Heinrich von Kleist

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is the most celebrated German writer of the Classical period, and some, perhaps most, would say he is the most eminent German writer of any period so far, the author of Faust, Werther, West-Oestlcher Divan and many other distinguished plays, novels and poems. But also a botanist, a geologist -- he published some work on optics notable today mostly for some glaring errors, perhaps to demonstrate that no-one is completely perfect, not even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But also the longtime minister of culture of the the German city-state of Weimar. When Napoleon passed through that part of Germany, he and Goethe had a good long chat, because of course. But also too many other things to list them all here. When Germany founded its official international cultural center in 1951, they named it the Goethe-Institut, because of course they did. 

The second-most eminent German writer of the Classical era is Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), playwright, poet, historian, philosopher, friend of Goethe, perhaps best-known for his "Ode to Joy," which Beethoven put to music in his 9th Symphony.

And then there's the third-most celebrated German writer of the Classical era, one you may not have heard of if you're not from Germany and have taken no courses in German literature: the spooky one, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). 

 

"Spooky" feels like a very inadequate adjective to describe Kleist's works. The German word "unheimlich" is much better. I don't think there is a single English word which translates unheimlich adequately. Unheimlich means frightening, eerie, ominous, unsettling -- come to think of it, when English-speaking people mis-translate the German noun "Angst" -- and they do, utterly, every time -- they tend to come up with something close to that which is described by the German adjective "unheimlich."

Kleist was born into a Prussian military family, in Frankfurt on the Oder, about an hour's drive from downtown Berlin today according to Google Maps, not to be confused with the much bigger and more well-known Frankfurt on the Main in western Germany, Germany's financial center and home of its highest skyscrapers, and also where Goethe was born. Kleist wrote plays, fiction and poems, and other things, including a fascinating essay on the marionette-theater. 

One of his plays, Der zerbrochene Krug, is among the best loved German comedies. The rest are quite dark, and one, Der Herrmannschlacht, which tells the story of the crushing defeat of several Roman legions by a coalition of Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg forest in 9 AD, is seldom performed, because it is considered, quite rightly, to be really about Kleist's hatred for Napoleon's army, for France in general and for non-German things in general. More about that later. 

If you saw a photo from a production of Kleist's Prinz von Hombuurg, you might well assume that what you were seeing was from a weird modern or post-modern staging of the play. But actually, scenes from the play as Kleist wrote it, and as it was performed in his lifetime, look like that, because very weird things happen in the play. Unheimlich. 

And then there are Kleist's stories. The longest and scariest of them, Michael Kohlhaas, has given a figure of speech to modern German: "to play Kohlhaas" means to be extraordinarily stubborn. 

The story was inspired by a report of a 16th-century episode in which a man from the merchant class reacted violently to mistreatment by a nobleman. In Kleist's re-telling of the story, Kohlhaas is a horse-dealer whose horses and servant are mistreated by a drunken lout of a junker. Kohlhaas demands restitution, and doesn't get it, because, you may not be shocked to learn, in 16th-century Prussia, noblemen could sometimes get away with mistreating commoners. But turns out Koohlhaas was the wrong commoner to mess with: long story short, he and his friends declare war on the Junker after his legal efforts fail, burn down the countryside, and although Kohlhaas is eventually caught and executed, he also manages to prove that he was right. 

This story is unheimlich right from the start. From the opening scene, where, now that the drunken lout of a junker has succeed his father, there is a toll charged to cross a bridge which Kohlhaas used for many years to bring his horses to market with no toll, there is the sense that what is portrayed is this fiction is both eerily real and and quite unpleasant -- that Kleist is thrusting under our noses the wrong things about the world from which we ordinarily choose to look away. 

The world is not as it should be. And Kleist describes this with devastating skill.

It also ought not to be that a poet as talented as Kleist was infected with such common and ugly nationalism, but his play Der Herrmannschlacht, with its heroic ancient Germanic tribes standing in for the Germans of Kleist's own time and the ancient Romans standing in for France, leaves little doubt about that, and of you still doubt it, his political writings and letters from the time of Napoleon's occupation clear it up. You see, Kleist was very disturbed by the way in which French soldiers and German women were behaving with one another. 

Not with the behavior generally of occupying soldiers of any nation, and of the predicaments of women of the nations they occupied. Not with horrors of war generally. Those could have been topics of reasonable discussion. But, no, Kleist was very specifically and exclusively disturbed about French soldiers and what they were doing with German women. There's no putting a positive spin on it.

And the final, very disturbing  fact about Kleist is his death; a young, terminally-ill woman, Henriette Vogel, convinced him to kill her and then himself. In 1811, Kleist, 34 years old, his success and reputation growing rapidly, shot her dead, and then fired a bullet through his own brain. 

The world is not as it should be.

Buy Heinrich von Kleist, Saemtliche Werke und Briefe at amazon:  https://amzn.to/3BFyWSL

Goethe, an Idealized Classical World, and Italy

Goethe traveled to Italy in the late 1780's, and published a book about the trip, Italienische Reise, 30 years later. The following is based on that book -- to be more precise, the 1976 Insel Teschenbuch Verlag edition of the Italiensiche Reise, it 175, with 40 drawings Goethe made during the trip, and an afterword by Christoph Michel.

Like many other Germans in the 18th century, the young Goethe loved Italy without ever having been there. What they loved above all was the art, architecture and literature that had come from the Classical world, as well as the Italian Renaissance, which, like them, had been in love with antiquity. Like all lovers, they idealized the object of their love -- I do not mean that as a negative comment, not in the slightest.

Kant is famous for never having traveled far from his home in Koenigsburg. Goethe traveled a bit more, but for 57 years, from 1775 until his death in 1832, he was an employee of the city-state of Weimar, and was expected to stay in the city for the most part. He held still there, while people traveled from near and far to visit him. In his older days, he received his visitors, very much like a prince. In 1786, at age 37, he slipped away and traveled to Italy, apparently because he was afraid that if he had asked permission for the trip, he wouldn't have gotten it -- was that true? Or did Goethe slip away, in the middle of the night, all alone, to make this already dramatic excursion even more dramatic?

He wanted to read Tacitus in the city of Rome. He wanted to inspect the remains of buildings designed by the ancient architect Vitruvius, and the Renaissance buildings made in northern Italy by the Renaissance architect Palladio, who for Goethe resurrected the spirit of Vitruvius. He wanted to find in Italy an earthly paradise where people's spirits were more wisely and joyfully oriented than in Germany. And he says in the Italienische Reise that he found this paradise. The title page just before the first chapter carries the subtitle "Auch ich in Arkadien!" which is German for "et in arcadia ego," which is Latin for "Also me in  Paradise!"

Goethe's interests were wide-ranging, to say the least. Besides literature, philosophy and the arts, he became quite learned in natural sciences including botany and geology. His interest in these last two are on display in the Italienische Reise. Frankly, I understand almost nothing of Goethe's scientific remarks, apart from a few witticisms, such as when he says that a certain region's soil is rich in the ideal ingredients for smooth roads, which is very fortunate, because the region is very ugly, and one wants to be away from it as soon as possible.

From my point of view, the most dramatic parts of the book to do with geology are those in which Goethe makes daily trips from Naples to the lip of the then-active Vesuvius -- not because I understand any of Goethe's geological remarks about the volcano and its lava, but because he daily, and very enthusiastically, exposed himself to such danger, the very thought of which horrifies me. Goethe's friend Herder seems to have had a similar horror of such behavior, accompanying Goethe only on his first walk up the side of the volcano, and on that day returning to the city earlier than Goethe.

Goethe mentions Pliny the Elder once in the book, but not anything about the manner of Pliny's death.

Goethe's loving examination of Italy went from the figurative heights of its intellectual and artistic achievements, quite literally down into the soil. For him, it was perfectly natural to include an inspection of the plants and the soil of any place in which he found himself, as natural as it was to treat the people he found in Italy as the cousins of Caesar and Vergil.

As with any truly great book, it would be senseless to try to condense the Italienische Reise: it is already condensed. There are no superfluous words in it. Goethe travels south as far as Sicily, and then returns home to Weimar. Everywhere he goes, he is received and celebrated as the author of Werther. All through the trip, he works on Torquato Tasso. He meets many of his German friends. The Prince of Weimar has, of course, forgiven him for having sneaked away in the night like a thief. He spends more time in Rome than in any other place. He observes peasants, princes, artists, bishops, visits museums, theatres, operas, palaces, ruins and one huge and very active volcano. He learns a great deal. A reader of his book will learn a great deal -- although, I wonder whether there has ever been a reader who has understood everything Goethe wrote.

Founders Of National Literatures

In some cases it's very easy to spot the first great figure in the literature of a nation -- "great" not in the sense that they were bettter writers than others, that's a subjective call, but in the sense that they formed a reference point for the literature that followed, great in the sense that the writers and readers of that nation looked at each of them as a kind of founder of their culture.

In some cases that figure is very easy to spot: in Greece it's Homer, in post-Roman Italy it's Dante, in Spain it's Cervantes, in England it's Shakespeare, in Russia it's Pushkin.

In ancient Rome, some would say, it's Vergil. Others would say it's Cicero. I, and perhaps a few others, would say that Horace and Sallust and Ovid write rings around those two. (Then again, by my own criteria, that's not the point.)

The situation is quite murky in Amurrka, because after the mediocrity of Irving and the so-so melodramatic novels of Cooper came Melville, the most accomplished writer in our nation's history, but dishonored in his own time, and always an outsider. He even founded an Amurrkin tradition of outsider-writers: Emerson, Faulkner, Gaddis, the Beats. The fucked-upness of our literature is world-famous.

Who's the first great German writer? Luther, Grimmelshausen, and Goethe, the top 3 choices, are about as different from one another as 3 writers can be. Is that bad for Germany, or nice for Germany?

(Or is this all incredibly meaningless and beautiful?)

France just simply doesn't have one. Maybe because the field is more crowded with geniuses that the literature of any other nation.

And when I think that there must be similar sitchy-ashuns in the literature of Portugal and Lithuania and Mexico and hundreds of other nations, discussions including thousands of writers whose names I have never heard, my mind reels at how much bigger the world is than my mind.

"Und leider auch Theologie[...]"

Hunter S Thompson once remarked that he thought he could've enjoyed being a full-time sportswriter, but that before he took up that line of work he would've had to put a big hatpin through his frontal lobes, and then get a thesaurus, to make sure he didn't use the same adjective a dozen times in the same paragraph.

It may surprise you to know that I have daydreamed about becoming a pastor or priest. I'd have to perform the do-it-yourself hatpin-lobotomy first, of course, like Thompson before the switch to sportswriting that never was.

The title of this blog entry is from Goethe's Faust which is not only the most highly critically regarded piece of German literature, but also to this day the most-seen play on German stages, with hundreds of productions in an average year. It means "And unfortunately theology, too." Faust is sitting in his study at the beginning of the play, complaining that he's enegetically studied philosophy, law and medicine, "und leider auch Theologie." He goes on, "Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!/ Und bin so klug als wie zuvor." My translation: "Here I stand, a poor cuss!/No more clever than I ever wuz." Soon after that he swears he would sell his soul for some real wisdom, and the Devil appears and sez Okay then! and the fun begins. It's a great play. A lot of Germans dislike it because unfortunately they were forced to study it as children, just as many people in English-speaking schools are taught to hate Shakespeare.

Another very popular quote by Goethe, to judge by the number of Google hits it generates, is "Die Geschichte des guten Jesus habe ich nun so satt, dass ich sie von keinem, außer von ihm selbst, hören möchte." My translation: "I'm so tired of the story of sweet Jesus, I don't want to hear it again unless He tells it to me personally." (The originals are a lot better. Goethe was a great poet. I'm not.) Do I ever know how Goethe felt! Hence the aforementioned need for a do-it-yourself hatpin lobotomy.

Today I read a blog post by a very sincere young thing who's all excited about a project to "discover the words of Jesus" by studying Aramaic. The thinking goes that the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic. Never mind that the consensus of scholars is that the Greek versions we have are the originals. Never mind the well-known principle of something always being lost in translation. Never mind those incomprehensible owner's manuels which illustrate the perils of multiple tranlations of the same text. "News Radio" did an episode about this sort of thing: "I have skills. Monkey-strong skills.") Never mind that there have already been Aramaic translations of the Bible, going back to the days when people still spoke Aramaic! Never mind, never mind! Being religious means never having to make sense! Maybe it's this freedom which draws me to it.

Philosopher-Kings

Alexander the Great, the Emperor Augustus,Charlemagne and Napoleon, besides being great rulers and conquerors, had also each of them a great impact upon the culture of his time. Hard-bitten, practical men, politicians and merchants and so forth, often deride culture -- literature, philosophy, art and so forth -- as being both a waste of time and a refuge for weaklings who cannot deal with real life. These practical types tend to measure one's success in "real" life by one criterium: the amount of one's material possessions. At an opposite extreme, one thinks for instance of Nietzscheand Oscar Wilde,are those who maintain that art alone makes life worthwhile. As with many other instances of extreme differences of opinion, so here I feel that such extremes are rather silly. Art is important, but without food, shelter and other basics which the practical types are constantly, industriously providing, no-one would be able to create it. Both extremes contain kernels of truth: often artists are, in fact, pampered sillies who cannot cope very well with the world at large. And art does certainly make life nicer. The practical types probably have no conception of a world completely without art, and would be just as horrified as anyone else if they ever did get a glimpse of such a world.

Whether or not Alexander's relationship with Aristotlewas more than just an interesting historical coincidence, whether Aristotle ever thought of his pupil or Alexander of himself as a philosopher-king, or not -- he died rather young for a philosopher, and in the dozen years of his reign he was extremely busy with practical and political things -- at the very least, one must regard Alexander as an extraordinary patron of culture. Although his empire collapsed into many separate kingdoms almost immediately after his death, still, everywhere he had been, from the Adriatic to Afghanistan, Greek culture flourished for centuries, because Alexander had consciously planted it there. A philosopher, a rhetorician, a musician could travel all over the vast Hellenistic world and find a market for his services in every city, and that he owed directly to Alexander.

It is a commonplace that in the age of patronage, poets and princes had a relationship that was often self-serving on both sides: the princes wanted praise and so supported those poets who flattered them, and the poets realized that the princes were the best patrons, and so flattered ceaselessly, shamelessly and with no regard for the truth. Like many commonplaces, this one overstates the matter somewhat. Doubtless, many writers throughout the ages of patronage were toadies, just as many are today, and many princes were conceited fools ready to swallow any amount of flattery -- as are many leaders and wealthy people today. But it's a great oversimplification to dismiss every description of every prince by the writers of his court on these grounds.

It may not be such an oversimplification, however, in the case of Augustus. Augustus is justly celebrated as the initiator of the pax romana, the greatest period of peace the Mediterranean world, or indeed perhaps any portion of the world at all, has ever enjoyed. Because of his reforms, his institutions and his example, the peace lasted for centuries after Augustus' death. That is certainly to be praised. When one considers the arts, however, a chillier picture emerges. There seems to have been little room for poetry that did not praise the Emperor and his family, and no room at all for anyone who criticized or made fun of them. The Aeniad is a great poem. Perhaps Vergilcould have done no better if he had not been obligated to praise Augustus in his poem. but who knows how many other poets or would-be poets there were, of whom we have never heard, or who never began at all to compose and declaim, because their talent for flattery was too slight? And Ovid,the greatest of all Augustan poets, was banished to a fort on the Imperial frontier on the Black Sea coast, a particularly cruel punishment for such a thorough urbanite. We don't know exactly what Ovid did, how he gave offense to the Imperial house. We can be pretty sure, however, that the offense was pretty minor, of the sort that many princes would ignore, even if it hadn't come from the greatest poet of the age. We know that Ovid apologized profusely, begged pathetically and in vain to be forgiven, until he died on that frontier post. It is generally agreed that Latin literature declined precipitously after the Augustan age. Surprisingly seldom, in my opinion, does anyone think to blame this directly on Augustus.

Alexander and Augustus lived in a culture -- it was in very many respects one and the same culture -- in which it was taken for granted that a sovereign could read and write. By the time of Charlemagne, the Roman senatorial families, the heirs of the rulers of the western Empire, had faded from the scene, any power they might still have confined mostly to the Catholic Church. Almost all of whatever literacy remained was to be found in the monasteries. The rulers of Western Europe, the heirs of the barbarians who had swept away the remnants of the western Empire, could neither read nor write. They fought ceaselessly among themselves, not the least among their own families. Patricide, matricide, fratricide, filiocide and every other sort of depravity was rife, along with famine and plague. To appreciate how great Charlemagne's achievement was, one has to understand how thoroughly awful things had become before him.

Charlemagne united and for the most part pacified a large portion of Western Europe. It's true, he waged war ceaselessly, but he waged it mostly at the expanding borders of his empire, thus pacifying an ever-growing area within. Within his borders, palaces and monasteries were built on a vast scale, and in these monasteries Charlemagne gave great support to learning -- not only Christian learning, but also the preservation of the ancients. In his main palace at Aachen, centuries before universities began to appear in western Europe, there was a sort of academy, from which officials and clerks went to every corner of the Empire. Einhard,Charlemagne's friend, minister and biographer, says that the Emperor himself spoke excellent and fluent Latin in addition to his native German, and could understand Greek as well. The whole time since the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire, its legitimate heirs had continued to rule in Constantinople. After Charlemagne was named Emperor of the West by the Pope in AD 800, he was, in his own eyes if not in theirs, the colleague and equal of the Byzantine Emperors. In any case, it was only natural that a dominion as large as Charles' would send and receive embassies to and from Constantinople. Einhard also says that Charlemagne tried very hard to learn to write, and was hampered in this only by the fact that he had begun late in life. Charlemagne's vast contributions to letters are not in doubt. Among other things, the first example of written German come from his time, upon his orders. Perhaps Einhard was flattering Charlemagne's memory in his description of the prince's linguistic abilities. We don't know. To me the description has the ring of truth.

A thousand years after Charlemagne, it was once again taken for granted in Europe that princes could read and write. Many other men, however, the bourgeoise, the businessmen, could also read and write, could build palaces, buy fine paintings, produce plays, maintain orchestras and so forth. Their wives and daughters, presumably, often had their hand in all this artistic enterprise. It was not seemly for middle-class women to be obviously, publicly concerned with business, but still they had their salons which could be as grand as those of any princess. For all that titles were losing their significance, however, it was not taken for granted that a man could rise to the rank of king or emperor on his own initiative. But then Napoleon went ahead and did it anyway, and we are still sorting out the consequences of his reign. And the contradictions, which are glaring: this Emperor came to power under the auspices of a Revolution which, or at least so many of its adherents had thought, was to do away with sovereigns. With all sovereigns, once and for all. Beethovennamed his third symphony after Napoleon, then, when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, almost destroyed the score in his rage. He neded up renaming the symphony "to the memory of an heroic man," to the memory of the younger, not-yet-corrupted Napoleon.

Goethewas less disturbed by titles, and met twice with the self-crowned Emperor. Beethoven accused Goethe of being too subservient to Napoleon, but I don't know if the accusation makes much sense. Their lives were so very different that it may have impeded their communication: Beethoven was the son of a musician in an age when musicians were servants. That Beethoven himself refused to be treated as a servant, to grovel before anyone, was a radical break with the past, and was very brave. Far from living out any such traumatic class struggles himself, Goethe was an aristocrat, although not quite as much of one as he claimed to be when describing the past of the Goethe family in Frankfurt, which he consistently, extravagantly exaggerated. He always had servants, he never was one, apart from the formulas of address required among various ranks of the aristocracy, which could very often include such formulations as "I am your most humble servant" and such. Perhaps Beethoven confused such figures of speech with actual servitude. There is no reason to confuse the two things. And in any case writers began earlier than musicians to free themselves from feudal patronage: pen and paper were cheaper than a musical instrument, much cheaper than an orchestra; the princes, although although they usually sought to control literature through censorship, did not compete with the businessmen, the bourgeoise, when it came to printing; and literature may always have attracted more solitary people, more prone to individual assertion and rebellion, than music, which flourishes in the direct interaction of groups.

Goethe himself was a very powerful man, a minister in the state of Weimar who looked after all sorts of things which were by no means confined to the realm of culture -- for example, mining and irrigation were under his purview -- and the most highly-respected poet in Germany, perhaps in all of Europe. The age of patronage had faded to a large degree, replaced by printing presses and mass readerships, and theatres and art galleries open to the public. Then again, things which are often thought of as belonging strictly to the past, have not, upon closer inspection, completely ceased to be. One visited Weimar and hoped to be received by the great man, very much as if he himself were a prince, and not strictly out of admiration for Goethe's talent, although that was always the stated purpose, but in hopes of furthering one's career, either with a job in Weimar or with a recommendation elsewhere. Among Goethe's local circle of friends was a rich and charming widow named Adele Schopenhauer, whose exceptionally gloomy son Arthurwould go on to be a philosopher, one whose fame, in keeping with his dark mood, was destined to be mostly posthumous. Arthur mostly quarreled with his mother, but got along quite well with the Herrn Geheimrat Goethe. Goethe and the young Schopenhauer collaborated on the study of optics, until such time as it dawned on Schopenhauer that Goethe's ideas on optics were unsound. His integrity would not allow him to lie to his master; but the respect he felt would not allow him to contradict him openly. So instead, Schopenhauer moved to Berlin, published his studies on optics, and left Goethe behind.

A few years later a young and still relatively unknown Jewish dandy named Heinrich Heinecame to Weimar and called upon the great man Goethe. Perhaps Heine had been insulted by an antisemitic remark in Goethe's house, or on the way there; for whatever reason, Heine did not deliver the awed respect usual among Goethe's literary visitors; indeed, he seems to have been relatively monosyllabic and just this side of ostentatiously rude. The old Geheimrat tried to draw him out, asked him: What are you working on now? Heine: A version of Faust. Goethe: Do you plan to stay long in Weimar? Heine: Actually, now that I've met your Excellency, my chores in Weimar are completed. And with that the young smart-ass bowed and took his leave. And it turned out that Heine's career blossomed greatly without the protection of Goethe or any other great man, an example of how things were changing. Unfortunately, other things were staying the same: Heine's big mouth, his fearless pen and, to be sure, his Jewish heritage combined to make him intolerable to the powers which were gradually making one Germany out of hundreds of principalities. Like his friend Karl Marx,Heine had to spend most of his life in exile. He settled in Paris and wrote most of his brilliant poems and essays there.

Antisemitism was widespread in Germany, but by no means universal or unchallenged. I doubt that Goethe personally offended Heine, but it's easy to imagine that Goethe's butler or some other of his servants, or one of his aristocratic friends, might have made some crude remark about how things were going to Hell, if this sort of person, pointing to Heine, could now get in to see that sort of person, pointing in the direction of Goethe's drawing-room. One acquaintance, erstwhile friend and colleague of Goethe's who was, unfortunately, clearly antisemitic, was Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer set himself up at the University of Berlin and quite brazenly announced philosophical lectures to be held at the same time as those of Hegel.Did his failure actually surprise Schopenhauer? Competing as an unknown against one of the most popular philosophers of all time, a thinker who was enjoying rock-star fame, speaking in the largest lecture-halls whose seats were always all taken while many other people crowded into the aisles and entrances, seems like the act of a man who wants to fail, all the better to be able to call all of academia sour grapes.

Whatever his subconscious motivations may have been, Schopenhauer quickly canceled his lectures and settled into a solitary bachelor's life, living comfortably on the income from inherited investments, writing philosophy, not voluminously but very brilliantly, and very biliously. His criticisms of academia in general, and of Hegel in particular, are extreme. Extreme as they are, I admire them, although I wonder if they and I are wrong. To put my cards on the table: I, like Schopenhauer, failed pretty badly in academia and tend to resent it for personal reasons. And I have never begun to understand what Hegel was talking about, and so am perhaps too eager to accept Schopenahuer's analysis: that Hegel wrote nothing but nonsense, that he was an unparalleled charlatan who drastically set back the cause of philosophy. What if Schopenhauer never understood what Hegel was talking about? I'm reminded of the stupid comments against all modern, non-representational or conceptual art, uttered by people who obviously have no conception of any aesthetic ideas from later than 1850 or so, and who probably are just as clueless about earlier art as well. I am troubled by the very many later philosophers who seem to take Hegel very seriously indeed.

In any case, though I tend to nod and agree as I read Schopenhauer's critiques of academia, of Professorenphilosophie fuer Philosophieprofessoren, and of Hegel, I shake my head in dismay when Schopenhauer comments upon the Jews. Still, Schopenhauer had high, rare praise for Heine, whom he discovered late in both their lives. Is it possible that he did not know that Heine was a Jew? (I think he did know.) Or is it possible that Heine's writing caused Schopenahuer to reconsider some of his prejudices? (I think it's quite possible.)

The age of patronage, as it was with Alexander, and still with Charlemagne, and to a large degree still with Napoleon, is now gone -- but completely? I don't know. In earlier ages culture was dependent upon princes. When the prince was enthusiastic and openminded like Alexander or Charlemagne, culture flourished, and therefore life flourished. (I'm closer to the one extreme I criticized at the start of this essay, which states baldly that art alone makes life worthwhile, than I am to its opposite. Maybe I'm wrong when it comes to most people, but in my own particular case I'm right: if I can't be surrounded by, drenched in art, then I'm in a pretty sorry state. I can understand Nietzsche and Wilde pretty well, I can't muster much besides horror when considering a Rockefeller or a Gates.) There are fewer princes around nowadays, the ones who survive have far less power and less to say, in the field of culture as elsewhere; but there still is a type of patronage. Businessmen have to some degree taken the place of princes, and unfortunately they often tend to be somewhere between unsophisticated about and downright hostile to culture. There is large-scale state sponsorship of the arts in many European countries, so large-scale that if they had an inkling of it, many American artists would emigrate. Back here in the home of the brave the most important patrons are the successful artists -- and the philosophers and historians and so forth who have the qualities of artists. Unfortunately we don't have one word which embraces them all, although they are a unity as they always have been, as much now as when Leonardo da Vinci was painting and sculpting and designing buildings and bridges and artillery and dissecting bodies and otherwise embodying the definition of the Renaissance Man -- who recognize and promote and more and more often finance their as-yet unrecognized peers. Ever since Plato, the idea has been to inspire and educate the princes. Well, the princes of the ancien regime are just about gone, and their remnants are more sad than inspiring, let alone inspired, less and less capable of sustaining the old fantasies of good princes. The more successful among the artists, however, have begun over the course of the last few centuries to resemble princes. I'm thinking here more of Coppola than Schwarzenegger, more of Bellow than of Rowling. Clearly, Schwarzenegger has at the moment more political power than Coppola. But one certainly has to hope that Coppola has more power in determining what films will be made, and how and by whom. And that Bellow's appreciative remarks on this or that fellow-writer will still resound when no one any longer remembers Harry Potter.