138
PARTISAN REVIEW
the translator of
Faust
into French). As Mr. Bennett points ou t, there
has always been a minor line of self-consciously plastic and emotionally
reticent verse in German literature-a line running from Goethe's
R omische Elegien
(which Mr. Bennett unaccountably fails to mention)
through Platen and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Leaving Goethe aside,
George is certainly the greatest German practitioner of this kind of
poetry; and he manages to infuse it with a dramatic life that frequently
overcomes its inherent tendency to coldness.
George's early poetry is that of the fashionable
fin de siecle
world–
weariness and ennui. He was close to English Pre-Raphaelitism as well
as to French Symbolism, and the imagery and figures of some of these
poems resemble the former more than the latter. There is little of the
wavering sensuality of the French Symbolists, but a good deal of the
gauzy Botticelli atmosphere of Rossetti and Walter Pater:
Nun bist du reif, nun schwebt die Herrin nieder
M ondfarbne gazeschleier sie umschlingen,
Halboffen ihre traumesschweren lider
Zu dir geneigt die segnung zu vollbringen·'r.
These early lines are a skillful imitation of the period style, but
very soon George was using his mastery of atmospheric color for more
original poetic effects. His next few books were cycles of poems-drama–
tic monologues, terse descriptions, sharply etched symbolic incidents–
ea~h
projecting some possibility of life as embodied in a historical period
or an actual historical figure like the infamous Roman Emperor Helio–
gabalus. But George did not aim at accurate historical re-creations, like
Leconte de Lisle and the Parnassians; he used the aura of h istory rather
than its substance-as Mallarme did in "Herodiade" or Yeats in "Sailing
to Byzantium." And, as in Yeats's poem, we find in George the same
*
"Now you are ripe. Earthward the Mistress flies,/Moon-colored veils of gauze
around her clinging ;/Half opc:n are her dream-encumbered eyes ;!She bends to
you, her benediction bringing."
The translation, by Cyril Scott, is taken from
The Heritage of Symbolism,
by C. M . Bowra.
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