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PARTISAN REVIEW
all,
a phenomenon of liberation and relaxation, a cathartic phenom–
enon, and such phenomena are closely associated with the physical
organism itself. This assumption accords quite well with Speranski's
theory, now finding its way into pathology, that both the state and
the threat of illness are regulated and warded off by central impulses
to a far higher extent than was hitherto supposed. There can scarcely
be any doubt about it that art is a central and primary impulse. In
saying this I don't want to make far-reaching assertions, but it does
seem to me that such great age is particularly remarkable in view of
the fact that so many of these people lived in times when the general
expectancy of life was far lower than it is today.
As
you know, the
expectation of life for new-born children has almost doubled since
1870.
Now the question what aging means for an artist is a complex
one, in which subjective and objective elements cut across each other;
on the one hand we have moods and crises, on the other history and
description. Never again to be able to reach the height once attained,
in
spite of struggling for decades, is one fate. It was, for instance,
Swinburne's; at the age of twenty-nine he was a sensation, and from
then on he went on writing, ceaselessly, until when he died at the age
of seventy-two he was a fertile, stimulating man, writing poetry.
Something similar could be said of Hofmannsthal: the way from the
poems written by the twenty-year-old Loris to the political confusions
of
Der Turm
was the way from the feeding of the five thousand to
the gathering up of the crumbs. It is the same again with George
and Dehmel. All these men are lyrical poets in whom hard work and
determination took the place of the intuitive glimmerings they had
known in youth. Now I shall turn from these introspective allusions
to an entirely concrete question on the objective side of our problem,
namely: what do art history, literary history, and art criticism gen–
erally, mean by a "late" work? How do they define the formal transi–
tion from an artist's youthful work to the style of his "late" period?
It is difficult to get a straight answer to this question. Some cri–
tics resort to such terms as gentleness, serenity, toleration, a noble
mellowness, liberation from the vanities of love and passion; others
speak of weightlessness, a floating beyond the things of earthly life–
and then they come out with the word "classical." Others again see
the characteristic of the artist's old age as lying in ruthlessness, in a
