These contradictions haunted Hofmannsthal all his life and colored much of his posthumous reputation. They were a consequence both of his particular talent and, perhaps more so, of the cultural role he was expected if not forced to play, a role that was defined by the social and historical pressures of fin de siécle Vienna. To his early admirers Hofmannsthal represented the prodigiously talented aesthete; later critics saw in him the melancholy embodiment of an old order that had ceased to live long before its political demise, and his detractors attacked him as the propagator of a conservative ideology of cultural elitism. The brilliantly versatile virtuoso of the "beautiful life" had turned into an anachronism. What was missing between the artistic exuberance of his beginnings and the debilitating insecurities--even despair--of his final decade was an extended time of self-assured maturity. Hofmannsthal, like most of his literary creations, appears to have had an extended youth, during which he experienced all the privileges of a prodigy; and then he had to face the gravity of premature old age, with its agitated determination to maintain dignity or at least to preserve a posture of dignified resignation, perhaps even wisdom.
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