Galgenberg, Sept. 30th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--How nice of you to be so kind, to write so
consolingly, to be so patient in explaining where I am thinking wrong. I
burned the book in the kitchen fire, and felt great satisfaction in
clearing the house of its presence. You are right; I have no concern
with the body of a poet--all my concern is with his soul, and the two
shall be severely separated. I am glad you agree with me that poets
should be anonymous, but you seem to have even less hope that they ever
will be than I have. At least I pray that they may; you apparently take
no steps whatever to bring it about. You say that experience teaches
that we must not expect too much of gods; that the possible pangs of
posterity often leave them cold; that they are blind to the merits of
bushels, and discern neither honor nor profit in the use of those
vessels of extinguishment; you fear that they will not change, and you
exhort me to see to it that their weakness shall not be an occasion for
my stumbling. That is very sensible advice. But before your kind letter
came a few fresh autumn mornings had cleared a good deal of my first
dejection away. If the gods won't hide themselves I can after all shut
my eyes. If I may not rejoice in the divine in them with undistracted
attention I will try at least to get all the warmth I can from its
burning. And I can imitate my own dainty and diligent bees, and take
care to be absorbed only in their honey. You make me ashamed of my folly
in thinking I could never read Burns again now that I know about his
sins. I did secretly think so. I was sure of it. I felt quite sick to
see him tumbled from his altar into the mud. Your letter shows me that
once again I have been foolish. Why, it has verged on idiocy. I myself
have laughed at people in Jena, strictly pious people, who will not read
Goethe, who have a personally vindictive feeling against him because of
his different love-affairs, and I have listened astonished to the fury
with which the proposal of a few universal-minded persons to give Heine
a statue was opposed, and to the tone almost of hatred with which one
man whenever his name is mentioned calls out _Schmutzfink_. About our
poets I have been from the beginning quite sane. But yours were somehow
more sacred to me; sacred, I suppose, because they were more mysterious,
more distant,--glorious angel-trumpets through which God sent His
messages. I was so glad, I whose tendency is, I am afraid, to laugh and
criticise, to possess one thing at which I could not laugh, to have a
whole tract of beauty in which I could walk seriously, with downcast
eyes; and I thought I was never going to be able to be serious there
again. It was a passing fit, a violent revulsion. If I like carefully to
separate my own soul and body, why should I not do the same with those
of other sinners? It has always seemed to me so quaint the way we admit,
the good nature with which we reiterate, that we are all wretched
sinners. We do it with such an immense complacency. We agree so
heartily, with such comfortable, regretful sighs, when anybody tells us
so; but with only one wretched sinner are we of a real patience. With
him, indeed, our patience is boundless. I know this, I have always known
it, and I will not now, at an age when it is my hope to grow every year
a little better, forget it and be as insolently intolerant as the man
who shudders at the name of Heine, will not read a line of him and calls
him _Schmutzfink_. That writer's books you tell me about, the books the
virtuous in England will not read because his private life was
disgraceful, beautiful books, you say, into which went his best, in
which his spirit showed how bright it was, how he had kept it apart and
clean, I shall get them all and read them all. No sinner, cursed with a
body at variance with his soul and able in spite of it to hear the music
of heaven and give it exquisite expression, shall ever again be
identified by me with what at such great pains he has kept white. I know
at least three German writers to whom the same thing happened, men who
live badly and write nobly. My heart goes out to them. I think of them
lame and handicapped, leading their Muse by the hand with anxious care
so that her shining feet, set among the grass and daisies along the
roadside, shall not be dimmed by the foulness through which they
themselves are splashing. They are caked with impurities, but with the
tenderest watchfulness they keep her clean. She is their gift to the
world, the gift of their best, of their angel, of their share of
divinity. And the respectable, afraid for their respectability, turn
their backs in horror and go and read without blinking ugly things
written by other respectables. Why, no priest at the altar, however
unworthy, can hinder the worshipper from taking away with him as great a
load of blessings as he will carry. And a rose is not less lovely
because its roots are in corruption. And God Himself was found once in a
manger. Thank you, and good-by.