. “There is no past,” Goethe says. “One would like to look back, but there is only the eternal new, formed from the spreading elements of the past.” History sometimes plays with resemblances, but she never remains the same, she always finds the new, the cloth she cuts is a world cloth; unfailingly she invents, and complete imaginative freedom is permitted her by God; she alone is sovereign among the artists, plays with absolute liberty in this world where all else submits to laws and boundaries. She alone is free and makes use of this freedom in the most profound and sagacious ways. We owe her a little more respect, this elusive poetess! Eternally she will remain our mistress, a paragon we can never reach!
For there is no art or technique which is foreign to this great poetess of History: in every artistic form she presents the definitive example. I showed how, in the time of Charles V or the French Revolution, she created vast frescoes containing hundreds of figures and events, each a drama in itself; how, like Michelangelo, in a great painting she places heaven and hell in the most fantastic contrasts. And even when she is concerned with a less turbulent epoch, where the drama is less condensed, she still shows herself a c
onsummate artist. She does not always have to be stirring to be great. An example of this more gradual development: the early history of Rome, in the descriptions of Livy and Sallust. I know of nothing else in all Roman literature which can compare with its clarity of composition, measured growth and unrelieved tension, this calm yet continuous process which in three or four centuries had made of a little village in Latium, a mere molehill, the powerful city we know, centre of the Occident and the cultivated world. In this development of Rome, History eschews romantic, emotive, dramatically taut artistic forms and by contrast demonstrates in a clear account an epic exposé in the grand style, like those Tolstoy has created within the last century.
It’s not only when she is emotive that History proves herself a great artist. In those moments admittedly her technique seems more visible, but she also reveals herself to the connoisseur in more modest forms. Let us not forget that History is not overly self-admiring, and that sometimes it happens that she pens a crime or detective novel, like the history of the false Demetrius, the Gunpowder Plot or the affair of Marie Antoinette’s necklace; and sometimes she cannot resist farce, the burlesque, as in the case of a swindler duping his time, like Cagliostro or John Law—the world will be none the wiser—or today’s gold-makers, Captain von Köpenick, or the thief of the Mona Lisa. All art forms, the most elevated to the most playfully popular—History masters them all with the same ease. Likewise she can—whether in the time of the troubadours or of Werther—express with wonderfully touching delicacy the religious turmoil of the time of the Flagellants, the Crusades, the iconoclasm of Savonarola. She knows how to show heroism in all its excesses, where the heroes are desperadoes, as in the conquest of Mexico or that of Siberia by a handful of men who could fit into a single railway carriage. Then History can take on a darker tone, composing sombre war ballads, like poems, so rounded, so enclosed, about the return of Charles XII from Sweden to the Ukraine, or the expeditions of the Vikings, or the fall of the Goths in Italy. But as much as History creates the highest lyrical and dramatic forms, she can, when the mood takes her, resort to simple jokes, to anecdote, and even in this form the situations she presents are incomparable. Everywhere, in all artistic manifestations, in the fresco of characters, she leaves far behind in her wake the fully achieved works of the individual artist or poet.
But how, even though History has made perfect poetry of herself, is there always this seemingly endless procession of writers and artists who seize on historical matter and transform it through their own imagination, thereby creating from raw history dramas and historical novels, and desire to be greater poetical interpreters than reality itself? How do these audacious creators dare to surpass History through invention, she who is the unrivalled mistress of invention, and the supreme poetess? Nothing is more justified than this question, than this objection. Well, we should remember what was noted earlier—that History is not always a poetess; there are fallow periods, developments which are too sprawling and ponderous in their evolution, untilled areas amidst this vast field, and—this is decisive—it must be remembered that what History transmits to us is never the whole event, the complete image of man, but merely a shadow of his nature, always fragmentary. Even the individual, each and every one of us, knows particular important things and events and carries them with him to the grave. What it is to have such an abundance of things and events at such a distance from us in time! History, I repeat, is never a finished printed book which we can read from one end to the other, but a vast palimpsest, a compilation, a manuscript of which nine-tenths is amended, where hundreds of pages are indecipherable, and thousands of others are missing and can only ever be replaced in their context through synthesis and the imagination. These countless enigmatic passages must inevitably encourage the poet’s addendum, his fabrication. He will attempt to intervene and, following the sense of History, will try as far as he is able to add what is missing, thereby achieving what Michelangelo did with a Greek statue when he tried to replace the arms and head with his own sculptural vision of being. Of course, it is only in the more obscure passages that the poet will seek to apply his imagination to proceedings, not to those that are perfectly clear. In these brilliant passages he does not seek to outdo History. Even the greatest of all poetic dramatists, Shakespeare, inclines to this rule. At the climax of the tragedy of Julius Caesar, in Mark Antony’s speech when he calls to the people for vengeance, almost word for word the historical text comes straight from Plutarch. If a master such as Shakespeare requires of himself to show such veneration, should it not be required of all? Happily, this respect for the facts, for the original historical material is reborn and the era of the “historical novel”, the blatant falsification of our ancestors’ lives, is now over. The time is over where a Walter Scott could rearrange history to suit his own needs and form characters who resemble gaily painted marionettes; today it would be unthinkable to do as Schiller, who depicted the young Maid of Orléans falling on the field of battle instead of perishing at the stake. Things have become purer, clearer, more objective and precise, ultimately more honest through our modern way of thinking; we no longer feel obliged to “romanticize” and satisfy the “heroic”, to recognize the beauty in a particular historical figure, and we venerate the truth in history too much to modify it casually for our own ends. Who after all has the right to invent a life of genius? One must be a genuinely great poet even to dare, in a work of theatre or a novel, to place fictional words in the mouth of a Caesar or a Napoleon, a Luther or a Goethe. Such sacrilege is perhaps admissible when Shakespeare has Julius Caesar speak, or Strindberg Luther. In this case the sensibility of the author is so profound that he really can speak with a kind of fraternal genius. But essentially there are very few who have this right and that is why the vast majority of all that is offered us by way of historical novel or story is nothing more than caricature, a valueless hybrid form, and in the end a literary failure. For if our intellectual power is limited, then the logic of History rests with the spirit of the world. Our dimensions originate from a rigid corporeality, while those of History draw on the armoury of the eternal; and therefore these novelistic inventions mostly treat their heroes on their own level: they dilute elements of the story to make it more digestible to their audience while disregarding History and their own contemporaries.
It is this ignorance of the poetic superiority of History that we witness so clearly in the current trend for the “biographie romancée”, that is to say, the biography decked with the romantic garnishing of a novel, where the real is intermingled with the false, the documentary with the imaginary, where great figures and events are illuminated by a private form of psychology instead of by the pitiless logic of History. In these romantically infused biographies artifice retouches the canvas, exaggerating the “tiny” traits, reinforcing the heroic and more interesting. But by doing this they produce more posters than psychological portraits in the manner of the great masters. I always prefer the historically accurate biography which does not spin tales but renounces all manner of invention, one which humbly serves the superior spirit of History and does not stand brash and headstrong in her way. The true biography is that which is content to explain what is happening, respectfully to follow the half worn-away runic traces and, instead of presumption, prefers to state sincerely: “Nescio, here I do not know the truth, I cannot be decisive.” But through this renunciation the strictly objective historical biography does not become a sterile collection of documents, a cold and passionless after-account. For, naturally, anyone who wishes to get a handle on history must in some sense be psychological: they must possess the faculty of deep perception, of listening closely to the event with the inner ear to have the capability of knowing how to distinguish historical truths. This is not a slip of the tongue when I speak of historical truths. In history there is virtually never a single and unique truth, but each vital fact is gathered, related to others and transmitted in a hundred different ways. I should recall that famous episode of Walter Ral
eigh, the great English naval hero and pirate, who, incarcerated in the Tower of London, began to write his memoirs. He begins poring over contemporary accounts of naval warfare, and finds that the battles in which he was engaged are described in a completely different way to what actually happened. He is so disturbed by this that he gravely doubts whether any true historical account is possible and in disgust casts his manuscript onto the fire. This anecdote, so cherished by Goethe, is most instructive, for it demonstrates what we know from psychology: that truth, like the artichoke, has many layers and more often than not behind each truth another lies hidden. There is no definitive chronicle that will account for the soul’s actualities, no absolute truth protocol for the historical—and here I return to my theme—for it must always, at least to some extent, be something imagined. The purely material assemblage of facts brings only contradictions; a certain synthetic lens has always been necessary and always will be. The sculptural work always comes from the human; never can the cold specialist gain access to this life force, this quickening of truth, if he does not possess an atom of the poet in him, the seer, the visionary. This is why we can say that in all the areas where history appears uninteresting, it is more the fault of the historian than history itself, for it has not been communicated in a sufficiently poetic way. If we observe history with eyes wide open, as the poet does, we will find that there are no uninteresting figures. No one, even the smallest, most anonymous, most modest character, once the truthful poet’s gaze has rested upon him, is dull or indifferent to other men and there are no dull or dead periods of the past either, only poor historians. And, to explain more forcefully, I would say: there is perhaps no actual history in itself, in a general sense, but it is only through the art of writing, the vision of the narrator, when the very factual date of history is willed; for every experience and incident only becomes genuine in terms of the senses, when it is recounted in a truthful and verisimilar way. There are in fact no great or small events, only ones that remain alive or are dead, which are remodelled or are past.