Andreas

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  In the afternoon the nobleman returns to bring me my cloak, takes me to the notary.

  In the evening, near Madonna dell’Orto. The beautiful lady at a window.

  In the church, Camposagrado with servants to light him; returns alone, is attacked by a dog. He masters the dog with his teeth.

  HERR VON N’S ADVENTURE IN VENICE

  ANDREAS: two halves which gape asunder.—Andreas’s character not yet formed: he must first find himself in these vicissitudes. His shyness, his pride—all untested till now.—Not clear about his own state of mind—always too much, too little. Doubts whether he really committed the crime on the dog.

  Andreas: main line, courage—the courage incorporated in the air of Venice, courage in the night of storm. Morality: courage.

  Tour due to the calculating snobisme of his father.

  How Andreas imagines the life of great gentlemen (from the tales of the lackey, his grandfather, from his own experiences too). From the stag-rutting into the castle, changes clothes, hair dressed, calls for a mistress to take her to the opera Armida.

  Andreas (if he goes to the bottom of it) goes to Venice chiefly because the people there are always masked. After the adventure in the country with the haughty Countess, who had treated him like a lackey, the idea, half-dreamed, had taken shape in his mind that the adventure would have been glorious if he had been masked. In a general way he is now haunted by the difference between being and seeming—for instance, when he sees haycocks which look like countrywomen in hats or like monks, and which give him an eerie and solemn feeling, and are really senseless things.

  Chapters (provisional): I. Castle Finazzer. II. Arrival. III. Three New Friends. IV. The Knight of Malta. V. Double Life. VI. A Conversation. VII. The Demonic. VIII. Departure.

  Chapter I. The end. The mountains:—he has no wish to live there; at this moment he is richer than the mountaineer, richer than the mountain-dweller; he feels no need to relate things to Romana—it is entirely self-enjoyment, but possible only through her. When he had that—it was the pledge that he would possess Romana too.

  Camposagrado: a thick-set man, with a pearl drop in one ear containing a fragment of the Host.

  CHAPTER V. The New Friend (The Knight of Malta).

  Andreas had fallen into an unpleasant state of mind. The thought of home poisoned the “here”: the “here” made him think more sadly of home.

  He delivered the letter and was told that the master was dead. The business friend gone away. He asked for his trunk, a sign that he was longing for news from home. The bread tastes stale. He misses the coaches, the elegance; the people mean so little, compared with the Graben and the Kohlmarkt. A lady descending from her equipage in Vienna.

  He tries to see Nina, without any real hope. (Zorzi tells him that the Knight wants to know his name; asks whether he needs anything. Andreas declines.) He dislikes the part of him that wants to go to her. He is not received.

  Evening. Talk with Zustina on the staircase. He asks her why she does not wish to marry. How could she suspect that he was speaking of himself? She rebuffs him. Her justification: “They are gentlemen: there is good in every one of them. The mother of a simpleton has taken a ticket for him.” He, jealous of happy people. He tells her that he is probably leaving Venice. She is unmoved.—Her picture of the world: family tyrants or gamblers of all kinds. She removes herself from him.

  Various visits to Nina, a second time two days later, a third—but always obstacles. Once somebody is with her, another time “out,” or “ill”—once he is shown in and hears her in the next room, but “she has had to go out.” Yet he is always encouraged to return.—The situation becomes quite inexplicable when Zustina says to him: “Nina is so sorry that you are neglecting her.”—Feeling of helplessness.

  Sights of the town. A trial. Processions. Jesuits. Churches. Pictures: Tintoretto: distinction, boldness, self-confidence.

  Envy of all human beings, hypochondria, growing distaste for people. Too many people, would have liked to sweep them all away from him. Longing for trees (to embrace a tree). Gazing towards the mountains. Recollection of that moment. Melancholy. His thoughts become more disorderly and impure.

  Sea-monster for ten soldi from Crete, peculiar interior. To fill the void in him, goes not to the church but to the booth. The Spanish woman (the mask).

  The merman: “What a spectacle—but alas! only a spectacle!”—gives him all that the theatre did not give him, although an animal, and hardly a real one. Pain that the merman should impress him more than the real theatre.

  The mask. Her arm rests on his. The mask speaks tenderly. “Our first meeting was a great day for me. I had just arrived from a dreadful place; your face was the first—I could not but love it. I was free for anything, would have liked to swoop down from above, sure that I could fly. Have you any idea of what it means to be a prisoner?” (he thinks of the lead roofs).

  He doubts. She: “What I say is real—cannot you feel it?” (the pressure of her hand). He assures her that when he was with Nina that time, he thought of nothing but her. “And on your later visits?”

  The mask speaks tenderly; she speaks of Nina—he puts things together: “It is she.” The blood surges to his heart.

  The mask: “I forced a certain person to ask your name. There is a lifetime between that day and this.”

  Andreas resolves to put various questions to Zustina in order to find out the truth about his unknown. Again does nothing. It means too much effort.

  In the house: “Your friend was asking for you”—a vine-leaf with a drop of blood on it.

  Lonelier here among people than there on the dog’s grave.

  A mask wishes to take him to gaming-rooms. He refuses, turns back in the anteroom, asks her to tell him at any rate who she is and where she is going to take him. The mask has told him that there are various people interested in him besides the Knight. (Two persons at least. How does she know?) On the staircase, he thinks he recognizes the young Spanish woman, or another young person from Nina’s house. (She knows too about his visits to Nina.)

  Enters a church, hopes to see the Spanish woman. Is rapt into a dreamlike height, but only for a moment. There is somebody kneeling behind him, sighing, like a being at his mercy. This person leans against the edge of the step—looks into the distance.

  THE NEXT day to the Dogana. Letter about the condition of the Empress. Discomfort. The whole world so dreadfully puppet-like.

  Somebody follows him in a gondola, catches up with him: the Knight, who says he has been looking for him in the little coffee-house. A letter, similar to the first, has been thrown into the Knight’s house. “Do you really know nothing about it? Might I ask you to go over in your mind the people you have met in society? Nothing stands alone: everything is fulfilled in circles. Much escapes us, and yet it is in us, and all we need to know is how to bring it to the surface. Somebody I am deeply devoted to is greatly distressed by this affair. I will tell you what was in the letter. Have you any relatives in Italy?” (Fluidum of kinship).

  Andreas: “I should like to tell you so much about myself that your suspicions would be disarmed.”—Strange lack of self-confidence that his word does not seem to suffice even to himself! At the same time, mortal fear that, once the suspicion is removed, the Knight will lose all interest in him. How happy he felt when the man was sitting by him! Wonder that even this man should suffer some secret torment.

  Pleasant stroll afterwards. Knight: “Do not miss going to Murano—you hear the best music there. Your ambassador often goes there too.”

  Meanwhile a one-armed messenger brings a letter for Andreas. “Who is it from?”—“Your Honour knows.” Knight wonders at the coincidence. He asks the Knight to go with him. The Knight refuses. Is piqued—assumes that Andreas was laughing at him. “You receive the messenger I was telling you about.”

  FIRST SIGHT of the Knight. Intimation of harmonious contrast between appearance and spirit. Something witty about him that is simply
that contrast.

  At the beginning, Andreas’s chief objection to the Knight: the casualness of the acquaintance. “He cannot be worth much, since he had time to spend with me.”

  The hours with Sacramozo were the radiance in his day. How astonished he was when Sacramozo spoke to him! Then he was annoyed, because it made the Knight seem ordinary.

  How the Knight, in his eyes, always grows in beauty out of his ugliness, and he gradually comes to feel that the essence of the man is all love, or all form. His double nature: when he speaks on mystic subjects (for him, given the right connections, everything in the world, even the most commonplace circumstances and doings, can be included in them) he is candid, accessible to union, merely human, communicative of himself, accessible by enthusiasm.

  When he is in ordinary surroundings, he is completely set apart by courtesy; inconceivable that he could be touched, influenced, reached. It is impossible, when he is in this state, to attempt to remind him of the other. Here he exercises a power which is as coercive as the other is persuasive. Sometimes, in his worldly aloofness, he seems still stranger to Andreas: the idea “the power of despair” to be applied to him in this situation.

  Meetings with the Knight. The only being able to concentrate him: at the same time bewilders him: by being at home in the world: by his discretion, his acceptance of everything as a matter of course—Andreas’s fear in imperfect moments: that everything in Sacramozo may be merely show.

  The Knight does not invite him home; seems to take for granted that he has friends, that he knows where the pictures are to be seen, etc.

  The essence of his being: the secrets; alludes to them by minus dicere, not by plus dicere. The essence of his being a knowledge of the mystery of how man is organized.

  CONVERSATIONS with Sacramozo:

  Andreas full of prejudices; the worst against himself; his money prejudices, his prejudices as regards the world—as regards himself: thinks he has thrown away his happiness, everything is deteriorating, everything is stale. Sacramozo:

  “You are rich in hidden powers.—You exclude the extraordinary—you are wrong. You speak of happiness. How could you enjoy it? Ask rather—who is it that enjoys it?”

  Sacramozo teaches him to realize the function of poetry through Ariosto: poetry is not concerned with nature. The poet is a poet by virtue of his penetration of nature (of life).

  As to Ariosto: the true domain of poetry is the impossible (the youth whose body moved through his armour).

  Poetry as the present. The mystic element in poetry: the conquest of time.—

  It is in the transitions that we recognize the sublime. All life is a transition.

  In all our doings we must follow examples: there lies the grandeur of Christianity.—Unspiritual Christians cheat God: dirt behind the altar.—

  To know our element: we really live only under the eyes of one who loves us. Sacramozo: “Attention means as much as love. I beg you to treat my soul with attention. Who is attentive? The diplomat, the official, the doctor, the priest … not one attentive enough. The statement ‘I have neglected nothing’—who can pronounce it of himself with a clear conscience?”

  What we truly participate in, to that we are already half united. Sacramozo on the participation of negroes in their masters’ pleasure: he has found what he sought—he has received a letter.

  Sacramozo explains the repulsion of the soul for what it has recently experienced.

  How far a man like Sacramozo has outgrown all fears, yet all terrors are near him, to be called up at the slightest touch: what fear, terror, timidity mean.

  How far, for Sacramozo, all material is material for the divine.—Andreas broods: “Why with me, of all people?”—(Andreas must overcome that.) Sacramozo: “Everything is everywhere, but only for the moment.”

  To be able to ask somebody’s pardon—how far this means a higher understanding has been reached.

  All that a man like Sacramozo is henceforth incapable of—there lies his grandeur.

  Sacramozo objects to the expression “to go deeper into things”—it should be replaced by “to become aware”—“to remember.”

  Spirit is of one essence. In the spiritual world, there are no stages, only degrees of penetration. Spirit is action, perfect or less perfect. At some point you are preventing the world from thinking. Human beings are the sufferings and acts of the spirit.

  Through Sacramozo, Andreas realizes that he loves Romana Finazzer.

  Sacramozo believes in the twofold. Thus he tells the two determining experiences of his life. “It takes a man of natural genius (like Francis of Assisi) to be determined for ever by a single experience. The ordinary human being, when his way is cut off in one direction by some dreadful experience, will move in the other.”—As a rule, too, we create an individual out of a type by crossing it with another species: Narcisse is a rogue, but a respectable musician (cf. Goethe’s Note).

  Knight: “You often mention your uncle in a peculiar way—he must mean a great deal to you” (more encouragement from Sacramozo inconceivable). Andreas blushed. The story of Uncle Leopold and the two momentous days. Beside the death-bed: the widow, the second family—peasant lads.—The della Spina: “We have both lost so much, dear lady.”—While Andreas is speaking, Castle Finazzer, that day of gloom, comes back to him. The Knight (with a warm-hearted look): “You told that beautifully.”

  The human is nobly contained in him, and is beautifully detached.—He proposes a visit.

  CHAPTER VI. A Visit.

  “Who knows his own element?”

  By the company of the Knight of Malta, by but a single allusion to him, Andreas’s existence is refined and concentrated. If he meets him, he can be sure that something remarkable or at least unexpected will happen to him afterwards. His senses grow keener, he feels more capable of enjoying the individual in others. Feels himself in a greater and higher sense an individual. Love and hate are closer to him. He feels the constituent elements of his own being grow more interesting to himself, has the presentiment of beauty behind them. He feels the Knight’s mastery in the playing of his own part. There is no situation in which he could not imagine him. In the Knight, he encounters supreme receptiveness for identity.

  He tells himself all this, though in morbid self-reproaches. “What kind of man am I for the first man of any distinction I meet to make such an impression on me?”

  Beginning. The Knight catches him up on the Riva dei Schiavoni. “What a good thing I have met you.” (A vague impulse has sent Andreas there.) “I nearly sent for you. You are wanted …”

  Secret about Maria. At Andreas’s first visit she makes a tiny, helpless gesture towards a dark corner behind her sofa with a certain stiffness about her waist—and at that moment, Andreas has a presentiment that here is an insoluble mystery, that he will never know this woman, and feels that the infinite has wounded him more violently than any definite pain that he has ever known: he has three or four memories which all bear within them this pointe acérée de l’infini (the spearhead of the infinite) (the meeting with the old woman and the child on that first morning)—feels this unfelt pain without realizing that, at that very moment, he loves.

  At his first visit, Maria says, “Somebody will write to you again.” Once he receives from Maria a letter that is passionate, almost cynical. He hurries to her; she is not at home. Later, he finds her. She is in great distress: “I have been told about the letter”—she has to bring herself to something like a confession—“my hand is bewitched: it acts against my will. I would like to cut it off, but the fifth commandment forbids that …” (Problem: how far am I responsible for my hand?)

  Elegance and distinction, the phantoms Andreas has pursued, are embodied in Maria in their most perfect form, as nobility of the soul. He now sees the Viennese countesses as mere marionettes, worked by their breeding.

  Sacramozo’s relationship to Maria is this: that he wants to amuse her in order to keep her alive, because she alone makes life worth living fo
r him (however little, for that matter, he demands or expects from her).

  Sacramozo has for Maria “religion, not love” (Novalis).—The Knight: “I found her in Genoa. Wicked people declared they had a right to her. I protected her—and managed to bring her here. But I mean no more to her on that account than you do. I look upon every day as the last. Day by day, I think, ‘She will escape you!’”—Andreas: “Do you think she will enter a convent?”—Knight: “She nearly did. But she seems to have abandoned the idea. She told me she had received letters which dissuaded her.”

  Maria married to a wicked man at thirteen. She is a widow: her husband was cruel. The religious crisis which caused the split in her. A prayer (Sacramozo tells Andreas this)—Maria regards it as a punishment for having implored Christ to be her accomplice in her love-affair, and thus having been guilty of blasphemy. Since then, Maria filled with disgust for the act itself: she feels the vague fatigue, has a physical knowledge of the thing which appals her.

  At a remark, a mere piece of news, her astral body, consisting of her thoughts, fears, aspirations, is often, with immense sensibility, touched by a “silent fall of distant stars”—she feels this whole as her “I”: this whole must become blessed, this whole would never have been capable of surrendering in love, this whole Andreas can never embrace, this whole is her burden and her suffering.

  A midway aspect of Maria—in which the lady is uppermost: that all is not yet united in her, that she is neither resigned nor exhausted, that the possibilities of dying a martyr’s death or petrifying in aristocratic morgue still lie open to her.

  Sacramozo knows from confidences that Maria at times loses her identity. Sacramozo surmises as to her condition.

  THE LADY (Maria) and the cocotte (Mariquita) are both Spanish: they are dissociated aspects of one and the same personality, which play trucs on each other. The cocotte writes Andreas the letters. The cocotte hates Sacramozo and all his sentimental fuss. Once, Andreas encounters the cocotte as he is taking leave of the lady: once, the kind lady is transformed before the mirror into the malicious cocotte. The cocotte fears Sacramozo, believes he has the evil eye (she fears, too, that he might kill her, and he actually pursues her with a knife).—The cocotte sleeps with him, this makes Andreas fall more deeply in love with the lady; he can no longer understand Sacramozo’s Platonism. In the early morning the bed is empty, he hears moans, and, with gestures of appalling distress, the other takes flight. During this troubled time, he once finds in his valise the fichu of the Finazzer girl.—The cocotte declares that she has to go to a rich old man.