Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

After lunch and that first delightful surprise came a second. Van der Stappen, who had long been meaning to fulfil an old wish of his own and Verhaeren’s, had been working for days on a bust of the poet, and today was to be the last sitting. My presence, said van der Stappen, was a very lucky chance, because he positively needed someone to talk to Verhaeren—who was only too inclined to fidget—while he sat for the sculptor so that his face would be animated as he talked and listened. And so I looked deeply into his face for two hours, that unforgettable face with its high forehead, ploughed deeply by the wrinkled furrows of his bad years, his brown, rust-coloured hair falling over it, the hard, stern structure of his features surrounded by brownish weather-beaten skin, his chin jutting like a rock and above the narrow lips, large and lavish, his drooping moustache in the Vercingetorix style. All his nervousness was in his hands—those lean, firm, fine and yet strong hands where the veins throbbed strongly under the thin skin. The whole weight of his will was expressed in his broad, rustic shoulders; the intelligent, bony head almost seemed too small for them. Only when he was moving did you see his strength. If I look at the bust of him now—and van der Stappen never did anything better than the work of that day—I know how true to life it is, and how fully it catches the essence of the man. It is documentary evidence of literary stature, a monument to unchanging power.

In those three hours I learnt to love the man as I have loved him all the rest of my life. There was a confidence in him that did not for a moment seem self-satisfied. He did not mind about money; he would rather live in the country than write a line meant only for the day and the hour. He did not mind about success either, did not try to increase it by granting concessions or doing favours or showing cameraderie—his friends of the same cast of mind were enough for him. He was even independent of the temptation so dangerous to a famous man when fame at last came to him at the zenith of his life. He remained open in every sense, hampered by no inhibitions, confused by no vanity, a free and happy man, easily giving vent to every enthusiasm. When you were with him, you felt inspired in your own will to live.

So there he was in the flesh before me, young as I then was—a poet such as I had hoped to find him, exactly as I had dreamt of him. And even in that first hour of our personal acquaintance my decision was taken; I would put myself at the service of this man and his work. It was a bold decision, for this hymnodist of Europe was little known at the time in Europe itself, and I knew in advance that translating his monumental body of poetry and his three-verse dramas would keep me from writing my own work for two or three years. But as I determined to devote all my power, time and passion to someone else’s work, I was giving myself the best thing imaginable—a moral mission. My vague seeking, my own attempts, now had a point. And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him. If you are a beginner there is more security in such self-sacrifice than in your own creativity, and nothing that you ever do with all your heart is done in vain.

In the two years that I spent almost exclusively in translating the poetry of Verhaeren and preparing to write a biography of him, I travelled a good deal at various times, sometimes to give public lectures. And I had already received unexpected thanks for my apparently thankless devotion to Verhaeren’s work; his friends abroad noticed me, and soon became my friends too. One day, for instance, the delightful Swede Ellen Key came to see me—a woman who, with extraordinary courage in those still blind and backward times, was fighting for the emancipation of women, and in her book The Century of the Child pointed a warning finger, long before Freud, at the mental vulnerability of young people. Through her, I was introduced to the poetic circle in Italy of Giovanni Cena, and made an important friend in the Norwegian Johan Bojer. Georg Brandes, international master of the history of literature, took an interest in me, and thanks to my promotion of it the name of Verhaeren began to be better known in Germany than in his native land. Kainz, that great actor, and Moissi gave public recitations of his poems in my translation. Max Reinhardt produced Verhaeren’s Les Moines —The Monks—on the German stage. I had good reason to feel pleased.

But now it was time to think of myself and remember that I had taken on other duties as well as those to Verhaeren. I had to bring my university career to a successful conclusion and take my doctorate in philosophy home. Now it was a matter of catching up within a few months with the entire scholastic material on which more conscientious students had been labouring for almost four years. With Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, a literary friend of my youth who may not be too happily remembered today because he was one of the acknowledged public writers and academics of Hitler’s Germany, I crammed by night. But the examination was not made difficult for me. In a private preliminary conversation the kindly professor, who knew too much about me from my public literary activities to trouble me with details, said with a smile, “I expect you’d rather not be tested in the field of exact logic,” and then gently led me into spheres where he knew I was sure of myself. It was the first time that I had to take an examination, and I hope the last, and I passed with distinction. Now I was outwardly free, and all the years from then until the present day have been given to my struggle to remain equally free in my mind—a struggle that, in our times, is becoming ever harder.

IHAD NOW LIVED THROUGH ten years of the new century; I had seen India, part of America, and I began thinking of Europe with a new and better-informed sense of pleasure. I never loved our old world more than in those last years before the First World War; I never hoped more for a united Europe; I never believed more in its future than at that time, when we thought there was a new dawn in sight. But its red hue was really the firelight of the approaching international conflagration.

Today’s generation has grown up amidst disasters, crises, and the failure of systems. The young see war as a constant possibility to be expected almost daily, and it may be difficult to describe to them the optimism and confidence in the world that we felt when we ourselves were young at the turn of the century. Forty years of peace had strengthened national economies, technology had speeded up the pace of life, scientific discoveries had been a source of pride to the spirit of our own generation. The upswing now beginning could be felt to almost the same extent in all European countries. Cities were more attractive and densely populated year by year; the Berlin of 1905 was not like the city I had known in 1901. From being the capital of a princely state it had become an international metropolis, which in turn paled beside the Berlin of 1910. Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, Amsterdam—whenever you came back to them you were surprised and delighted. The streets were broader and finer, the public buildings more imposing, the shops more elegant. Everything conveyed a sense of the growth and wider distribution of wealth. Even we writers noticed it from the editions of our books printed; in the space of ten years the number of copies printed per edition tripled, then multiplied by fivefold and by tenfold. There were new theatres, libraries and museums everywhere. Domestic facilities such as bathrooms and telephones that used to be the prerogative of a few select circles became available to the lower middle class, and now that hours of work were shorter than before, the proletariat had its own share in at least the minor pleasures and comforts of life. There was progress everywhere. Who dared, won. If you bought a house, a rare book, a picture you saw its value rise; the bolder and more ambitious the ideas behind an enterprise, the more certain it was to succeed. There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere abroad in the world—for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigour constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum? Europe had never been stronger, richer or more beautiful, had never believed more fervently in an even better future, and no one except a few shrivelled old folk still bewailed the passing of the ‘good old days’.