STEFAN GEORGE
323
his elbow. The room was sparsely but carefully appointed. The
books were few: Plato's
Phaedrus
in Kassner's translation,
Shakespeare's sonnets, Goethe's
Winckelmann.
On the wall was a
picture of a beautiful boy in the scanty dress of a Greek shepherd.
It is very necessary for the biographer of George to discuss
his sexuality. For the doctrine of the New Love-
Das neue heil kommt nur aus neuer liebe-*
is the direct product of a homosexual mind. Whether George (or,
for that matter, Walt Whitman who preached the New Love in
Calamus)
would confess to homosexuality is irrelevant except inso–
far as unconscious homosexuality is subtler in its manifestations
than the conscious sort. Naturally there is no longer any question
of moral disapproval. But the word
love
is ambiguous, and one
likes to know its meaning_ in a given context.
It may very well he that George seldom thought how unusual
was his indifference to women and his passionate attachment to
men. He may have considered these attachments in terms of
religion and philosophy. Probably his was in the proper sense
Platonic love, such love as Socrates felt for Alcibiades. George's
choice among Shakespeare's sonnets (those which give weight to
Oscar Wilde's theory were published in the
Blatter)
seems to bear
this out. So-more obviously-does his choice of the
Phaedrus
among Plato's dialogues.
Winckelmann-from
a literary stand–
point-is a more dubious choice, for Winckelmann is the proto–
type of the schoolmaster dreaming of the ghosts of Greek boys.
The Georgekreis was a
Mannerbund,
a group of Platonic
philosopher-kings. The group was never closely defined. It was
never a club with a definite membership. Ludwig Klages is re–
ported to have said that he was never conscious of belonging to a
group at all. George fell in love with him, invited him to write in
the magazine, lost interest, and that was all.
If
this is true, the
case of Klages is not wholly characteristic for George was not
usually obsessed with the mere bodies of his friends.
George's life from 1898 to 1919 has been properly identified
with his magazine
Die Blatter fiir die Kunst
which appeared in
twelve series between those dates. The Georgekreis was his little
world, and the record is one of the exits and entrances of the
*"The new salvation comes only from new love."
