Young Ofeg's Ditties

Front matter

YOUNG OFEG’S DITTIES

BY GEORGE EGERTON.

Uniform with this.

Introductory Note

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

It has been urged upon me by many that translation is an unworthy form of literature; and with this view I entirely agree, if the translator be not in such sympathy with the writer he endeavours to give in his own tongue, as to make translation a labour of love, and not merely a branch of literary trade. In offering this necessarily poor version of these beautiful prose poems, which are an exposition of Friedrich Nietzche's triumphant doctrine of the Ego, I am not alone actuated by my individual admiration of Ola Hansson's writings, but also by a desire to make known to others one of the most remarkable writers of our day.

Ola Hansson is the youngest and most striking personality amongst Scandinavian writers. He was born on the 12th of November 1860, in Skåne (Skania), the most southern province in Sweden. His family is one of the oldest in the province, and have held the same estate for many centuries as freehold proprietors. Herr Ola's father was the first to marry an outsider, and his eldest brother the first to enter a University—for the dis- tinguishing characteristic of such families in Sweden is jealousy of innovation, tenacity in the preservation of family tradition, and intermarriage. He joined the University at Lund, and passed a brilliant examination in philosophy as one year's student, but the expectation that he would be a shining light as lecturer was not fulfilled, as he devoted himself to letters.

After his return to Skania he issued his first book, "Sensitiva Amorosa" in which he broke new ground in literature: that of physiological mysticism, with which he plumbed greater depths in the mysteries of human life than even the Ibsen, Björnson, or Strindberg problem-plays had led one to believe possible. As the niceties of his psychology and the peculiar depths of his analysis met, not alone with little understanding, but called down a storm of opprobrium and scurrilous personal attacks from the press, he left his native land and settled finally in Germany; and here he gained in a few years a leading position as poet and critic in the newer school of letters.

His fame spread from Germany to France, where attention was first drawn to him by the publication of "Young Ofeg's Ditties." His numerous lyrical and critical works have been translated into most European languages, and every new issue of his pen is hailed with eagerness. Most of his work is in striking affinity with the atmosphere of erotic mysticism that pervades the paintings of Mr Burne Jones, so much so that Amor and Psyche, King Cophetua, and Chant d'Amour might serve as illustrations of some of Ola Hansson's moods, save that they are lacking a little in the sensuous intensity of the latter's work.

Something of the Skanian atmosphere has crept into his nature: the flat land, the ever-varying delicate nuances of the seasons, the shifting lights, the wayward moods peculiar to each time of the year, all find echo in his impressionable soul.

As poet, psychological novelist, masterly essayist, and individual critic, he is one of the most striking literary phenomena of the age—he is the incarnation of the nervous life of to-day. He is a specialist in psychology, a pathological hunter in the terra incognita of the human soul; laying bare hidden places with the sure, deft touch of a skilled surgeon. He writes by the light of some inner illumination; feels with delicate intellectual antennæ uncommon to ordinary humanity. He is a master in the diagnosis of the elusive emotions that flit like shadows across the hearts and minds of men. His writings are distinguished by melancholy sentiment, delicate, dainty joy, and sympathetic sorrow with the fruitless struggle of man with adverse circumstances, and the enigmatical forces in his own being. The peculiar rhythm of his prose adapts itself to his moods, fixes the fleeting expressions, the changeful colours, and the scarcely audible undertones of life.

He is an aristocrat in letters, for the few, not the many. "Sensitiva Amorosa" and "Parais" (Pariahs), are the most individual of his many novels; they give the psycho-physiological key to all his subsequent work.

As critic he aims to grip the characteristic, the individual, in a writer's nature, to probe to the man behind the work—to interpret both. "Interpreters and Seers," "Young Scandinavia," "Friedrich Nietzche, His Personality and His System," with a pamphlet on "Materialism in Belles Lettres," have placed him in the foremost rank as a critic.

As writer he has worked against the heaviest odds. He published most of his earliest works without the slightest pecuniary return—and he has been absolutely true to the principles of his art.

As a man who has seen all, staked all, lost faith, and is yet not embittered, his personality is interesting.

He watches the game of life with a ('tis true) somewhat weary interest, but his heart is full of pity, and his noble sensitive soul answers to every chord in the existence of humanity. His keenness of vision pertains almost to second sight, he reads men, with the complexity of their motives and the duality of their being, with appalling ease. He is a poet—who is likewise a seer.

GEORGE EGERTON.

Ditty 1

I.

Scandinavia was hushed in the greatness and silence of a winter's night. The sky was thickly studded with stars and the countries slept.

The moon rose. It gleamed upon Sulitelma's crest and up from the white farms in Skåne. The shadows lay in long slants, gliding toward the East softly and imperceptibly, as thoughts that have never found words; and the stars glimmered so vividly, that if a living being had been there he might have heard how they trembled through the silence.

But no living thing appeared in the night, for all things slept: in field and wood, on sea and cabin, in village and town.

Suddenly a form rose up by Kolmården's woods, taller than the tallest pine tree, broad in the shoulders as Kölen's ridge. He cast a shadow across the land like a Titan's pall, and it was so long that it enveloped all Stockholm, and dropped its other end into the Gulf of Bothnia.

And his eyes had the sinister, furtive look of a criminal's; and when he lifted his face upwards, so that the moonlight fell upon it, it revealed such depths of disquiet and tortured conscience that the shadows paused and the stars ceased to tremble. And the form groaned—groaned with a despair so unspeakable, so unfathomable, that children shrank in their cradles and grown-up folk had bad dreams. And the night stood silently as if waiting to hear something; but no living thing seemed to exist except the solitary figure on Kolmården.

Yet there was another awake: the great Spirit, he who is so great that he can never be seen by mortal eye—by some called Time, by others Fate, by others again Justice or the Judge.

He was reposing in space, Orion's Belt girding his loins, his armpits resting on the wagon pole of Charles' Wain, his hair of grizzled eld streaming out betwixt the hemispheres called by men the Milky Way,—and his eye gleamed in his forehead, and the light of it fell through the Northern Night over the solitary figure on Kolmården. "Judas!"—the word echoed through the night with a sound as when stones fall upon ice. Then the figure cowered as under the grip of a giant's hand, and his eyes stared wildly about him, and a look as of millions of stifled screams of terror gathered upon his face. But the night stood silently around him, and no living being seemed to exist.

"Judas!" it echoed a second time. And he knew not whence the voice came, for the great Spirit is so infinitely great that he can never be seen by mortal eye; and when he looked at the stars that shivered, he thought it was they who had spoken; and when he watched the slanting shadows he thought it was they; and when he noticed the silence and the solitude around him, he made sure that it was their voice and nought else that he had heard.

"Judas!" it echoed for the third time, and everything spoke, and nothing spoke, and it was outside him, and it was inside him. And then he laughed,—laughed as a man laughs in the madness of terror; and it echoed through the night, and he listened to his own laugh; and when a while had passed, it still sounded as if a hundred thousand people were laughing far off in the midst of the sleeping towns.

And again the voice sounded: "What sin have you committed to-day?"

"I have not sinned to-day," answered the figure.

"Then why is your conscience troubled?"

"My conscience is not troubled."

"Then why did you shrink when you heard my voice? and why did you groan? I will tear the bandages off the wounds in your conscience, so you may see that they still bleed; I will conjure forth all your sins, and they will grip your soul like bloodhounds. So set your heels against the side of the cliff, and wind your arm about the wood, for your legs will sink under you at what you are about to hear."

Then the figure shivered from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, so that Kolmården's woods bent as if the storm had whirled through them. And he sank upon his knees, and he dashed his head upon the rocks and cried:—

"I am not Judas! I am not Judas!"

"You are the corpse-blood of life, the corruption of humanity. Your soul is leprous, your heart's blood black, your brain filth. Amongst the children of men there is not one to be found who is such a shame to the race as you. Were one to ransack all prisons and all the dwelling-places of vice—never would one find your equal. For you are the silent consenter, you have kept silent; kept silent all your life, kept silent when you ought to have spoken, bartered your soul for silence' sake, lost your peace of conscience. 'Tis true you never jeered at him who stood in the pillory, but kept silent; you never held the pincers whilst others tore the heart out of the body of the witness to the truth, but you kept silent; you were not amongst those who harnessed pregnant women to your chariot, but you used them and kept silent; you never lashed your labourers to greater exertion until the blood spurted from the poor broken down wretches, but you looked on while others did it, and you kept silent. You would have kept silent if your own father had been dragged by his grey hairs, your own mother violated in your presence.

"But mark now my words, when the day of judgment comes, the great day of doom, when all the races of the earth shall be judged, and all the worlds will be empty, and eternity stand waiting in silence and trembling—then I will cause the portals of my mansion to be closed: and I will arise and say: Ye all, no matter what sins ye have committed, they are forgiven ye—ye weak ones who could never resist the tempter, and ye leaders who tempted, I forgive ye. Purge your hands from impurity and blood, and clothe ye in festive garments, and enter ye into the everlasting joys! I forgive ye, all! All except one!

"And then I will point to you, you silent consenter, and I will cause the doors of my mansions to be thrown open, and I will shew you the desolate, empty worlds, and say:—You who let injustice be, well knowing it was injustice; you who looked on coldly, although you had hands to help; you who betrayed your brethren by silent consent, when you might have saved them by a word; you who possessed the truth and spake it not; who walked in silence past the interminable row of witnesses crucified for the sake of truth;—you cowardly man of silence, whose name is Judas—forgiveness will never be yours, never in eternity. You shall wander through the desolate spheres, and you will never be able to pause, and you will never find death, and the spheres will never cease to be, and they will be always a little desolate; and the silence will drive you mad, and you shall howl like dogs at midnight, and you shall scream like a man possessed, and shriek with laughter in the madness of terror as you laughed a while ago, but no one will hear you, no one answer you, nought but the echo of your own voice, rolling on through the dead infinities, the one sound, the one living thing to be found."

The figure sprang up and his shadow fell across the moonlit land like the grotesquely magnified shadow of a human head upon a white wall; and he stretched his hands heavenwards, and his eyes darted out of their sockets, and he fell on his face, crashing like a giant tree. And the dawn flamed, and the cocks crew the land around, and men woke in their beds bathed in a nightmare of sweat.

Ditty 2

II.

Mankind seemed trivial and life meaningless. The thoughts of some were lighter than feathers, and of others more void than ether. And although I tested all human efforts under the magnifier, they never seemed larger than the millionth part of a grain of sand, and all worths were as circles or cyphers.

As the day waned towards eventide I went out into the forest. Autumn had come, and it was already far advanced towards the night of the year. The ground was sodden under my feet, and the water trickled down the trunks of the green trees, and only a few skeleton leaves still hung upon the naked tree tops.

But high above me the storm raged and the crown of the forest shivered. It lulled, it rose again, and I heard voices, not feeble, such as of men, but the mighty ones that echo through the spheres.

First came a lament, wild, piercing, as if a knife had been thrust through the heart of the universe. That was the forest that writhed.

"Why do you complain?" roared the Storm.

"I am weary," answered the Forest, "weary in my very soul, weary with age and suffering. Now I am shedding my leaves, then I shall become white again, and yet I shall not die, for again the sap will rise and the green leaves shoot. If only one could die—die! I am weary, weary of my very soul."

"You tired of life, who have scarcely yet begun to live! Shake off your rotten leaves and feel how already the new Spring begins to well up in you. Look at me who saw you birthed and who will see you die, who lived long before Nature even dreamed of you, and who will still live when she will have lost you even as a memory. Look at me: I have borne the weight of all the worlds upon my shoulders, through years for whose endless length there exists no number, and yet I am as straight in the back as when I played and leaped an urchin over the water wastes before the egg of the world had got its shell. Through me it is that mankind connect their thoughts;—for I am the swiftest of all messengers. Do you not see the load I bear upon my back and in my hands?"

"What is it? I know it not, it looks so strange, and I never hear aught from men."

"Not for two thousand years have I carried so heavy a burden before; for the race that lives now has been working at the sorriest smiths'-work known to man: forging the screws for its own coffin."

And the Storm scattered a handful out over the lands.

"Is that death you are sowing?" asked the Forest.

"It is fire, it is sulphur," answered the Storm, "it is poison and two-edged swords. For mankind shall shuffle off the old coils."

"Relate," said the Forest.

And the Storm paused awhile, resting like a bird on its wings, and its keen, wise eyes scanned all the countries round.

"Two thousand years ago there lived a man called Jesus. He it was who first said that the weak should possess the earth, and as the descendants of the slaves became rich and powerful they either burned at the stake or hanged on the gallows all those who refused to believe their belief.

"But below the few who sat on thrones and ate off gold—slaves' sons who had become masters—stood new millions of slaves. They thronged outside the portals of the masters' strongholds, one black inconceivable mass, that peoples the earth; and whenever they saw windows gleaming, or heard the clink of gold or men who were joyous, they forgot that the masters too were the sons of slaves, and they stoned his image, which was placed outside the city gates, with the face of a dove and the body of an ascetic. And they raised a cry of vengeance against their own God and against his votaries, their brethren, just because the latter were inside, whilst they themselves were shut out.

"Do you hear the cry? Yesterday I raised it upon my wings, to-day it shrieks with me across the world, for the hour of change is at hand, and the kingdom of the slaves is divided against itself.

"Do you hear how it batters against the iron portals; do you hear how the windows crash; do you hear how the image totters on the ancient altar, worm-eaten wood as it was? Do you hear those strokes as of a giant wielding an axe? Do you know what it is? It is the slaves chopping the tree in whose crown they themselves have built their nest, but that is so great that they do not notice it is their own tree. They imagine it is their enemies', for their God has stricken them with blindness, and all slaves are stupid. To-morrow the world of the slave will burn and they will themselves be the incendiaries. And the night will be scarlet and my breath will be hot and blasting, so that even you will shrivel up as a shaving.

"And when the new day dawns and the sun rises, the kingdoms of the earth will lie in ashes, and the tree of the slaves will be a charred trunk, and the sap will have dried in its veins. But upon the desolate plain two hosts will stand opposed; the hordes of the one will be reckoned in millions, for the slaves will always be the many, and they will be like unto a black cloud on the morning sky. Those who stand opposite them will be few, but they will shine with the brightness of dawn. And then there will be a stir in the black cloud, and a man will step forward in the likeness of a slave with a black-avised face, cunning eyes, and low hair-covered forehead; and then a gleam will appear in the sun-host, and again a man will step forward, but of his beauty no man can say aught, for such an one has not yet been seen upon earth, for it is the Master, the only true sovereign, he who was stolen as a child by the demon of the slaves and left to perish miserably, and who, unknowing of his birth-right, grew up in the wilderness where no slave had set his foot; and then the last great duel will be fought, the duel between the master and the slave, the cloud and the suns. And such a cry of jubilation as I then shall raise has never yet been heard upon earth."

And the Storm rose once more upon its wings and floated away, and the woods stood still and listened, and when I lifted up my eyes the sky behind the naked forest crowns was glittering with stars.

Ditty 3

III.

There was once upon a time a manikin who wandered through the woods the whole night long, where the glow worms sparkled in the gloom. And when the morning came he stood at the fringe of the wood and watched the sun rise above the ocean.

Then the manikin sat down on the shore and wept. And when he raised his eyes again he saw the great Sea God resting on the surface of the waters. He lay stretched in all his length, with his arms folded, resting his head on his hands. His robe of green silk floated loosely round his body and glistened humidly when the waves lapped; and his hair streamed far out to the uttermost end of the sea like a broad streak of sunlight; and his green eyes rested on the manikin, who sat upon the strand and wept.

"Why do you cry?" asked he.

"I've lost my way," answered the manikin. "I wandered the whole night through, and I am weary. I want to sleep, but I cannot; I want to go home, but I hate home; I am sick of life."

"Well, you have got death," said the Sea God.

"I can't die," answered the manikin, and he shuddered; "life has been so beautiful, and I am so young."

"Well, then, go to my brother Pan," said the Sea God.

At that the manikin laughed ironically:

"He offered me flowers, but when I went to pluck them they turned into butterflies and flew on their way, and when I caught a butterfly a maggot remained in my hand. Your brother Pan is a rogue."

"Well, then, come to me," said the Sea God.

"What will you give me?"

"I will give you salt and sunshine, and a great prospect"

"You are so big—you frighten me."

The Sea God lifted a periwinkle in his palm: "And yet I find room in this tiny thing," said he.

"But you look so stern, and your face is so lone-lorn."

Then the Sea God laughed, and his laugh rippled like sun-ray across the sea; and he lifted his hand, and the depths parted, and the manikin gazed into a crimson coral cave slung with delicate green creepers, and its walls were a mosaic of pearls.

"But I'm bound," he cried, in distress of soul. "Let me go! for I love a woman."

Again the Sea God laughed at the manikin.

"Child," said he, "you say my brother Pan is a rogue, and yet you have never found out his greatest piece of roguery."

And he dipped his little finger in the ocean, and a whirlpool arose, flinging great drops of spray that resembled green pearls, and foam that shimmered like unto a silver white veil in the sunlight. And under the veil the manikin saw a woman's face, fairer than any he had hitherto seen. And the Sea God breathed upon it, and it vanished as a puff of smoke, dissolved into space.

Then the manikin stood up, and the ground slipped from under his feet, and slid away and rolled itself together far under the horizon, and he saw himself as a little dark speck on the boundless ocean under the boundless sky, and there was a silence as if all life had died, and the sun shone solitary in the universe.

And the manikin nestled with a feeling of unfathomable security close to the heart of the mighty solitude.

Ditty 4

IV.

I was twenty years old when I went out into the world to seek happiness. I wandered both long and unceasingly, I wandered both far and near. Yet I found her not. The world lay like an inert mass, life lacked colour, and men concerned me not. There was nothing to which I could attach myself, and I was far from sufficient to myself.

So I consulted books. "Love a woman," said they, "for love alone can reveal to you the hidden meanings of things and the beauty of existence. Love a woman; and you will hear harps in the air, and feel sunshine in your soul, and happiness will fly into your mouth of its own accord, like the roast sparrows of Schlaraffenland."

Then I set out to seek the woman, and I found her one day at the forest quell. Every morning and every evening for five years I bore her water cruse, and so she became mine. But when I had owned her for three days and three nights, I saw an earwig in the apple of her eye, and a maggot in the corner of her mouth, and I left her.

Again I consulted books. "Men never find happiness," said they, "unless they find hearth and home, and wife and child." So I fastened a hobble to my leg, and put my head into the social halter; but when I found that the iron still ate into my soul and that they wanted me to grind the seed I desired to sow for a future ingathering into meal for the common larder, I jumped up, turned my house on end, and went out into the King's highway.

And one man pointed a finger at me, and the other called insulting names, and the children pelted me with stones, and the grown-up folk with rotten fruit, and every window was propped full of jeering people. Then I quitted the town and went out into the world, and ascended a high mountain. Behind me, down in the valleys, lay the dwelling-places of men, with all their thousand towns; I had an endless bird's-eye view of them, and they appeared as a single ant heap, but in front of me the mountains sank perpendicularly into an abyss of the bottom of which I could get no glimpse; and a murmur whispered in the air as when a multitude speaks, thousands of voices and yet only one, and it was a human voice but as if it came from a giant riding on the whirl of the storm:—

"What is called happiness in the world you have forsaken is nothing more than the petty phantasies of petty minds, a toy for children; but the great happiness in the face of which you shrink as you shrink now before the mountain cleft, she is fearful in her majesty, as is everything great. If you dare not the leap, turn back, for then you are fit for the small happiness of the world; but if you desire to attain the greater, hurl yourself headlong into the depths. But bear in mind: your fate is concealed from you, no one knows what the black gulf hides except those who have seen it with their own eyes, and there is no return journey for those once down. Dare—win—with shut eyes—with set teeth2"

I am going to the new world that he alone sees who has quitted the abodes of men, and from which there is no return road. And my thoughts circle round my head like birds, and the most delicate moods of my soul take butterfly form, and my dreams wax like green leaves and many-coloured flowers on the strand of a sea in which they are mirrored, and the very seas are my own soul, and the blue sky is arched above my head by the most ethereal of my fancies.

Ditty 5

V.

When wine began to lose its flavour, and Eve lost her one front tooth, I was seized with the desire to solve the enigma of life. I spent five years dissecting a fly's leg, for I had heard that one must seek the great in the infinitesimal, and that the manifold scheme of creation lay in one blade of grass; but when at the end of five years I took a rest and lifted my eyes to the heavens, I discovered I was sitting in a hole deep down in the ground, and that I had lost sight of the whole world, and that it was only with difficulty that I could catch a glimpse of a strip of blue sky by straining back my head. So I left the fly's leg alone and climbed out of the hole. But I was almost dazed by the light of day, and I sat in the midst of the sunshine and richly coloured nature blind as an owl.

In the seventh year I met an old wise man who told me that what I had supposed to be the tree of knowledge only bore unripe fruit. Then the old wise man taught me that absolutely no materials were needed to build up one's house other than the mathematical lines of pure reason. So I hammered away right merrily, and it went apace like a noiseless dance. But one day a tiny zephyr wafted by, and the whole concern fluttered away, and I watched it floating in the air like a rift of gossamer.

Then I shook the old wise man by his old white beard and bade him go and order himself a coffin, if it be that he could not fashion one for himself out of his mathematical dots and lines. And I closed my eyes and lay musing in an agony of soul. Night came, and suddenly I felt the pain snap as the husk about a seed, and I felt something grow in me, something that was sinking its roots into my very heart, rising as sap through my veins; and leaves, uncurled out of their sheaths, and they had colour and form but not of this world, and when morning came I saw in my soul's dawning a blossom, the great half opened blossom of a strange flower. And of this flower there is only one stock, and it is my blood that waters its roots, and the plant grows inside, invisible to all but me. But I know that when the blossom opens I shall find at its core the great Unknown.