United States or Mayotte ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He, like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and De Maupassant, was summoned before the bar of justice for outraging public morals by the publication of his play, The Box of Pandora, the sequel to Erdgeist. He had to withdraw the book and expunge certain offensive passages, but he escaped fine and imprisonment, as did his publisher, Bruno Cassirer.
When Faust claims affinity with the Erdgeist, the spirit tells him to seek affinities with beings which he can comprehend. The commandment which forbade the representation of God in a bodily form, forbids the poet equally to make God describe his feelings and his purposes. Where the poet would create a character he must himself comprehend it first to its inmost fibre.
Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the meaning thereof? "It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes. Strange enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and Tailored.
For me all the man is summed up in the cry of one of his characters in Erdgeist: "Who gives me back my faith in mankind, will give me back my life." An idealist, surely. The last time I saw him was at the Richard Strauss festival in Stuttgart, October, 1912. He had changed but little and still reminded me of both David Belasco and an Irish Catholic priest.
Missionaries translate the latter word 'devil, and make it signify an evil spirit living in the upper regions, or our popular heaven, and reigning over Abonsamkru, the last home of souls, or rather shades of the wicked. Thus sasabonsam would be equivalent to Erdgeist, Waldteufel, or Kobold, no bad nickname for a miner.
Word Of The Day