coming as they do after all Manfred’s vacillation upon just this point, indicate the final resolution of despair to brave all possible wretchedness from without for the sake of feeling within, in all its strength, though but for a moment, the fierce defiance of the rebellious Titan. Hungry for deeds, finding nothing to do, fearing the possible future life, and hating the present, the hero at last resorts to an untrue but stirring assertion of absolute personal independence of all the hateful universe here and hereafter; —
- “Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me.
- I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey —
- But was my own destroyer, and will be
- My own hereafter.”
This is pessimism that overleaps itself. The outcome of self -analyzing romanticism is the determination to build afresh a world that shall be nobler than this poor world of decaying passive emotions. Feeling will not do. Manfred attains something by action, even though he first acts in the moment of death. Doing work of some kind is, then, that to which we are necessarily driven. But if the action of defiance can make death tolerable, why might not some kind of activity make life tolerable? Is not the worthy life then to be found, not in emotion, but in work? Is not the ideal state the ideal activity, not the ideal feeling? This suggestion had been at the foundation of the prototype of Manfred, the Faust of Goethe.
Praise of the first part of Goethe’s “Faust” is nowadays superfluous. Doubtless the work is a
