I quoted these lines from Macbeth, and there
came back to my mind the witches, phantoms, apparitions....
Alas! no ghosts, no fantastic, unearthly powers are
terrible; there are no terrors in the Hoffmann world,
in whatever form it appears.... What is terrible
is that there is nothing terrible, that the very essence
of life is petty, uninteresting and degradingly inane.
Once one is soaked through and through with that knowledge,
once one has tasted of that bitter, no honey more seems
sweet, and even the highest, sweetest bliss, the bliss
of love, of perfect nearness, of complete devotion—even
that loses all its magic; all its dignity is destroyed
by its own pettiness, its brevity. Yes; a man
loved, glowed with passion, murmured of eternal bliss,
of undying raptures, and lo, no trace is left of the
very worm that devoured the last relic of his withered
tongue. So, on a frosty day in late autumn, when
all is lifeless and dumb in the bleached grey grass,
on the bare forest edge, if the sun but come out for
an instant from the fog and turn one steady glance
on the frozen earth, at once the gnats swarm up on
all sides; they sport in the warm rays, bustle, flutter
up and down, circle round one another... The
sun is hidden—the gnats fall in a feeble
shower, and there is the end of their momentary life.
XIV
But are there no great conceptions, no great words
of consolation: patriotism, right, freedom, humanity,
art? Yes; those words there are, and many men
live by them and for them. And yet it seems to
me that if Shakespeare could be born again he would
have no cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear.
His searching glance would discover nothing new in
human life: still the same motley picture—in
reality so little complex—would unroll
before him in its terrifying sameness. The same
credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood,
of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the
same senseless sufferings in the name...
why, in the
name of the very same shams that Aristophanes jeered
at two thousand years ago, the same coarse snares in
which the many-headed beast, the multitude, is caught
so easily, the same workings of power, the same traditions
of slavishness, the same innateness of falsehood—in
a word, the same busy squirrel’s turning in the
same old unchanged wheel.... Again Shakespeare
would set Lear repeating his cruel: ‘None
doth offend,’ which in other words means:
’None is without offence.’ and he too
would say ‘enough!’ he too would turn away.
One thing perhaps, may be: in contrast to the
gloomy tragic tyrant Richard, the great poet’s
ironic genius would want to paint a newer type, the
tyrant of to-day, who is almost ready to believe in
his own virtue, and sleeps well of nights, or finds
fault with too sumptuous a dinner at the very time
when his half-crushed victims try to find comfort in
picturing him, like Richard, haunted by the phantoms
of those he has ruined...
Copyrights
The Jew and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
