Hyperion to Bellarmin
So I came among the Germans. I didn’t ask for much and was prepared to find even less. Humbly I came like homeless blind Oedipus to the gates of Athens, where the grove of the gods welcomed him and he was met by beautiful souls —
How differently I fared!
Barbarians of old, made yet more barbarous by industry and learning and even religion, deeply incapable of any godly feeling, spoiled to the core for the joys of the holy graces, in every degree of profligacy and pettiness an offence to every decent soul, dull and full of discord like the shards of a discarded vessel — these, my Bellarmin! were my comforters.
They’re harsh words, but I'll say them nonetheless, because it’s the truth: I can imagine no people more fragmented than the Germans.
You see craftsmen, but no human beings, philosophers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings, masters and menials, youths and elders, but no human beings — is this not like a battlefield where hands and arms and all the limbs lie about in pieces while the spilled life-blood seeps away into the sand?
To each his own trade, you will say, and so do I. Only he must pursue it with his whole soul, must not choke every energy within him that doesn’t quite befit his title, must not with such niggardly timidity pretend to be to the letter only what he’s called; with earnest, with love he must be what he is, then there lives a spirit in all he does, and if he’s boxed into a specialism in which the spirit cannot thrive, then let him thrust it from him with contempt and learn to use a plough! But your Germans like to stick with what’s most needful, and that’s why there’s so much bungled work amongst them, so little that is free and genuinely pleasing. But this one could put up with if only such beings didn’t have to be feelingless for all beautiful life, if only the curse of godforsaken unnature didn’t everywhere rest upon such a people. —
The virtues of the ancients were but glittering vices, some wicked tongue — I can’t tell you which — once said; and yet even their vices are virtues, for then still lived a childlike, a beautiful spirit, and nothing they did was done without soul. But the virtues of the Germans are a glittering evil and nothing more; for they are only works of necessity, in craven fear wrung from the wasted heart with slavish effort, and leave without solace any pure soul that would nourish itself on the beautiful, oh! that, spoiled by the holy harmony in nobler natures, cannot thole the discord screeching in all the dead orderliness of such beings.
I tell you: there’s nothing sacred that’s not profaned, that’s not debased to miserable makeshift with these people, and what is even amongst savages mostly kept divinely pure, these all-calculating barbarians approach as one might go about a trade, and they can do no other, for once a human being has been drilled, it serves its ends, it seeks its profit, it dreams no more, God forbid! it remains staid, and when it celebrates and when it loves and when it prays and even when the lovely festival of spring, when the world’s season of reconciliation dissolves all care and conjures innocence into a guilty heart, when drunk with the sun’s warm rays the slave joyfully forgets his chains, and softened by the god-inspired breath the foes of man are full of
peace, like children — when even the caterpillar takes wing and the tipsy bee swarms, still will the German stick inside his box and not be bothered much about the weather!
But you shall judge, holy nature! For if only they were modest, these people, didn’t make themselves the measure for the better amongst them! if only they’d not belittle what they’re not, and yet, if belittle they must, if only they didn’t mock the divine! —
Or isn’t divine what you mock and call soulless? Isn’t better than your babble the air that you drink? the rays of the sun, aren’t they nobler than all of you in your cleverness? the earth’s springs and the morning dew refresh your groves; can you do that? Oh! you can kill, but you can’t bring to life if love doesn’t do it, and that’s not from you, you didn’t invent it. You fret and you brood about how to flee fate, and are flummoxed when your childish arts prove bootless; meanwhile the stars wander blithely above. You debase it, you tear it apart, where it puts up with you, tolerant nature, and yet it endures in unending youth, its autumn and spring you can’t drive away, its aether is something you won't defile.
Oh, it must be divine because you're suffered to destroy and yet it doesn’t age and in your spite the beautiful stays beautiful! —
And it’s heart-rending to see your poets, your artists, and all who still honour the genius, who love the beautiful and nurture it. The good souls! They live in the world like strangers in their own house, they are just like long-suffering Ulysses when he sat at his door in beggar’s garb while the shameless suitors roistered in the hall and asked: ‘Who has brought us this vagabond?’
Full of love and spirit and hope its youthful sons of the muses grow towards maturity among the German people; you see them seven years later, and they wander like shades, silent and cold, they’re like soil the enemy has sown with salt so that it shall never more bring forth a blade of grass; and when they speak, woe unto him that understands them! who can see in the storming titanic energy, as in their protean skills, the despairing battle their troubled beautiful spirit must fight against the barbarians with which it has to deal.
‘All things on earth are imperfect,’ that’s the eternal refrain of the Germans. If only someone would tell these godforsaken people that with them all things are only so imperfect because they leave nothing
pure unsullied, nothing sacred unfumbled by their clumsy hands, that with them nothing thrives because they will not honour the root of all thriving, divine nature, that with them life is precisely so vapid and fretful and brimming with cold dumb discord because they scorn the genius that brings energy and nobility to human activity, serenity to suffering, and love and brotherhood to cities and homes.
And that too is the reason why they’re so afraid of death, and for the sake of their oyster-like existence suffer all the shame, because they know of nothing higher than the handiwork they’ve cobbled for themselves.
OBellarmin! where a people loves the beautiful, where it honours the genius in its artists, there blows like breath of life a universal spirit, the bashful mind unfolds, self-conceit melts away, and all hearts are pious and great, and inspiration brings forth heroes. The homeland of all men is with such a people and there the stranger loves to linger. But where divine nature and its artists are so abused, oh! there life’s greatest joy is gone, and any other star is better than the earth. There men, though born beautiful, become ever more wild and wasted; a servile disposition grows and with it rude courage; intemperance grows with cares, and with opulence hunger and fear of famine; each year’s blessing becomes a curse and all the gods take flight.
And woe to the stranger who wanders out of love and comes to such a people, and thrice woe to him who, driven like me by great pain, a beggar of my kind, comes to such a people! —
Enough! you know me, you won’t take it amiss, Bellarmin! I spoke in your name too, I spoke for all who live in this land and suffer as I suffered there.