Adepts in Self-Portraiture Read online

  Adepts in Self-Portraiture

  Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy

  by Stefan Zweig

  Translated from the German by

  Eden and Cedar Paul

  Published by Plunkett Lake Press, November 2011

  www.plunkettlakepress.com

  © Williams Verlag AG

  Bibliography © Randolph J. Klawiter

  Cover: Self-Portrait by Susan Erony, oil, acrylic, burnt paper on canvas, 2000, 24" x 18", Collection Cape Ann Museum

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  For more information, visit www.plunkettlakepress.com

  To MAXIM GORKY

  CONTENTS

  eBook Publisher’s note

  INTRODUCTION

  CASANOVA

  THE MAN AND THE BOOK

  LIKENESS OF CASANOVA IN YOUTH

  THE ADVENTURERS

  TRAINING AND TALENTS

  PHILOSOPHY OF SUPERFICIALITY

  HOMO EROTICUS

  YEARS IN OBSCURITY

  LIKENESS OF CASANOVA IN OLD AGE

  GENIUS FOR SELF-PORTRAITURE

  STENDHAL

  LOVE OF FALSEHOOD AND DELIGHT IN TRUTH

  LIKENESS

  FILM OF HIS LIFE

  AN EGO AND THE WORLD

  THE ARTIST

  DE VOLUPTATE PSYCHOLOGICA

  SELF-PORTRAITURE

  MODERNITY OF STENDHAL

  TOLSTOY

  PRELUDE

  LIKENESS

  VITALITY AND ITS COUNTERPART

  THE ARTIST

  SELF-PORTRAITURE

  CRISIS AND TRANSFORMATION

  THE ARTIFICIAL CHRISTIAN

  DOCTRINE

  STRUGGLE FOR REALIZATION

  A DAY IN TOLSTOY’S LIFE

  RESOLVE AND TRANSFIGURATION

  THE FLIGHT TO GOD

  ENVOY

  CHRONOLOGY OF STEFAN ZWEIG’S LIFE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS BY STEFAN ZWEIG AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH and SECONDARY LITERATURE by Randolph J. Klawiter

  ~ eBook Publisher’s note ~

  Adepts in Self-Portraiture was first published in English in 1928 by Viking Press, translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul. We have introduced some minor updates to this translation to make this eBook more accessible to the contemporary reader.

  British spellings such as favour, defence or sabre have been Americanized. Terms no longer in use such as ere, forsooth, athwart or twixt have been updated. We have also adopted the spelling now used for names such as Dostoeffsky, Chekoff or Kutusoff. We have also italicized non-English words if they are not between quotation marks, for example carbonari, lorgnon, carpe diem, duma or hidalgo.

  Plunkett Lake Press

  Lexington, Massachusetts

  November 2011

  INTRODUCTION

  The proper study of mankind is man.

  POPE

  In the series of volumes whose general title is Master Builders, I am trying to analyze the distinctive types of the creative will, and to illustrate these various types by a description of personalities characteristic of each. This third volume of the series (the first to be published in English) is at once counterpart of the first and second, and their supplement. The Struggle with the Daimon showed Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche as so many variants of the tragic personality driven onward by elemental urges, by demonic energy — as so many variants of the temperament which, in its movement towards the infinite, strides over itself and over the outer world. Three Masters contemplated Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky as types of epic world-shapers who in the cosmos of their novels create a second reality side by side with the real world known to us all. Adepts in Self-Portraiture takes us along a road which leads, not like The Struggle with the Daimon towards the infinite, and not like Three Masters into the real world, but back into itself. For the adept in self-portraiture, the aim is to disclose the microcosm of his own ego, rather than to depict the macrocosm, the plenitude of existence. Unconscious though it be, this is the purpose of his art; no reality is so important to him as the reality of his own life. Whereas the imaginative writer who creates new worlds beside the real world of objective experience, a writer whose gaze is fixed on the outer world, the extrovert, merges his ego so thoroughly in the objective that the ego is no longer discernible (Shakespeare is the supreme example) — the writer whose gaze is turned inward, the introvert, makes everything in the real world lead back into his own personality, so that his writings tend before all to be expositions of his own ego. No matter what form he may choose, the drama, the epic poem, lyric verse, or autobiography, he will unawares make his own self the medium and the center of all his works, so that every one of them will primarily be an example of self-portraiture. The present volume is designed to expound the characteristics of these subjectively minded artists, and of autobiography as their typical method of expression.

  I know that my readers will be startled rather than convinced to hear me utter in one breath these three names, Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy. What possible standard of values can be applied at one and the same time to an amoral rapscallion such as Casanova (to whom many would even dispute the title of artist), and to a man like Tolstoy, filled with heroic ethical purpose, and in addition a creative artist of the first rank? But when I put these three side by side in one book, I do not imply that they stand side by side on the same spiritual plane. On the contrary their names symbolize three levels which are superposed so as to represent successively higher species of the same genus; they represent ascending gradations of the same creative function, self-portraiture.

  Casanova is the lowest, the primitive gradation. In him we have naïve self-portraiture, a simple record of deeds and happenings, without any attempt to appraise them, or to study the deeper working of the self.

  In Stendhal, self-portraiture has reached a higher level, the psychological. Here a simple report, a mere record of the curriculum vitae, is not felt to be adequate. The ego has grown inquisitive as to itself; it watches the mechanism of its own impulses; seeks the motives that actuate it in doing certain things and leaving others undone. A new perspective emerges, arising out of the binocular vision of the ego as subject and object, out of the twofold biography of the internal and the external. The observer observes himself, the one who feels, investigates his own feelings. The subjective, the mental life, has entered the field of vision, which is no longer completely occupied by the things of the outer world.

  With Tolstoy, this spiritual self-contemplation attains its highest level, inasmuch as it has now become an ethico-religious self-portraiture. The keen observer describes his own life; the skilled psychologist records the reflex actions that are aroused by his own sensations: besides this, a new factor is at work, the inexorable eye of conscience. Every word is scrutinized as to its truth, every motive as to its purity, every feeling as to its persistent energy. Self-portraiture, transcending the frankly inquisitive phase of self-study, has become a moral self-questioning, a self-assize. When limning himself, the artist is no longer content to depict the kind and the form of his earthly manifestations; he wants also to ascertain their meaning and to appraise the
ir worth.

  Such a master in the art of self-portraiture can fill any kind of book with his own ego. But only in one kind can he express himself fully: in autobiography, in the comprehensive epic of the ego. Each strives unwittingly towards this form, and yet few attain it in perfection; of all the varieties of literary art, autobiography, being the most responsible, is the least often successful. It is seldom essayed, so seldom that in the whole world there are scarcely a dozen autobiographies worthy of serious consideration. Rarest of all is the autobiography which takes the form of a profound psychological study; for a man of letters finds it hard to plunge from the familiar levels of straightforward literature into the deepest recesses of the soul.

  At the first glance it might seem as if self-portraiture would be an artist’s most spontaneous and easiest task. Whom does the imaginative writer know better than himself? Here is a personality whose every experience is familiar, whose secrets have all been revealed, whose most intimate chambers have been unlocked. With no further trouble than a probing of memory and a description of the facts of life, he will reveal “the truth.” He will have little more to do than to raise the curtain which hides the stage from the public. Just as no gifts for painting are requisite for photography, the unimaginative and purely mechanical reproduction of a prearranged reality, so, it would seem, the art of self-portraiture does not need an artist at all, but only an accurate registrar. On that theory, anyone you please could be a successful autobiographer.

  The history of literature shows, however, that ordinary autobiographers are nothing better than commonplace witnesses testifying to facts which chance has brought to their knowledge. A practiced artist, one with eyes to see, is needed to discern the innermost happenings of the soul; few even of the accomplished artists that have attempted autobiography have been successful in the performance of this difficult and responsible task. The path by which a man must descend from the surface into the depths, from the breathing present into the overgrown past, is dimly lit and hard to follow. Bold, indeed, must be he who would travel that path amid the abysses of his own personality, on the narrow and slippery slope between self-deception and purposive forgetfulness, down into the region where he is alone with himself, where (as when Faust went down to the Mothers) the impressions of his own life exist only as symbols of their former existence in the real world. How much patience and self-confidence he will need before he will be justified in saying the sublime words: “Vidi cor meum!” How arduous is the return from this innermost sanctuary to the conflicting world of literary creation, the return from self-contemplation to self-portraiture! If we want an index to the enormous difficulty of such an enterprise, we can find it in the rarity of success. We can count on our fingers the number of those who have achieved it. Even among autobiographies which draw near to perfection, how many gaps there are, how many hazardous leaps, how much padding and patchwork! Always, in art, that which lies nearest to hand is the most difficult; the undertaking one would have thought the most trivial proves the most formidable. Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art.

  Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem? Here an elemental impulse is at work, powerful as an obsession, the inborn longing for self-immortalization. Placed amid an unceasing flux, overshadowed by the perishable, doomed to perpetual transformation, swept away by the irresistible current of time, one molecule among milliards, we are all of us involuntarily spurred on by the intuition of immortality to seek an anchorage in something, no matter what, which shall outlast our ephemeral existence. Begetting and self-portraiture are, in the last analysis, nothing more than two different ways of expressing the same primary function, the same endeavor to cut a notch that will endure for a while in the ever-growing tree of humanity. A self-portrait, therefore, is nothing more than the most intensive form of the will to perpetuate oneself; and early attempts in this direction still lacked the developed artistry of the picture, the elaborated aid of writing. Stone blocks set up over tombs; clay tablets on which, in clumsy, wedge-shaped characters, deeds of heroes were recorded; fragments of bark inscribed with runes — such are the forms in which the earliest self-portraits have come down to us across the void spaces of the millenniums. Long since have the deeds become unmeaning, and the language of those moldering generations has grown incomprehensible. Unmistakably, nevertheless, the records betray the impulse which animated the men and the women who fashioned them, the impulse to portray themselves, to keep themselves in being, by handing down to posterity a trace of the individuality which might thus be preserved when life had fled. The obscure will to self-perpetuation is the elemental urge underlying and initiating every attempt at self-portraiture.

  Long, long afterwards, when mankind had become more knowledgeable and more conscious of self, a further conation was superadded to the crude and vague impulse towards attesting that one has existed. Now the individual began to cherish a desire to become aware of himself as an ego, to explain himself to himself for the furtherance of the consciousness of self. When, as Augustine so well phrases it, a man “becomes a problem to himself,” and sets out in search of an answer which will concern him alone among mortals, he unrolls the course of his life before himself like a map, that he may see that course more plainly and understand it better. At this stage, he does not try to explain himself to others, for he wishes, in the first instance, to explain himself to himself. Here he reaches a parting of the ways (we reach it today in every autobiography) between the description of life and the description of experience, portrayal for others and portrayal for the writer’s own sake, autobiography that is objectively directed and autobiography that is subjectively directed. Writers belonging to the former group have an impulse towards the public avowal. Confession is their characteristic method, confession before the whole world or confession to the pages of a book. Writers of the latter group are prone to soliloquy, and are usually content with writing diaries. Only persons endowed with an extremely complicated temperament such as Goethe, Stendhal, and Tolstoy, have tried to effect the thoroughgoing synthesis in this field, perpetuating themselves in both forms.

  Self-contemplation, however, is nothing more than a preparatory step, and not a momentous one. Thus far, sincerity is easy. The artist’s real torment does not come until the work of communication begins; not until then is a heroic candor demanded of the autobiographer. For no less elemental than the urge to be communicative, to let all our brethren know about the uniqueness of our personality, is the counter-urge towards secretiveness, manifesting itself in the form of shame. Just as a woman’s innermost being tingles with the longing to surrender her body, while in the conscious she is animated with the desire to keep her body for herself, so the will to confession must wrestle with the spiritual modesty which counsels reserve. Even the vainest among us (above all, the vainest among us) feels that he is not perfect, not so perfect as he would like others to think him. For that reason he would like to keep his less amiable characteristics private, would like the knowledge of his inadequacies and pettinesses to die with him, even while he wishes his likeness to live on among his fellows. Shame, therefore, is the perpetual adversary of sincerity. With flattering tongue she tries to dissuade us from describing ourselves as we really are, and advises us to depict ourselves as we should like people to see us. The artist may honestly resolve to be frank, but with feline artifice shame will lead him astray, will induce him to hide his most intimate self, to gloss over his defects. Under her promptings, all unawares, the draftsman’s hand omits or embellishes disfiguring trifles (supremely important, in the psychological sense), or idealizes characteristic traits by an adroit distribution of light and shade. One who is weak enough to follow such promptings will not achieve self-portraiture; he will not get beyond self-apotheosis or self-defense. Honest autobiography, therefore, can never be a carefree narrative. Always the writer must be on his guard against the whisperings of vanity, must strenuously ward off the temptati
ons to touch up the picture he is presenting to the world. For the very reason that nobody else can control the autobiographer’s sincerity, that nobody but himself can hold him to account, he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances; he must be witness and judge, accuser and defender, rolled into one.

  There is no armor of proof against self-trickery. However strong a cuirass we make, we can launch a bullet swift enough to pierce it, and the powers of self-deception can be intensified to cope with the powers of self-knowledge. However resolutely a man may bar the door against falsehood, she will creep in through a chink. If he study the lore of the mind that he may learn how to parry her onslaughts, she will discover a new and cleverer thrust which will get in beneath his guard. Like a panther, she will crouch in the shadows, to spring upon him when he is most unprepared. The art of self-deception is refined and sublimated by the wider experience, by the growth in psychological knowledge, designed to avert self-deception. One who manipulates truth roughly, apprentice fashion, will produce lies which are crude and easily recognizable. Not until a man has a subtle mind are his falsehoods refined, so that they can be detected only by one as subtle as himself. When thus refined, they assume the most perplexing, the most illusive forms; and their most deceptive mask is invariably the semblance of honesty. Just as snakes prefer to lurk among rocks and boulders, so the most dangerous lies are hidden in the shade of seemingly heroic admissions. When you are reading an autobiography, and come to a passage where the narrator appears amazingly frank, attacking himself ruthlessly, it behooves you to walk warily, for the probability is that these reckless avowals, these beatings of a penitent’s breast, are intended to conceal some secret which is even more dreadful. One of the arts of confession is to cover up what we wish to keep to ourselves, by boldly disclosing something far more tremendous. Part of the mystery of the sense of shame is that a man will more readily expose his most hideous and repulsive characteristics than bring to light a trifle that might make him appear ridiculous. In every autobiography, that which is above all likely to lead the writer out of the straight path is the dread of arousing the ironical laughter of his readers.