TWO STORIES
0487
kindly growls. Not because he was calmed but because he sensed
the other's good will and sympathy, Johannes began again after a
short pause:
"I know, sir, that once in your youth you read Nietzsche's works.
Well, I read him too. One evening in my beloved attic study when
I was seventeen years old I came upon those pages in
Zarathustra
that contain the Night Song. Never in these almost sixty years have
I forgotten that hour, when for the first time I read the words: Night
has come; clearer now is the voice of every gushing spring-! For it
was at that hour that my life acquired its meaning, that I entered
upon that service in which I persevere today, in that hour the
marvel of language struck me like sheet lightning, the unspeakable
magic of the word; dazzled I looked into an immortal eye, felt a
divine presence, and surrendered myself to it as to my fate, my love,
my happiness and my destiny. Then I read other poets, found nobler,
more holy words than those of the Night Song, found, as though
drawn by a magnet, our great poets, whom no one now knows,
found the dream-sweet, dream-heavy Novalis, whose magic words
all taste of wine and blood, and the fiery young Goethe, and the old
Goethe with his secret smile, I found the dark, hurrying, breathless
Brentano, the quick, palpitant Hoffmann, the noble Marike, the
slow, painstaking Stifter, and all, all the lordly ones: Jean Paul!
Amim! Buchner! Eichendorf! Heine! I clung to them; my longing
was to be their younger brother, to quaff their words, my sacrament;
the high, holy wood of this poetry became my temple. In this world
I lived; for a time I considered myself almost one of them; I knew
the marvelous delight of running my hands through the pliant stuff
of words like the wind in the tender foliage of summer, of making
words ring, dance, crackle, shudder, snap, sing, shout, freeze, tremble,
leap, congeal. There were people who recognized in me a poet, in
whose hearts my melodies dwelt like harps. Well, enough of that,
enough. There came that time of which you were pleased to speak,
the time when our whole race turned away from poetry, when
all
of us as though with an autumnal pang recognized the fact: Now
the temple doors are closed, now it is evening and the high, wild
woods of poetry are darkened, no man of today can find the magic
path to the inner sanctuary. Quiet had descended and quietly we
poets disappeared into the sober land for which great Pan had died."
