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RO M A N T I C I S M ,
HELLENISM,
AND THE
PHILOSOPHY
O F N AT U R E
william s . dav i s
Romanticism, Hellenism, and the
Philosophy of Nature
 William S. Davis

Romanticism,
Hellenism, and the
Philosophy of Nature
William S. Davis
Program in Comparative Literature
Colorado College
Colorado Springs, CO, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-91291-2    ISBN 978-3-319-91292-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91292-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942750

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International
Publishing AG part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For my parents
 Preface

This book is a work of comparative literature. It investigates connections

between philosophy and literature in the Romantic era, or what is called
the Age of Goethe within German studies. More specifically it is interested
in intersections between the absolute idealism of Schelling and Hölderlin—
their response to Fichte’s response to Kant—and metaphors of dynamic
creativity and oneness that arise in both literary and philosophical texts in
the years around 1800. It is also a study of some aspects of the broader
movement of Hellenism that was so powerfully in evidence in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The idealization of “Greece”
and the conception of nature that arose from absolute idealism, most
clearly evidenced by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature),
work strategically together in an attempt to carve out a space for nature,
beauty, and eros within the idealist system, or in response to it. Philosophy
becomes poetry, poetry philosophy.
This is not a study of influence, nor of the way in which philosophical
ideas find expression in literature. It is about the emergence of metaphors
and images, within both philosophical and literary texts, that represent nat-
ural objects as vibrantly alive, metaphors that are connected with “Greece”
as a lost unity that must be imaginatively reassembled as an aesthetic whole.
This study is by no means an attempt at a comprehensive view of the subject
(as if that were possible). It turns to only a few of the vast number of pos-
sible textual examples in the hopes of elucidating some of the discursive
reactions to Kant and Fichte that arise around 1800. It engages three
responses specifically: intellectual intuition, Naturphilosophie, and
aesthetic/erotic intuition. Or, put less technically, it investigates: ­fantasies of

vii
viii PREFACE

becoming one with everything, the view that the universe is comprised by a
single living organism within which everything is dynamically connected,
and the notion that our problems can only be solved through beauty—both
as art and as eroticized objects of desire. All three strategic responses func-
tion most fruitfully in an imaginary Greece figured as a wholeness lost that
might yet again be found, “on classical ground,” as Goethe puts it.
As a literary scholar primarily, I am interested always in the interpreta-
tion of poetry and fiction, in new possibilities of reading that arise, even
for canonical texts, through new contexts and productive engagements
with theory. Each of the literary authors who appears in this study had a
connection to absolute idealism. Hölderlin helped create it. Goethe felt
compelled to find a sort of peace with it. Percy Shelley immersed himself
in it via Coleridge and his own study. Byron, I believe, absorbed its basic
tenets only to shrug them off in favor of a less ideal mode of literary rep-
resentation. Each of these connections opens new possibilities for reading
literary texts. The worship of Greece, the celebration of a World Soul that
disperses itself through all of nature, the fantasies of melding with nature
and with objects of erotic desire—as they appear in the literary examples I
examine here—all become more meaningful if we understand something
of the philosophical aspect of the discourse from which they emerge.
As for the philosophy, my attempt is to provide a clear account of the
basic concepts of Schelling’s philosophy of nature within a literary-cultural
context. He produced an enormous amount of writing within only a few
years in the 1790s (and at an astonishingly young age), much of which is
not accessible to those without German and who have not immersed
themselves in the vocabulary of German Idealism. One aim of this study is
thus to make key aspects of Schelling’s thought from the period more
accessible to literary scholars interested in intersections between poetics
and absolute idealism, specifically as it concerns the philosophy of nature.
Although Schelling’s theory guides my reading of literary texts, literature
likewise helps to make sense of what the philosophy is getting at. Schelling
(under the influence of Goethe) even attempted to become a poet himself
for a few years in the 1790s. Metaphors central to Schelling’s philosophy of
the period (the World Soul, for example), arise in the poetry of Hölderlin,
Goethe, and Shelley as well. We might in fact argue that reading Goethe, for
example, aids our understanding of Schelling as much as the other way
around. I thus contend that we can better understand Goethe’s lyric poem
“Weltseele” (“World Soul”) if we understand ­something of its discursive
connection to Schelling’s Von der Weltseele (On the World Soul), while
 PREFACE
   ix

Schelling’s conception of nature as vibrantly alive and animated by a single

and omnipresent force also depends upon poetical constructions, as becomes
more evident when read in the context of Goethe’s poem. A central tenet of
Romanticism broadly understood, after all, is that poetry and philosophy are
meant to form part of a single enterprise.
“Greece” within the Romantic imagination was so overdetermined that
it could be used to nearly any purpose a poet or philosopher might
require—from the image of everything we have lost, to the image of
everything we might yet again acquire. Philosophy, nature, beauty, eros,
art (not to mention nice weather)—it is all to be found in an imaginary
“Greece.” This book looks mainly at two variations of this Romantic
Hellenism: Greece as site of aesthetic perfection and Greece as a site of the
archaic origins of what becomes Western Culture. Each literary artist in
question here claims that Greece, in some way, made him a poet (even
Byron). Goethe, who invented his own form of classicism in the late eigh-
teenth century, appeals to classical-era Greece as the only model we have,
in the fallen modern world, of what art should be. Hölderlin deploys
imagined Greek landscapes and islands as the site of the original pure
“being” from which self-consciousness has pried us away. Shelley fanta-
sizes about erotic union on an Aegean island where it is possible to meld
with everything. Byron, eschewing an apotheosizing Hellenism, looks to
ancient Greece as a political ideal, as the emblem of personal and political
freedom the revolutionary might again wring from history.

Colorado Springs, CO William S. Davis

 Acknowledgements

In the creation of this book I have received vast support over the years. I
wish to acknowledge the renowned Goethe scholar, Katharina Mommsen,
who first introduced me to the connection between Goethe’s poem
“Weltseele” and Schelling’s philosophy of nature when I was her student
at Stanford University long ago in the late twentieth century.
Much of this project is indebted to the Schelling-Forschungsstelle in
Berlin, which is directed by Dr. Elke Hahn. Going back to the early years
of this century, Elke and I have shared numerous discussions around top-
ics related to all things Schelling. She has also aided my work on Schelling
and Naturphilosophie immensely through opening resources to me, sug-
gesting avenues for research, and providing supportive help and feedback.
Some of the ideas from Chap. 2 derive from a paper I gave in a colloquium
she organized in Berlin in the summer of 2013, “Im Grunde die Wahrheit”:
Bild und Reflexion in Frühromantik und Philosophie, and which later
appeared in Berliner Schelling Studien under the title, “Lebende
Landschaften: mit Hölderlin und Schelling in Griechenland.”
Thanks to colleagues at the Colorado College, especially to Genevieve
Love and Eric Perramond for mutual support in our scholarly efforts. I
likewise wish to thank the librarians of Colorado College and of the
Newberry Library, Chicago, for their help in acquiring materials necessary
to complete this book.
I am also grateful to Susan Ashely, Professor of History and former
Dean of Faculty at the Colorado College, for envisioning Mediterranean
Studies and obtaining a Mellon Foundation grant that allowed faculty of
the college to create courses and conduct research on topics related to the

xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mediterranean world. My work in Romantic Hellenism began in 2010

with the support of this grant. Since then, and with additional grants from
the Colorado College Division of Humanities, I have been able to teach
courses, conduct research, attend conferences, and enjoy the healthful
Mediterranean lifestyle in Greece for a portion of each year.
Some of my ideas on Byron and Greece that appear in Chap. 5 first
emerged as a lecture I gave at the Athens Centre, Athens, Greece, in June
of 2013, “One with Everything: Romantics on Acrocorinth.” My thanks
go out especially to Yannis Zervos, executive director; Rosemary Donelley,
program director; Isabella Frangouli, assistant director; and Olympia
Kappatou, student coordinator, of the Athens Centre. Their support over
the years since my first visit there in 2010 has been a tremendous benefit
to my teaching and study of Hellenism.
I am especially grateful to my dear friends and colleagues, Lisa Hughes
and Barry Sarchett, for introducing me to Greece, and for remaining
always my fellow travelers in, and students of, all things related to Greek
language, culture, and history. Our times together in Greece have enriched
my life immeasurably. You know that this book would never have come
about without your friendship and support in the “light and air” of Greece.
I also thank my parents, Garold and Norma Davis—scholars and teach-
ers both—for setting me on the path of inquiry and the love and words
and ideas that allowed me to become a scholar myself.
Finally, I thank my wife and fellow adventurer, Kelly, for endless friend-
ship, patience, and love.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Romantic Hellenism, the Philosophy of Nature,

and Subjective Anxiety   1

2 Intellectual Intuition: With Hölderlin, “Lost in the Wide

Blue”  13

3 The Philosophy of Nature: Goethe, Schelling, and the

World Soul  49

4 Aesthetic/Erotic Intuition: Hölderlin, Shelley, and the

Islands of the Archipelago  87

5 Coda: With Byron on Acrocorinth 135

Index 151

xiii
 A Note on Editions and Translations
from the German

No facility with the German language is required for the reading of this
book. All quotations from the German are provided in English translation.
For longer literary texts I provide the German original as well as the trans-
lation. In the interest of space, I cite most philosophical passages in trans-
lation only, with important German terminology provided in parentheses.
I cite professional translations when possible, so that readers who do not
have German can refer to the appropriate texts. All other translations are
my own (including from Schelling’s works that have not yet be translated
into English). With each translation from German-language texts I also
reference the original source so that scholars working in German can easily
locate the passages in question.
For Schelling’s works I cite the Manfred Schröter edition of 1928 pri-
marily, using the volume and page numbers he provides from the original
edition. This allows scholars working with any edition of Schelling’s col-
lected works to locate citations easily. Where it is necessary, I also cite the
Münchner Ausgabe, which, at this time, remains a work in progress. For
Goethe’s works, I rely chiefly on the Weimarer Ausgabe. For Hölderlin, I
reference the grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe. As noted above, for all of these
texts I employ professional translations when available.

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Romantic Hellenism,

the Philosophy of Nature, and Subjective
Anxiety

By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the repercussions of Kant’s

critiques had extended beyond philosophy proper into wide-ranging forms
of cultural expression. Kantianism, now largely out of the hands of the
philosopher of Königsberg himself, had become a cultural phenomenon
that, however exaggerated or distorted public perception of Kant’s ideas
may have been, inspired some and exasperated others. Of those who paid
attention to such things, some were fired with passion for the new ideas.
Certain young men took up Fichte’s response to Kant, for example, more
as a lifestyle of boldly personal freedom than simply as of a system of
knowledge—an attitude he encouraged himself.1 Others were less enthu-
siastic. Goethe in 1794 accused Schiller of being so under the sway of a
subject-focused Kantianism that he had come to see nature as a mere
“idea.”2 The young Heinrich Kleist suffered a “Kant crisis” in 1801 that
plunged him into a dark epistemological depression.3 Fresh from the
Tübingen theological seminary in the mid-1790s, three friends and for-
mer roommates—Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schelling, and
G.W.F. Hegel—though trained by the state of Swabia for a life in the
Protestant clergy, tossed aside all plans for service within the Lutheran
church. Inspired by the revolution of the spirit they encountered in the
new philosophy (as well as by political revolution in France), all three were
caught up in the philosophical issue of their day, and, in their own ways,
would devote their lives to coming to terms with it. Schelling, the young-
est of the three, framed the central question succinctly in his lectures at the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

W. S. Davis, Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91292-9_1
2 W. S. DAVIS

University of Jena in 1797: “How is perception within me possible?”4

How, in other words, am I to understand the relation between myself as a
subject here, and the otherness that appears beyond my subjectivity over
there?
This book is about a mode of response to this question that emerges at
an intersection of philosophy and literature in the years around 1800.
From a philosophical perspective, we can view this response to the ques-
tion of the borders of the self as part of what Frederick Beiser calls “the
struggle against subjectivism.” He has in mind discursive strategies against
“the doctrine that the subject has an immediate knowledge only of its own
ideas, so that it has no knowledge beyond its circle of consciousness.”5
This fear of a lack of reliable knowledge beyond his own “circle of con-
sciousness” is indeed precisely what drove Kleist to distraction in 1801
(more on this “crisis” in Chap. 3). Though some might argue that German
idealists, as they responded to Kant, created their own crisis of subjectivity
simply by being so idealist, Beiser argues that much of German thought in
the years around 1800 was, in fact, creatively engaged in a solution, in
finding a way to bridge the gulf between idealism and realism as part of a
route beyond the subjectivist conundrum.
In this study, I suggest that we can read one version of an answer to the
fear that consciousness might comprise a confining and isolating “circle”
in the works of philosophical poets of the period—Hölderlin, Goethe, and
Percy Shelley—as well as in the philosophy of nature of a poetic philoso-
pher, Friedrich Schelling. All turn in their ways to metaphors of the one
with all as an antidote to subjectivism, exploring the possibility of discov-
ering or creating a restorative unity with what lies beyond the subject. This
longing for unity thus forms the primary trope I hope to investigate. As
we will see, oneness has epistemological, ontological, aesthetic, as well as
erotic dimensions. The desire for love and beauty works against solipsistic
isolation. As the poetic narrator of Percy Shelley’s Episphychidion puts it:
“We shall become the same, we shall be one/Spirit within two frames, oh!
Wherefore two?”6
This entanglement of art and philosophy heralds the fact that for these
writers the answer to the problem of the subject’s relation to the object
lies ultimately not in philosophy or theory alone but in an act of the aes-
thetic imagination. Overcoming subjectivism and dualism (the subject–
object split) is possible only through the creative apperception of the
beautiful. In order to deploy beauty as a weapon against the potential
solipsism of a subject cut off from the world of objects, the texts I have in
 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC HELLENISM, THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE… 3

mind take advantage of two interconnected cultural forms that were

ready-­to-hand by the end of the eighteenth century: the philosophy of
nature and Romantic Hellenism. I thus argue that much of the Romantic
valorization of Greece is intimately intertwined with natural philosophy.
Contemporary natural sciences presented scientifically inclined thinkers
like Schelling and Goethe with a dynamic view of nature that allowed for
vital connections between subject and object. In this vein, Schelling
worked out his own Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) in the final
years of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, at least since Winckelmann’s
Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture
(1755), which idealized Greek classical “noble simplicity and quiet gran-
deur” (“eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Größe”)7 to the detriment of any
art that came after it, a reinvented Hellenism was taken up in the discourse
of art and ideas as a dominant aesthetic ideal. By the time they were room-
ing together at the theological seminary in the early 1790s, the notion
that an idealized “Greece” lay behind Western culture as a lost form of
aesthetic and ontological wholeness was something the Tübinger three
could take for granted.
The discursive strategy, however, is not simply to rely on the philosophy
of nature and a Romanticized Hellenism as tools in the post-Kantian
struggle but to employ both cultural forms as inextricably interconnected,
as parts of a single, two-pronged, mode of representation. The dynamic
view of nature, which conceives the universe as shot-through with a single
life force that Schelling sometimes Platonically calls The World Soul, finds
support in the classical ideal. “The classical” in turn cannot exist in the
absence of a dynamic conception of nature. That is, were humans not
capable of connecting directly and intuitively with nature, Greek art, in
the sense that Winckelmann idealizes it, would never have come about.
Because of their intuitive and immediate connection with the natural
world, a unity now lost for overly self-conscious moderns, these “Greeks”
were able to produce works that were at once natural, yet filled with spirit.
Goethe thus defines the beautiful as “spiritually organic (geistig
organisch).”8 In this expression we find the two prongs—human creativity
(Geist) and organic nature—welded together. Much of this study, in one
way or another, is in the service of explaining both terms of Goethe’s
adverb/adjective pairing, as well as their interconnection.
It follows from Goethe’s nearly oxymoronic combination of Geist
(mind, thought, reason) with organisch (organic, natural, not character-
ized by reason) that the path towards the beautiful, or the way beyond the
4 W. S. DAVIS

circle of one’s own consciousness, lies in a particular conception of mate-

riality, within a view of the object as vibrantly (geistig) alive. We might
indeed characterize all of the literary texts I examine here as texts of the
vibrant object.9 With this term I designate an aspect of Schelling’s
­philosophy of nature that appears in a variety of forms in literary texts of
the period, the insistence that natural objects are not dead things, but—
organic and inorganic alike—living potentialities, constantly in flux and
part of a vast natural process leading from simple matter to the heights of
human self-consciousness: “the entirety of nature is at work in each of its
products,” as Schelling puts it.10 At the end of his long lyric poem,
Epipsychidion, Percy Shelley captures the paradoxical sense of the vibrant
object with the metaphor that compares the body aflame with love to a
bush that, like the one Moses encountered, is “ever still/Burning, yet ever
inconsumable.”11 Shelley’s burning bush is “spiritually organic,” the para-
dox of a body alive with a fire that cannot die, a sign of embodiment that
is material and immaterial at once—a vibrant object.

The Chapters
Each chapter thus engages both an idealized Greece as well as the concept
of nature on which the idealization depends. In the first chapter,
“Intellectual Intuition: With Hölderlin, ‘Lost in the Wide Blue,’” we
begin with the opening scene of Hölderlin’s, Hyperion (published in final
form in 1799). Set in the 1770s, Hyperion is a modern and alienated
Greek who longs to reclaim the wholeness of his lost heritage. As the
novel opens, on the “heights of the Corinthian Isthmus,” we find Hyperion
caught up in fantasies of melding with nature, of becoming “one with all
that lives.”12 I argue that we can best read this longing, not simply as a
regressive or escapist fantasy but as the literary realization (not merely a
representation) of the philosophical concept of intellectual intuition,
which both Schelling and Hölderlin took up around 1794. Hölderlin, in
the introduction to an early version of the novel, tells us that, like Hyperion,
we are all compelled to walk an “eccentric path” in life. Human self-­
awareness comes with the cost of the loss of harmonious being—as if sub-
jectivity amounted to being kicked out of the womb. Seeking to regain
this lost wholeness, we, like a planet in an eccentric orbit, at times find
ourselves closer to the ideal and at times farther away. Key to understand-
ing Hyperion’s plight, along with a theoretical solution, is the idea—
expressed most clearly by Schelling, but appearing repeatedly in Hölderlin’s
 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC HELLENISM, THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE… 5

novel—that we are all part of one vast “universal organism.”13 Though we

may perceive ourselves at times to be alienated from everything around us,
we have the capacity, through intellectual intuition, to reconnect with a
world beyond the self—intellectual here, as in Shelley’s “Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty,” meaning non-material, non-sensory. Because the
same vibrant force that enlivens human consciousness runs through all
natural objects, we have the capacity to meld, to become one, to become
whole again, at least in theory.
Hölderlin’s novel, set in and focused on the ideal of “Greece,” expresses
a Hellenism that finds in an imaginary Greek landscape (based somewhat
on travel narratives) an emblem of the unity lost to self-awareness. Modern
Greece functions for Hölderlin as the ideal locus for the staging of both
the ideal of unity, now evident only as broken fragments, as well as of its
loss. As the novel opens, it thus enacts the post-Kantian crisis in most vivid
terms, while also pointing to the solution. Hyperion, obsessed with the
gap between subject and object, dreams of an intellectual connection that
might allow him to put the pieces back together. Ultimately, however, the
intellectual solution alone proves insufficient. The only way back, Hyperion
discovers, is via beauty. Intellectual intuition must become aesthetic intu-
ition. The eccentric path leads, though painfully and only asymptotically,
always towards the beautiful.
In the second chapter, “The Philosophy of Nature: Goethe, Schelling,
and the World Soul,” I trace a line from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie to
Goethe’s ideas on classical aesthetics, as he outlined them in the introduc-
tion to his short-lived journal on art and aesthetic theory, Die Propyläen
(1798). It is here that Goethe espouses his notion of the beautiful as “spiri-
tually organic.” Understanding something of Naturphilosophie, itself a phi-
losophy of the imbrication of the spiritual and the organic, is a prerequisite
for understanding Goethe’s aesthetics. In the late 1790s he and Schelling
spoke often, even developing plans to collaborate on a great poem of nature
(which Goethe called das große Naturgedicht), a work, however (like so
many grand Romantic schemes), that never came to ­fruition. In this Jena
period, however, Schelling did produce his own great work in prose form,
the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), which Michael Vater calls “by
far the most polished and complete work that Schelling published within his
lifetime.”14 For his part, rather than one large poem, Goethe wrote a num-
ber of lyrics that critics believe may have been intended for, or at least in the
spirit of, the great work. Of these the one most closely associated with
Schelling’s ideas is “Weltseele” (“World Soul”), published in 1803, the title
6 W. S. DAVIS

of which resonates with Schelling’s On the World Soul (1798). The World
Soul, as Schelling tells us, is the force from which nature emerges as the
absolute’s drive for self-representation. It is the vital element in everything,
which “since it is everywhere present, is nowhere, and because it is every-
thing, can be nothing determinant or particular.”15 The World Soul is
Schelling’s metaphorical expression of vibrant materiality. Everything is alive
and interconnected as one vast organism, a concept that also finds poetic
expression in Goethe’s “Weltseele,” a poem of cosmic creation that describes
the origins of a universe in which all is vibrantly charged and interconnected
to the point where even “every speck of dust is alive” (“jedes Stäubchen
lebt”)—a hymn to Naturphilosophie and vibrant materialism.16
Moving to the Propylaea, the gateway to the Athenian Acropolis, we
see that for Goethe the philosophy of nature and aesthetics are two sides
of the same classical coin. Athenian artists of the fifth century BCE were
able to produce art that transcends all other human aesthetic creations
because they had the capacity, quite intuitively, to “penetrate” nature, as
Goethe argues, or to see “what holds the world together at its core,” as
Faust longs to do.17 To hope to achieve what for these artists came as natu-
rally as breathing the classical air in which they grew up requires great
effort and study in the modern era, hence the need for Naturphilosophie.
Art that simply imitates nature, as if a snapshot of the surroundings,
remains “superficial” and lifeless.18 The classical, or true, work of art, in
Goethe’s conception, is thus a special variation of the vibrant object. Art
that is both spiritual and organic does not merely represent the world
around us but co-produces the world, taking on new life as an animated
rival to nature itself.
In Chap. 4, “Aesthetic/Erotic Intuition: Hölderlin, Shelley, and the
Islands of the Archipelago,” we turn to the erotic side of Hellenism and
the philosophy of nature. Near the end of System of Transcendental
Idealism, Schelling argues that, in keeping with the Romantic aesthetic
that views art as the end of philosophy, intellectual intuition must become
aesthetic intuition. He means that intellectual, or non-sensory, connec-
tions—as in Hyperion’s melding with the vastness of nature—are fine in
themselves, but ultimately limited by their own incorporeality. How do we
know that an experience of intellectual unity is not simply a “subjective
deception,” a hallucination, for example?19 Schelling argues that intellec-
tual connections with the absolute thus represent only the first step
towards an experience that can reintegrate the individual with the whole-
ness lost through the acquisition of self-consciousness, that they function
 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC HELLENISM, THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE… 7

as a sort of inspiration that must be made tangible in the real world in

order to become complete. Rendering intellectual intuition palpable
means to create a work of art, and Schelling is at pains to prove that there
is no other means by which the absolute can become tangibly present in
the material world: “aesthetic intuition simply is the intellectual intuition
become objective.”20
This palpability of the aesthetic object, the intellectual rendered touch-
able, is where the erotic comes into the picture, which will likewise bring
us back to an idealized Greece as a site of lost wholeness. Comparing two
scenes of mysterious erotic encounter—one from the second book of
Hyperion and one from the end of Shelley’s Epipsychidion—I argue that we
can make better sense of these passages if read in the context of aesthetic
intuition, or, more specifically, if we read them as examples of aesthetic
intuition become erotic intuition. Artistic souls, Hölderlin’s Hyperion and
Shelley’s poet, encounter obscure female objects of desire as if through a
process of aesthetic production. Hyperion’s meeting with the love of his
life, Diotima, in fact bears striking resemblance to Schelling’s account of
the creation of the art object. Sex and aesthetics unite in vibrant material-
ity. As soon as intellectual melding is materialized as an aesthetic ­encounter,
transposed from a rarified unity with the all to an experience of bodies
moving in space, it has also become eroticized.
Both erotic scenes I examine also transpire on idealized Greek islands.
Hyperion meets the love of his life, Diotima, on Hölderlin’s romanticized
“Calaurea,” which lies off the east coast of the Peloponnese, while Shelley
takes us to a fictional island that is “one of the wildest of the Sporades” in
the northern Aegean.21 Both islands function as miniaturized and intensi-
fied examples of the vibrant materiality championed by Naturphilosophie.
Much as in the universe of Goethe’s “Weltseele,” everything on them is
vividly alive in ways not quite possible on the quotidian mainland. At the
same time, both islands function as sites of mythological, or originary,
wholeness. Unlike Goethe’s classical aesthetics of the Propylaea, these pas-
sages are more concerned with an archaic Greece that functions as a site of
all-unity from which humans are bound to fall. The aesthetic/erotic logic
thus brings the philosophy of nature and a Romantic Hellenism together
once more. Aesthetic intuition, as the spirit of the absolute made tangible
in the work of art, is only possible within a dynamic natural world com-
prised by a single universal organism that vibrantly connects everything,
allowing us to hear the voice of the absolute, to penetrate into the heart of
nature. Ancient Greece, here specifically in its island form—the most
8 W. S. DAVIS

ancient locus of the Greek spirit—represents that vital connection in its

wholeness, before the fall from pure being. In both texts in question, the
climax of the erotic encounter becomes the moment at which the artist
rediscovers his lost unity, that portion of the self gone missing with the
arrival of self-consciousness. In the process, the female object of desire is
reduced to the silence of the work of art. She does not speak. The absolute
speaks through her.
Viewed in light of the subject–object split and its attendant threat of
subjectivism, these chapters represent three related responses: intellectual
intuition, vibrant materialism, and aesthetic intuition (with its erotic coun-
terpart). Nature, art, and eros appear as an interrelated answer to the ques-
tion of how perception is possible. A World Soul permeates material being
in a way that renders even the dust at our feet vivid and alive. Humans are
capable of connecting intellectually with this natural world beyond their
own subjectivity and of rendering these connections tangible as art objects.
Bodies reach out and touch each other, not merely as dead things colliding
in space, but as the intensified union of vibrantly material beings, burning
but never consumed.
In the brief concluding chapter, “Coda: with Byron on Acrocorinth,”
Byron brings us back to the very site on the Greek landscape where we
began with Hyperion, the fortress of Acrocorinth above the ancient city of
Corinth. With The Siege of Corinth (1816) we encounter a text (set in the
Venetian-Ottoman war of 1715) by a Romantic who spent time in Greece
in body, rather than merely in spirit. I read this narrative poem as an exam-
ple of a Romantic Hellenism that goes directly against the grain of the
other texts that have been the subject of investigation. Byron takes up,
only to reject, the spirit of the very concepts that have been of concern in
this study, including Naturphilosophie and those intuitions of intellectual,
aesthetic, and erotic kinds. Like Hyperion and Epipsychidion, Byron’s
poem offers both the allure of oneness with nature as well as an erotics of
immaterial melding. He references these Romantic tropes, however, only
to subvert them in favour of a subjectivity comprised by the hard contours
of a body unmoved by intellectual forms of union.
Byron does not require an apotheosized Greece to solve the problem of
modern brokenness by posing as its etiological foil. His poem ends, as
does the battle between the Venetians and Turks, with a huge explosion
from the rocky top of Acrocorinth that shreds and mingles bodies of
Christian and Muslim alike to the point that corporeal distinction is no
longer possible. Here we find Hyperion’s fantasy of becoming one with all
 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC HELLENISM, THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE… 9

literalized in grotesquely comic fashion. The counter-example, I hope,

underscores the pervasiveness of the Romantic trope of unity restored
through nature and Hellenism. We can read Byron’s poem through the
lens of the same tropes we have encountered in the rest of the study—they
are all there—but this time they point, not towards the paradoxical notion
of an immaterial materiality as a response to subjectivism but as an insis-
tence, though tinged with irony, on the contours of materiality for its own
sake.

Notes
1. For example, Fichte claimed that only those of bold and independent mind
could understand his system, the Wissenschaftslehre (generally translated as
“Science of Knowledge”): “What sort of philosophy one chooses depends
… on what sort of man one is … A man indolent by nature or dulled and
distorted by mental servitude, learned luxury, and vanity will never raise
himself to the level of Idealism.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Sämtliche Werke,
ed. J. H. Fichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965), 1:434–435. Regarding Fichte’s
cultural impact, Friedrich Schlegel famously proclaimed the
Wissenschaftslehre, along with the French Revolution and Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister, “one of the three great tendencies of the age.” Friedrich von
Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler (Munich:
Schöningh, 1979), 2:198.
2. We will look more closely at Goethe’s relationship to German idealist phi-
losophy in Chap. 3. For his argument with Schiller on Kant and idealism
versus realism, see Goethe’s autobiographical essay, “Glückliches Ereignis”
(“Fortunate Event”). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke,
Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. 133 vols.
(Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), 2.11:13–20.
3. More on Kleist’s “Kant crisis” in Chap. 3. See Heinrich Kleist, Sämtliche
Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag,
1984) 2:634–635.
4. “Wie ist Emfindung in mir möglich?” From Ideas Toward a Philosophy of
Nature (Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797), a text derived from
Schelling’s Jena lecture notes. Friedrich Schelling, Schellings Werke nach
der Originalausgabe in neuer Ordnung, 12 vols, ed. Manfred Schröter
(Munich: E. H. Beck and R. Oldenburg, 1927) 2:25.
5. Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism
1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), 1.
6. Percy Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil
Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 406 (lines 573–574).
10 W. S. DAVIS

7. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works

in Painting and Sculpture. Open Court Classics. [Gedanken über die
Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst.
English and German], trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La
Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 32, 33.
8. Goethe, Werke, 1.47:12.
9. For the term vibrant object, I look to Jane Bennet’s notion of “thing-
power” and “vibrant materiality”—the ability objects have “to act as quasi
agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their
own”—though her ideas differ from Schelling’s Naturphilosohie in signifi-
cant respects. Contemporary new materialist theories, including Bennet’s,
forcefully reject the notion that objects gain their vitality from some extra-
neous absolute spirit that permeates them. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter:
A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), vii.
10. Schelling, Werke, 3:18.
11. Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 407 (lines 578–579).
12. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin
(Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008), 12. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche
Werke, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1943–1985), 3:8–9.
13. Schelling employs this term, allgemeiner Organismus, frequently in his
works on the philosophy of nature. We will return to it a number of times
in the ensuing study.
14. Michael Vater, “Introduction: The Odyssey of Consciousness,” in
Schelling, F. W. J. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter
Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978) xi.
15. Schelling, Werke, 2:347.
16. I cite the poem as it appears in its original publication: Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and Martin Wieland, Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804 (Tübingen:
Cotta, 1803), 106 (line 23).
17. “Was die Welt/Im Innersten zusammenhält” (Faust, Part I, lines 382–
383). Goethe, Werke, 1.14:28.
18. Goethe, Werke, 1.47:12.
19. Schelling, Werke, 3:625.
20. Schelling, Werke, 3:625.
21. Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 392.
 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC HELLENISM, THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE… 11

Bibliography
Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism
1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goethes Werke, Herausgegeben im Auftrage der
Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. 133 vols. (in 143). Weimar: Böhlau,
1887–1919.
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, and Martin Wieland. Taschenbuch auf das Jahr
1804. Tübingen: Cotta, 1803.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Friedrich Beissner and Adolf
Beck. Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe. 8 vols. (in 15). Stuttgart: Cotta;
W. Kohlhammer, 1943–1985.
———. Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece. Translated by Ross Benjamin. Brooklyn:
Archipelago Books, 2008.
Kleist, Heinrich. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Edited by Helmut Sembdner.
Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1984.
Schelling, Friedrich. Schellings Werke nach der Originalausgabe in neuer Ordnung.
12 Vols. Edited by Manfred Schröter. Munich: E.H. Beck and R. Oldenburg,
1927.
Schlegel, Friedrich von. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Edited by Ernst
Behler. Munich: Schöningh, 1979.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Donald H. Reiman and
Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in
Painting and Sculpture. Open Court Classics. [Gedanken über die Nachahmung
der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst. English and German].
Translated by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton. La Salle, IL: Open Court,
1987.
 CHAPTER 2

Intellectual Intuition: With Hölderlin, “Lost

in the Wide Blue”

“To be one with all—that is the life of the divinity, that is the
heaven of man.”
[“Eines zu seyn mit Allem, das ist Leben der Gottheit, das ist der
Himmel des Menschen.”]
—Hölderlin, Hyperion

We begin at a specific site on the Greek landscape, the very place where
Hölderlin’s only novel, Hyperion (1799), opens with a scene of longing
and nostalgia and Byron’s narrative poem, The Siege of Corinth (1816), to
which we will return in Chap. 5, concludes with a very big bang, not a
whimper: Acrocorinth, a fortress that for centuries guarded the narrow
isthmus between Attica and the Peloponnese, and whose walls to this day
tower above the ancient city of Corinth.1 Byron claimed to have crossed

For the translation, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece,
trans. Ross Benjamin (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008), 12. For the original
text, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Adolf
Beck, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 8 vols. (in 15) (Stuttgart: Cotta;
W. Kohlhammer, 1943–1985), 3:9. (Hyperion is in vol. 3, 1957.) For all
quotations from Hyperion, I cite Ross Benjamin’s translation (unless otherwise
noted). I also provide the reference for each quotation from the Grosse
Stuttgarter Ausgabe.

© The Author(s) 2018 13

W. S. Davis, Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91292-9_2
14 W. S. DAVIS

the isthmus eight times between 1809 and 1811 on journeys to the
Peloponnese (or the Morea, as it was then called), venturing forth from
Athens with his vast entourage into the more distant regions of what was
at that time, though not for too much longer (in part thanks to Byron
himself), known as “European Turkey.”2 Lacking the funds and the leisure
time such a journey would have required, Hölderlin could travel to Greece
only in his imagination. For descriptions of the landscapes that feature so
prominently in his novel he was thus forced to rely upon the representa-
tions of others, on travel narratives of those few Western Europeans who
had the resources and the daring to undertake the journey to Greece.3
Though easily accessible today for those who do not mind walking up
a steep incline of smoothed cobblestones, the site receives comparatively
few visitors, lacking the classical draw, for example of the Acropolis in
Athens. Acrocorinth’s classical monuments (including a temple to
Aphrodite that once adorned the top of the hill) have long since been
replaced by Ottoman and Venetian fortifications. On the right day, you
might wander on “the heights of the Corinthian Isthmus” nearly as for-
lornly as Hyperion does when his sad tale begins. For Byron, it stands out
as a military site, as the citadel that guarded the entire Peloponnese from
any army coming across the narrow isthmus, while for Hölderlin the figu-
rative and metaphorical possibilities of the landscape itself register most
significantly. For our purposes, in this study of Romantic Hellenism and
philosophy, we will emulate both poets by insisting on the material as well
as the figurative range of Acrocorinth and the isthmus. It is at once the
very real place that anchors two of the literary texts I wish to read in some
detail, while at the same time shot through with metaphorical possibilities
we cannot overlook. Everything comes together at the Corinthian
Isthmus, a place where the Ionian meets the Aegean, a massive peninsula
meets the mainland, ancient confronts modern, and Greece encounters
itself as history, philosophy, poetry, and myth.

With Hyperion on Acrocorinth

Like the Homeric epics it reveres, Hölderlin’s only novel begins in medias
res. Hyperion, recently returned to Greece from a sojourn in Germany,
reflects on his life and sends his memories as a series of letters to his
German friend, Bellarmin. Looking down onto the isthmus from the
heights of Acrocorinth in the spring of 1771, Hyperion simultaneously
looks back at the course of his own life.4 Much like the ruins that surround
 INTELLECTUAL INTUITION: WITH HÖLDERLIN, “LOST IN THE WIDE BLUE” 15

him, his life appears as a heap of broken bits that once formed a coherent
totality but now lie in scattered confusion. Friends and companions he
once had have since vanished. The love of his life, Diotima is now dead.
His dreams of restoring Greece to its former glory have disappeared with
the disastrous uprising against the Ottoman Empire of 1770, which ended
in slaughter and flames, and with Greece only firmer in the Ottoman
grasp. “I have nothing that I may call my own,” Hyperion complains,
“distant and dead are my loved ones, and I hear nothing more of them
from any voice.” [“Ich habe nichts, wovon ich sagen möchte, es sey mein
eigen. Fern und todt sind meine Geliebten, und ich vernehme durch keine
Stimme von ihnen nichts mehr.”]5
Given his recent experiences, we might today label his depression a
form of post-traumatic stress disorder. We should note, however, that
Hölderlin represents Hyperion’s suffering not simply as mourning in the
face of horror and tragic loss, but specifically as a division from unity, as a
fall from wholeness into fragmentation. It is also clear that the landscape
onto which he gazes—the isthmus that simultaneously unifies and
divides—reflects his psychic state. On the one hand, there is a certain pal-
liative effect to his wanderings on Acrocorinth: “Every morning I am now
on the heights of the Corinthian Isthmus and, like a bee among flowers,
my soul often flies back and forth between the seas that, to the right and
left, cool the feet of my glowing mountains.” [“Ich bin jezt alle Morgen
auf den Höhn des Korinthischen Isthmus, und, wie die Biene unter
Blumen, fliegt meine Seele oft hin und her zwischen den Meeren, die zur
Rechten und zur Linken meinen glühenden Bergen die Füße kühlen.”]6
Yet, harsh reality, which Hölderlin frequently associates with “destiny
(Schiksaal),” and is here symbolized by the howling of jackals, snaps him
out of his reveries: “The cry of the jackal that sings its wild dirge among
the stone heaps of antiquity startles me out of my dreams.” [“Das Geschrei
des Jakals, der unter den Steinhaufen des Altertums sein wildes Grablied
singt, schrökt ja aus meinen Träumen mich auf.”]7
Geographically, an isthmus functions as both a unifier and a divider. In
this case, opposing landmasses are joined by a narrow strip of land, an
isthmus that likewise signals the division of the Peloponnese from main-
land Greece. The two seas that lie at Hyperion’s feet, the Ionian on his left
and the Aegean on his right, nearly join but can never touch across the
Corinthian Isthmus, calling to mind the “bold lover” of Keats’ “Grecian
Urn,” who remains suspended in time just at the moment when his lips
are about to reach those of his beloved: “never, never canst thou kiss/
16 W. S. DAVIS

Though winning near the goal.”8 The landscape with which the novel
opens thus reflects oneness (“we shall be one/Spirit within two frames, oh!
wherefore two?”—as Percy Shelley puts it in Epipsychidion),9 yet it simul-
taneously signals the threat of division, loss, and alienation.
As if to underscore a reading of the landscape as symbolic of separation
and partition, Hyperion’s opening letter alludes to several binary opposi-
tions: high and low, joy and sorrow, thought and action, child and adult,
present and past, and most significantly, Greece as it was and Greece as it
is now—or an idealized “Greece” that must once have been, and that now
looms as a form of wholeness and aesthetic perfection that can be found in
contemporary Greece only as a pale and fragmentary reflection. The part-
ing of the two seas by a mere six kilometres of terra firma points to the
countless divisions that disrupt our experience of oneness, while it simul-
taneously signifies the very possibility of that lost unity in the first place—
the landscape as an emblem of eternal division, with the tantalizing
possibility of reintegration, that characterizes the human experience. Thus,
Hyperion on Acrocorinth, as he “flies” like a bee physically back and forth
between the two seas at his feet, moves in his mind between the opposing
experiences of a connection with the “eternally unified world” and “reflec-
tion,” which returns him to his solipsistic prison:

But a moment of reflection hurls me down. I reflect and find myself as I was
before, alone, with all the pains of mortality; and the asylum of my heart, the
world’s eternal unity, is gone; nature closes her arms and I stand like a
stranger before her and do not comprehend her.
[Aber ein Moment des Besinnens wirft mich herab. Ich denke nach und
finde mich, wie ich zuvor war, allein, mit allen Schmerzen der Sterblichkeit,
und meines Herzens Asyl, die ewigeinige Welt, ist hin; die Natur verschließt
die Arme, und ich stehe, wie ein Fremdling, vor ihr, und verstehe sie nicht.]10

Nature itself is one, but “a moment of reflection,” which necessarily con-

stitutes a division into self as subject and self as object, likewise establishes
subjectivity as a fall from nature. In the instant of contemplation Hyperion
comes to himself but loses the bliss of oneness with the “all” of nature that
surrounds him. Indeed, this erratic movement between two poles, which
characterizes Hyperion’s physic state as the novel opens, is reflected by the
structure of the novel itself as it continually moves between scenes of con-
traction and expansion, solipsism and connection.11
In this role of unifier and divider, the Isthmus of Corinth likewise func-
tions as an objective correlative for the philosophical anxiety that most
 INTELLECTUAL INTUITION: WITH HÖLDERLIN, “LOST IN THE WIDE BLUE” 17

engaged Hölderlin and his friends in the decade of the 1790s, standing in
for the Ur-Teilung, the original division, with which consciousness begins.
Hölderlin’s idea is that, to become a self (or an Ich in Fichtean terms), the
unity of the one must give place to the split between self and other, subject
and object, since without this division a thinking or “reflecting” subject is
not possible. We will have more to say shortly about this splitting of one
into two, and its importance for both philosophy and Hellenism, but for
the moment let us stay with the landscape with which Hyperion opens.
Two seas encounter each other across a narrow neck of land, and this
encounter is clearly visible from the “heights” on which Hyperion stands.
The significance of the specificity of this site has been largely lost on critics,
however, as they have failed to note that only for the final version of the
novel, Part I of which appeared in 1797, did Hölderlin transpose what
became the opening scene to the “heights of the Corinthian Isthmus.”12
The earlier published version, Fragment von Hyperion, which Schiller
included in his journal Thalia in 1794, sets the equivalent scene in
“Cithäron,” that is, atop the mountain range of Kithairon, which lies
between Attica and Boeotia, approximately 100 kilometres north of
Corinth (famous also as the place where baby Oedipus was left out to die
of exposure). As a novelist not tied to history or to physical geography,
Hölderlin was free to roam the Greek landscape of his mind, and the
novel’s various fragments and drafts thus show him moving things around
a fair amount, including transposing Diotima’s home from a “lonely valley
of Tmolus” (now in Turkey) to the island of “Kalaurea,” or contemporary
Poros in the Saronic Gulf. We will have more to say about Diotima as an
island girl in Chap. 4, but as for Hyperion’s opening scene with the two
seas below his feet, Ionian to the left and Aegean to the right, we should
note that within those years between 1794 and 1797, when Hölderlin
decided to shift the setting of the novel’s opening, he was likewise intensely
engaged in creating his own response to Fichte and the Ur-Teilung (origi-
nal division). The isthmus thus comes to function as both the geographic
knife blade of an original cutting or division, as well as the unifier of sea
and sky.

Lost in the Wide Blue

This reflection on division as constitutive of self-consciousness, which
both Hyperion’s musings and the landscape itself exemplify, brings us now
to the framing metaphor for this book, as Hyperion expresses it: the
fantasy of becoming one with everything. Hölderlin here reaches for
­
18 W. S. DAVIS

m­etaphors and images that can represent the theoretical concept of unity
as more than theory—indeed to enact, to render sensuously tangible,
rather than to represent or explain. Hyperion becomes tangled up in blue:

Often, lost in the wide blue, I look up at the ether and into the holy sea, and
I feel as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of solitude
dissolved into the life of the divinity.
To be one with all—that is the life of the divinity, that is the heaven of
man. To be one with all that lives, to return in blessed self-oblivion into the
All of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy moun-
tain height, the place of eternal repose, where the midday loses its swelter
and the thunder its voice and the boiling sea resembles the billowing field of
grain.

[Verloren in’s weite Blau, blik’ ich oft hinauf an den Aether und hinein in’s
heilige Meer, und mir ist, als öffnet’ ein verwandter Geist mir die Arme, als
löste der Schmerz der Einsamkeit sich auf in’s Leben der Gottheit.
Eines zu seyn mit Allem, das ist Leben der Gottheit, das ist der Himmel
des Menschen.
Eines zu sein mit Allem, was lebt, in seliger Selbstvergessenheit wieder-
zukehren in’s All der Natur, das ist der Gipfel der Gedanken und Freuden,
das ist die heilige Bergeshöhe, der Ort der ewigen Ruhe, wo der Mittag
seine Schwüle und der Donner seine Stimme verliert und das kochende
Meer der Woge des Kornfelds gleicht.]13

These aqueous fantasies of melding with water and sky may immediately
stand out to us as Freudian oceanic feelings, depressive symptoms of
Hyperion’s PTSD, a “Rousseauean regression to childhood,” a yearning
to flee the world to “commune with nature,” or the expression generally
of “merely nostalgic and escapist” desires.14 Certainly this lust for the
“ether” sounds much like a “fantasy of untouchable fullness”—in Julia
Kristeva’s terms—that is, as suicidal yearnings for an integration with an
absolute wholeness that allows for no loss, division, or separation.15
Hyperion, we might argue, like Werther before him (in another epistolary
novel that likewise begins in the spring of 1771), longs to flee from the
Symbolic into the Imaginary, to drown in oblivion.16
This escapist reading of the passage appears plausible, given Hyperion’s
fantasies of melding with the all, yet it misses an important element of the
equation. The structuring principle of the novel situates these fantasies
within a repeating pattern of ascent to unity and fall into alienation. Like
a Freudian fort/da game: together/apart, systole/diastole, unified with
 INTELLECTUAL INTUITION: WITH HÖLDERLIN, “LOST IN THE WIDE BLUE” 19

all/divided from all—a structure that (theoretically) repeats eternally.17

The movement of Hyperion’s desire, through which he stages a place for
himself in the world, a quest and a purpose, is what Hölderlin calls “the
eccentric path,” which we will discuss in more detail below.
In some sense, interpreting the passage quoted above will be the task of
the entire book. I will argue that understanding the metaphor of the one
with all requires an engagement with the philosophy that produces the
metaphors on which it depends for its own expression. Certainly, to be
melded with all and “lost in blue” is a philosophical strategy, a form of an
answer to a Kantian problem. And yet the poetry, the metaphors that give
life to the strategy, can also be said to precede, even to produce, the philo-
sophical strategy itself. There is, in other words, no way of knowing which
comes first, the philosophy or the poetry. The novel is in part an attempt
to poeticize a form of philosophy that both Schelling and Hölderlin felt
could only be realized as an aesthetic production. Art here is not meant to
represent philosophy but to be philosophy.
As we begin to see how the metaphors work, as philosophical poetry
and poetic philosophy, we can better read similar fantasies and figures in
the broader romantic discourse, as we likewise gain clues about why it is
that an idealized “Greece” figures so prominently as the site of this meta-
phorical figuration of Romantic oneness. If we wish to grasp what
Hyperion is really up to on the top of Acrocorinth in the spring of 1771,
we need to turn to the philosophy that embodies the metaphor as well as
to what it is that connects this metaphor to the topography of an idealized
Hellenic landscape.
There is a double movement of subject–object relations in play for
Hyperion on Acrocorinth. On the one hand, his ability to lose himself in
the blue-beyond depends upon a dynamic conception of nature, on a
Naturphilosophie that posits natural objects as vibrantly alive and thus with
the capacity to respond, embrace, and enfold in ways inert objects never
could. We thus find here a dynamic concept of materiality, a living land-
scape composed of vital material objects that are not merely the product of
our representations but rather vibrantly entwined with human experience
(more on this vitalism in the next chapter). On the other hand, we find
Hyperion himself struggling to see in a fashion that exceeds material limi-
tations. To get at how and what Hyperion sees in the blue above Corinth
we need to understand something of a contested term from the German
Idealist vocabulary for a particular kind of seeing, intellektuelle Anschauung
(literally “intellectual seeing,” though typically translated as “intellectual
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 CHAPTER XX.

CONCERNS A RUMOR.
Preston had impatiently awaited the result of La Planta’s cross-
examination, and the verdict disappointed him. For secretly he felt
convinced still that even if the young man had not directly connived
at the money-lender’s death, yet that he could throw light on the
cause of death if he wished to.
“I cannot help thinking,” he said to Yootha while they were
discussing the mystery on the day after La Planta’s acquittal, “that he
knows something too concerning what happened at Henley regatta. I
have felt that all along. And had he been found guilty of conniving at
Schomberg’s death we might have been in a position to escape from
what now threatens us. However, I believe that in the end we shall
be able to snap our fingers at the people who are trying to blackmail
us, so you must try to cheer up, my darling.”
They were sitting out on the heather under the shadow of the
Sugarloaf Mountain in Monmouthshire, where they had been staying
for a fortnight at the Angel Hotel in Abergavenny, and, but for the
development which threatened they would have been completely
happy. As it was, when they succeeded in forgetting what the future
might hold for them, the hours were the happiest they had ever
spent. It was now August, but Monmouthshire is one of the few
counties which holiday makers seem consistently to overlook in spite
of its lovely scenery, with the result that the picturesque moors were
almost deserted.
For some minutes they remained silent. The quietude of the
countryside, the almost oppressive heat, the wonderful landscape
which unfolded itself before them, stretching away to the silvery river
Usk visible some miles down the valley, seemed in harmony with
their mood. And then presently, gently placing his arm about her,
Preston drew Yootha closer to him and pressed his lips to hers.
“My darling,” he murmured, “whatever happens, believe me I shall
love you always—​always. Doesn’t it seem strange that for all these
years we should not have met, and that then we should have
become acquainted by the merest chance? Supposing I had not
happened to wander into Bond Street that morning, just a year ago—​
it was the ninth of August, the date of the opening of our great
offensive on the Western front—​and that I had not been with
George, who knew La Planta, and that La Planta had not invited us
to lunch with him at the Ritz we should probably be strangers still! I
believe I fell in love with you that day, Yootha; certainly you attracted
me in the most extraordinary way directly we were introduced—​you
and your delightful friend, Cora.”
“And yet during the whole lunch you spoke hardly a word, and
Jessica thought you dull and stupid, I remember,” she exclaimed,
laughing. “I know, because I heard her say so to Aloysius Stapleton.”
“I dare say I was dull and stupid. I certainly felt dull, but several
months of hospital life are not calculated to sharpen one’s
intelligence, are they? As for Jessica, from the moment I set eyes on
her something in her personality repelled me, though afterwards, at
her house, when we had that lovely music, I felt for the first time less
antagonistic. But if I knew her twenty years I should never get to like
her, or, indeed, trust her. Doesn’t she affect you in that way?”
“Not in that way, precisely, though I have never liked her, as you
know. I have somehow felt all the time that she and Stapleton and La
Planta were playing some deep game, and I believe they are playing
it still, whatever it may be. How odd she should have invited us to tea
on her house-boat that day at Henley, and been so amiable, and yet
that so soon afterwards—​—”
She checked herself abruptly, and nestled closer to her lover. The
pressure of his strong arm seemed to give her confidence, restore
her courage. After all, she reflected, so long as they were together,
what could anything matter? And then, carried away suddenly by her
emotion, she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him again
and again.
The sun was setting when at last they rose and prepared to go
back to the village, a couple of miles distant, where they had left their
car.
“Why,” Preston said, suddenly producing a letter from his pocket,
“I forgot to tell you, dear, I received this from George just before we
came out. He is staying in town during August, as I think I told you,
and he says he has been again to the house with the bronze face.
While there he was informed that Mrs. Timothy Macmahon, to whom
Lord Froissart left his fortune, is now in London and has a strange
story to tell. Stothert told George that Mrs. Macmahon was greatly
upset on hearing that Froissart had bequeathed everything to her,
and that she is anxious to transfer the greater part of the fortune to
Froissart’s rightful heir, his eldest daughter, Mrs. Ferdinand Westrup,
who lives with her husband in Ceylon. Mrs. Macmahon admits, he
says, that she was on terms of intimacy with Froissart, who used to
visit her in Cashel, her home in Tipperary, but she declares that was
no reason for him to leave his entire fortune to her, especially as she
has a comfortable income of her own.”
He unfolded the letter and read parts of it aloud to Yootha as they
strolled along the heather. The paragraph which interested her most,
ran as follows:
“... Stothert also told me Mrs. Macmahon had told him that
Froissart, for some time before he took his life, had been
threatened with exposure of his private life if he refused to
continue to pay increasingly large sums of money to certain
persons who were persecuting him....”
Yootha put her hand impulsively on her lover’s arm.
“Charlie!” she exclaimed, “that is exactly what Cora told me she
thought might have been the reason of Lord Froissart’s suicide. She
had heard rumors of his intimacy with some woman in Ireland, and
that there was possibility of a big scandal, and she also told me Lord
Froissart possessed such a sensitive nature that she could not
imagine what would happen if the scandal ever came to a head. And
now I have an idea. Don’t you think it possible Vera Froissart may
have discovered her father’s secret, and that the shock of the
discovery may have driven her, for very shame, to end her life?”
For some moments Preston did not answer. Then he said:
“My darling, I don’t think that. What I think far more likely is that
Vera may intentionally have been enlightened concerning her
father’s unfortunate infatuation for Mrs. Macmahon, and herself have
been blackmailed by the very people who afterwards blackmailed
her father, in which case the same scoundrels are indirectly
responsible for the death of both father and daughter. More, I now
suspect the person or persons who threatened Froissart and his
daughter may be the people now threatening us if we refuse to
intimidate Cora in the way they wish us to.”
Yootha stopped in her walk, staring speechless at her companion.
“Good heavens!” she exclaimed at last. “How can such wretches
be allowed to live?”
Then her imagination began to work with extraordinary rapidity.
She thought of Cora’s secret love for Sir Stephen Lethbridge, who
had shot himself a year before; of Lord Hope-Cooper, who had
drowned himself in the lake of his beautiful park at Cowrie Hall, in
Perthshire; of Viscount Molesley, Leonora Vandervelt and others,
whose mysterious suicides had so startled London Society, also of
the well-known men and women who had, quite recently, ended their
lives apparently for no reason. Was it possible all these people had
been driven to desperation by the same means and finally in a fit of
temporary insanity, destroyed themselves?”
Suddenly she caught her breath.
Henry Hartsilver, the husband of her friend, Cora—​her dearest
friend! No breath of scandal concerning him had ever been
whispered, and yet—​—
A sentence she had read in a novel flashed back into her mind:
“The private lives of most men are sealed books to all but their
companion, or companions, in guilt.”
 Had Hartsilver’s private life been a sealed book to Cora, whose
habit it had been, she remembered, to jest about her husband’s
extraordinary respectability?
She clutched her lover’s hand, and stopped again in her walk.
“Charlie!” she exclaimed in an access of emotion, “if ever, after we
are married, you grow tired of me—​I want you—​I want you to—​—”
Something seemed to choke her, and Preston caught her in his
arms.
“Yootha, Yootha, my own darling!” he exclaimed huskily. “What
are you saying? What are you thinking about? How can you imagine
for a single instant I could grow tired of you, the one woman in the
world I have ever loved! Don’t say what you were trying to, whatever
it may have been. I don’t want to hear it. It pains me when you talk
like that, my precious! You don’t—​you can’t suppose I should be
such a monster as to think of any woman but you?”
“Oh, but promise—​you will promise—​if you feel your love for me
fading, no matter how little, to tell me about it? I couldn’t bear to think
you pretended to love me when all the time you knew in your heart
that in spite of yourself you were growing tired of me. So many men
grow tired of their wives. Oh, yes, I have seen it again and again
among my own friends—​they marry, they love each other truly for a
little while, then their love begins to cool, and then—​oh, my darling,
the bare thought of that possibility makes me feel faint and ill,” and
she began to sob bitterly as she lay listless in his arms.
It was now nearly dark, and they were still a long way from the
village. Preston tried to comfort her, assuring her again and again of
the impossibility of his ever growing tired of her, or indeed loving her
less, but for a long time she remained in deep depression.
And while this was happening Doctor Johnson and George
Blenkiron were dining together at the former’s house in Wimpole
Street.
They had become extremely friendly since their first meeting at
the ball at the Albert Hall, owing partly to the fact of their having
interests in common, and it was but natural that during dinner
mention should be made of their common friend, Preston.
“I still feel anxious about Charlie Preston,” Blenkiron happened to
remark. “He has changed greatly of late, yet won’t say what is the
matter. To-day I heard an odd story to the effect that he has got
himself into some sort of trouble. And yet I can’t think what. He is not
a man who runs after women; rather, he is inclined to shun them. On
the other hand he is not in monetary difficulties, that I know for a
fact.”
“Where did you hear the story?” Johnson asked.
“At the club. Several men seemed to have heard it, yet all were
vague as to the nature of the alleged trouble. I do hope, Johnson, he
has not done anything foolish. He is such a good fellow.”
“The last man to do anything foolish, I should say,” the doctor
replied. “I like to trace to their source the origin of vague stories,
because often they do much mischief though quite devoid of
foundation. Couldn’t we, between us, find whence this rumor
emanates?”
“I think it should be possible. I will see what can be done to-
morrow.”
Blenkiron was fortunate next morning in coming face to face with
the member of the club who had first told him the story, or the story
so far as it went.
Briefly, the rumor was that Captain Preston had been talking too
freely about a certain lady—​this was the new version—​that he had
been taken to task by an intimate friend of hers, also a member of
the club, and that an action threatened unless Preston agreed to
apologize in writing for what he had stated, and, in addition, agreed
to pay a considerable sum to the man who brought the charge.
“Who told you all that?” Blenkiron inquired carelessly.
“Told me? I’m sure I don’t remember,” his informant replied
quickly. “It is common talk. You will hear about it everywhere.”
 “Still, one ought to know who started it, because, personally, I
don’t believe a word of it. Preston is not a man to talk indiscreetly,
especially about a woman.”
The other shrugged his shoulders.
“I give it, of course, merely for what it is worth,” he said. “I don’t
vouch for the accuracy of everything I hear.”
“Then why repeat it as if it were solemn truth? I’d be more careful
if I were you, Appleton,” Blenkiron went on. “There’s a thing called
the law of slander.”
Appleton stared.
“If Preston is a friend of yours,” he stammered, “I suppose I ought
to apologize.”
“I think so too,” Blenkiron answered.
But in spite of his endeavor during the day to find who had first
started the story, he failed to get any information. Many of his
acquaintances had heard the rumor, but none could remember
where.
Yet one person could have enlightened him. Jessica, scheming to
destroy the happiness of those she knew to be striving to discover
the secret of her past life, had now no scruple as to what methods
she might employ to achieve her end. And for some weeks events
had been occurring which, she now realized, threatened to
jeopardize her position in Society, and indeed her own safety and
that of her faithful companions.
“Louie,” she said to Stapleton—​they were at déjeuner with La
Planta on the terrace of the Royal Hotel at Dieppe, “don’t you think it
time we put a check to the activities of Cora Hartsilver and her
energetic admirers? I am growing tired of being harassed by their
over-persistency. If our plan fails with Preston and Yootha Hagerston
regarding her, I suggest that more repressive measures be resorted
to at once. And I don’t mind admitting now, that I believe Charles
Preston is going to prove too much for us.”
 CHAPTER XXI.

THE LITTLE HORSES.

The re-opening of the Casino at Dieppe in 1919 was the signal,
as some may remember, for an outbreak of gambling for very high
stakes. This was attributed partly to the natural reaction of public
feeling after the roulette tables and the petits chevaux had been so
long hors concours, and partly to the fact that during the war many
acquired a taste for speculation who previously had looked upon
even a sixpenny lottery as ungodly.
Among the regular frequenters of the Casino during August of
1919 was a very handsome Englishwoman, accompanied almost
always by a tall, undistinguished-looking man of middle-age, and by
a good-looking, well groomed young fellow of twenty-six or so. Night
after night this trio would arrive between eight and nine o’clock, seat
themselves whenever possible at the same petits chevaux table,
until the Casino closed.
What attracted attention to them was the large sum they
invariably staked at every turn of the wheel which set the horses
“running”; the recklessness of their play, and their extraordinary luck.
Time and again they would come out of the Casino many hundreds,
and sometimes many thousands of pounds richer than when they
had gone in, and usually an agent de police would meet them at the
entrance and accompany them across to their hotel to prevent any
possibility of their being robbed.
Dieppe at that time was one of the few French seaport towns
which could be visited by English folk without their being compelled
first of all to comply with endless formalities, so that English people
foregathered there in their thousands. It was not surprising,
therefore, that when Jessica and her friends had been a week or two
in the town they should suddenly come face to face in the Casino
with no other than Captain Preston and his future wife.
Instantly Jessica extended her hand.
“I won’t say it is odd meeting you here,” she exclaimed, as she
shook hands with Yootha, “because one does nothing but run across
friends all day and every day, but I must say I did not expect to meet
you, for I heard you were both in Monmouthshire.”
“We left Abergavenny two days ago,” Yootha answered quickly,
“and arrived here last night. Isn’t this a delightful place? I’ve never
been here before.”
“Is anybody with you?” Jessica asked.
“An aunt of mine had arranged to come, but at the last moment
she was detained through illness.”
Though she felt exceedingly uncomfortable at meeting Jessica
again, after all that had occurred, she deemed it wiser to appear
friendly than to cut the woman—​her secret wish. Jessica, on the
other hand, seemed really glad to meet Yootha Hagerston once
more, and Captain Preston, and when they had conversed for a little
while she inquired where they were staying, and then invited them to
dine, an invitation they naturally felt compelled to accept.
The Royal Hotel was crowded with well-dressed people, many of
whom went across to the Casino after dinner, among them Jessica,
her friends, and her two guests.
“I have been so lucky at petits chevaux lately,” Jessica said as
they all passed in. “I don’t want to influence you in any way, Yootha,
but if you and Captain Preston like to play my game I believe you will
win. During the three weeks I have been playing I have come away a
loser only three times, and not on one occasion a heavy loser. I am
between three thousand and four thousand pounds to the good on
my three weeks’ play, and Louie and Archie won several thousands
each. And yet not one of us has any system. It is just pure luck.”
“I don’t think Yootha will play,” Preston, who had overheard
Jessica’s remark, cut in.
 “Oh, but why not, Charlie?” the girl exclaimed in a tone of
disappointment. “I have been looking forward so much to playing,
though of course I am not going to gamble.”
Jessica laughed, and in the laughter was a note of pity,
approaching disdain.
“Naturally if Captain Preston forbids you to play, you won’t play,”
she said lightly.
“Indeed you are mistaken, Jessica,” Yootha said piqued. Then she
turned to Preston.
“I am going to play, Charlie,” she said, “and you will see that I
shall win!”
“That’s the spirit,” Jessica laughed, only partly in jest. “And yet if
you lose, dear, you won’t blame me, I hope.”
Preston bit his lip, but said nothing more. Directly he had said that
Yootha wouldn’t play, he had realized his want of tact. No woman
likes to be thwarted, least of all before acquaintances, and by the
man she is going to marry. Had he remained silent she would, he felt
sure, have said of her own accord that she preferred not to play.
He lit a cigar and stood watching the game while Jessica found
seats at the table and made Yootha take the vacant one beside her.
Stapleton and La Planta stood just behind.
“Give me your money,” Jessica said in an undertone to the girl. “I
will add it to my own, and then we shall be backing the same horses
and my luck, if I have any, will be yours too.”
With a growing feeling of excitement, Yootha produced from her
handbag a roll of paper money, counted it carefully, and handed it to
her companion.
“That is all I can afford,” she whispered. “You’ll do the best you
can with it, won’t you? I do so want to win.”
“Oh! that is plenty,” Jessica answered, as she picked up the
notes, and after counting them, placed them on top of her own sheaf.
Then, for some minutes, she watched the play closely.
 “Now I am going to start,” she said suddenly, and pushed a heap
of paper on to one of the names of the horses.
The little horses spun around, passing one another, some
gradually dropping back, others overtaking, the leaders. Then came
the monotonous “Rien n’va plus” from the croupier; the horses began
to slacken speed, went slower and slower—​stopped.
Jessica had lost.
“This time we double,” she said under her breath to Yootha, and
pushed more money on to the name from which her former stake
had just been raked.
Again the horses spun round; again the croupier droned; again
they slowed down—​and stopped.
Jessica had lost again.
“Had we better go on?” Yootha asked anxiously. “Or why not try
another horse?”
“Nonsense,” Jessica answered impatiently. “You have lost only a
trifle. I have lost fifty pounds. Now watch.”
She backed the same horse again, and this time the heap of
notes was much bigger. The race started. For more than a minute
the little horses kept changing their positions, then they moved
slower and finally stopped.
Yootha uttered an exclamation of delight. The horse Jessica had
backed had won!
A great pile of money, as it seemed to the girl, was pushed
towards Jessica by the croupier, and at once she passed some of
the pile towards her.
The next time the horses started the sum staked by Jessica was
much bigger, and she won again. Again she staked, and again she
won; and again; and yet again. The crowd gathered about the table
began to murmur. It grew excited when Jessica, backing different
animals, won three times more in succession.
 By that time Yootha was panting with excitement. Jessica, as
soon as she had realized that her luck still prevailed, had gone
practically nap every time with Yootha’s money as well as her own.
Yootha’s breast rose and fell, her lips were parted, her eyes shone
strangely as she watched her companion staking and winning now
on almost every race. If she lost once she won twice. If she lost twice
she won generally three or four times directly afterwards. Yootha,
with her winnings piled in front of her, was about to speak to Jessica,
when her eyes met Preston’s. Her lover, standing facing her on the
opposite side of the table, was calmly smoking his cigar. He made no
movement, nor did his expression betray either approval or
disapproval. He merely looked hard at her without smiling.
“Make Captain Preston come and sit near us,” Yootha heard
Jessica saying. “He looks so sad there alone. Doesn’t he ever play?
Has he no vices at all? Take my advice, Yootha—​think twice before
marrying a man who boasts that he has no vices!”
“But he doesn’t boast anything of the sort—​he doesn’t boast at
all,” Yootha retorted, nettled, for again Jessica’s tone annoyed her.
She caught Preston’s eye once more and made a sign to him; but he
only shook his head and smiled rather coldly.
“You must teach him to play after you are married, dear,” Jessica
said. “I know that he has played,” and she smiled oddly. “Look at the
sum you have amassed to-night through taking my advice. Now I am
going to stake again four times, and, after that, win or lose, we stop.”
She staked heavily, and lost; then staked heavily again, and won
three times in succession.
Then she rose, and Yootha did the same, and at once other
players took their seats.
Yootha was beside herself. Though the sum she had won was
small by comparison with the amount won by Jessica, to her it
seemed a lot, perhaps because she had never played before.
“Let us go back and win some more,” she exclaimed excitedly,
casting a furtive glance backward at the table they had just left. “I do
love it so! Are you always as lucky as that, Jessica?”
 In the excitement of the moment she seemed quite to have
forgotten her aversion for Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson; she had even
forgotten her lover’s presence until he suddenly approached.
“Was I not right not to take your advice?” she said to him gaily.
“You ought to have played, Charlie, you really ought. You have no
idea what fun it is.”
“Haven’t I?” he answered, looking down at her. “I wish I hadn’t—​I
should be a rich man to-day.”
“Yes,” Jessica cut in with a curious laugh. “I have been told that
years ago Captain Preston lost thousands on the turf and at cards.”
Yootha saw her lover make a little gesture of annoyance and at
once she changed the subject.
At supper in the Casino they were joined by Stapleton and La
Planta, who had disappeared while Yootha and Jessica were
playing. When they were half-way through the meal, Yootha’s gaze
became fixed on a man at supper with friends at a table close by.
Presently she turned to Preston:
“I know that man so well by sight,” she said, “but can’t remember
who he is, or where I have seen him before. Haven’t we both met
him somewhere?”
Preston cast a hasty glance in the direction indicated. The person
referred to was a sleek, well-nourished man with black, rather curly
hair, and a carefully waxed moustache. Yes, he too had seen him
before—​but where?
And then all at once he remembered. He had not seen him
before, but he had seen his portrait. It hung, quite a large picture, in
Stothert’s office in the house with the bronze face.
He told Yootha so.
“So it does!” she exclaimed. “That is how I remember the face. I
wonder who he is?”
“You wonder who he is?” Jessica inquired; she had overheard
only the last sentence.
 “That dark man at supper over there,” and she indicated his
whereabouts with her eyes.
“Oh, that is Monsieur Alphonse Michaud,” Jessica replied at once.
“A remarkable character, according to all accounts. He is the
director, and I suppose proprietor of the Metropolitan Secret Agency
in London.”
“That man is? But I thought Mr. Stothert and the woman called
Camille Lenoir were the directors.”
Jessica laughed.
“Have some more lobster, dear,” she said. “No, Stothert and
Lenoir are merely managers, just salaried people like other
managers. But when have you been to the Metropolitan Agency?”
“I went there at the time of that horrible affair at the Albert Hall
ball, when they thought I had stolen Mrs. Stringborg’s necklace. I
can’t bear to think of it, even now. It seems like a nightmare still.”
“Of course—​I had forgotten. By the way, was that mystery ever
cleared up?”
“I believe not. The whole thing was most singular.”
“Didn’t the Metropolitan Agency find out anything? They are
generally so clever.”
“Nothing of importance,” Yootha answered quickly. “Oh, yes, that
is the man,” she said, looking again at the dark-haired stranger who
had just risen from supper with his friends, three flashily-dressed
women. “There is no mistaking him. The portrait is a striking
likeness.”
When Yootha and Preston were alone again, the girl returned to
the subject of her play.
“It is so exciting, Charlie,” she exclaimed. “I must try my luck
again to-morrow, I really must. In some ways Jessica is a wonderful
woman; she tells me she nearly always wins, so that by doing just
what she does—​—”
 “You seem suddenly to have taken a fancy to Jessica,” her lover
interrupted. “I never thought you would do that, dear.”
“Nor did I, Charlie,” she replied at once. “And I haven’t exactly
taken a fancy to her, only I think—​well, I think we have misjudged
her to some extent.”
“After the things you know she said about Cora?”
“I don’t actually know she said them, because I didn’t hear her say
them. After all, we were only told she said those things, and you
know how people exaggerate.”
Preston was silent.
“I wish you wouldn’t play again, darling,” he suddenly exclaimed
earnestly. “You have no idea how the craving to play can get hold of
you. I hoped so much to-night that you would lose.”
“Hoped that I should lose!”
“Yes, so that you wouldn’t want to play again; so that you would
grow disgusted with the game before it had time to get a hold on
you.”
“Ah! I know why that was,” she exclaimed, her brow clearing.
“Jessica said that years ago you lost a lot of money. No wonder you
hate playing now. I understand your being disgruntled. How much
did you lose, Charlie? And why did you never tell me? And who told
Jessica?”
“I lost almost every shilling I had,” Preston answered, lowering his
voice. “Otherwise I should be a rich man to-day, instead of
comparatively a pauper. The gambling fever caught me first when I
was staying in Port Said, with friends, and I was very lucky. It
increased and increased until, though I lost again and again, I
became absolutely reckless. I think the craze for gambling is the
worst form of affliction that can befall any man. But I overcame it in
the end, and because I overcame it when too late I want you to
overcome it before you go further.”
Yootha looked up into his face, and patted his cheek playfully.
 “Charlie,” she said, “I am going to play to-morrow—​just to-morrow.
I promised Jessica I would. And now I promise you that if I lose to-
morrow I will never play again. Will that satisfy you? You know I
always keep my promises.”
“I suppose it will have to satisfy me,” her lover answered, kissing
her. “But I hate your becoming intimate with Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson
—​you don’t know how I hate it. She is not the right companion for
you at all.”
“Oh, don’t be anxious,” Yootha replied, smiling. “I can look after
myself, I assure you.”
 CHAPTER XXII.

ANOTHER MYSTERY MAN.

“You will let me, won’t you?” Jessica said coaxingly.
She was addressing Yootha, begging her to let her take the place
of the aunt who had been detained at the eleventh hour, and act as
her chaperone during Yootha’s stay at Dieppe.
“I know there have been times when you and Cora have not
thought well of me, I never knew quite why,” she went on, “and I
should like you to be able to assure Cora that she formed a wrong
opinion of me. I always think someone must have told her things,
and so prejudiced her against me.”
Thus Yootha, always generously disposed, also impressionable
and ready to forgive an injury, fancied or otherwise, was soon talked
over by the clever woman. Indeed, the girl went so far as to
persuade herself that she and Cora and Preston, and the others who
had tried so hard to discover Jessica’s antecedents, had suspected
her unjustly. And now on the top of it all had come Jessica’s
introduction of Yootha to the Casino with its petits chevaux, Yootha’s
subsequent elation at her success, and Jessica’s extraction of the
promise from her that she would play again with her next day.
“Though I have been lucky all along, I have never been as lucky
as I was to-night,” she said to Yootha as they parted for the night. “I
believe you are my mascot, and to-morrow we will prove if you are or
not!”
Next night Preston excused himself. He said the Casino bored
him; in reality he could not bear Jessica’s company, or the sight of
Yootha gambling. To have opposed Yootha’s wish further than he
had done would, he knew, have been unwise; she might have turned
upon him and said things she would afterwards have regretted
saying. So with a major in the Gunners, whose acquaintance he had
made at the Royal Hotel, and who had been through the war, he
started off for an evening walk up the hill to the back of the town as
soon as Jessica and Yootha had gone across to the Casino, where
they were to meet Stapleton and La Planta.
It was one of those warm, balmy nights, the air perfectly still,
which we enjoy so rarely in this country. By the time Preston and his
companions had reached the summit of the steep ascent the moon,
in its second quarter, was shining down across the streets and
houses, imparting to the city the aspect of a toy town, and
illuminating the sea for many a mile beyond it. As they sat
contemplating the picturesque panorama their gaze became focused
on the lights of the Casino.
“Don’t you play at all?” the major, whose name was Guysburg,
inquired as he lit a fresh cigar and offered one to Preston.
“Not now,” Preston answered dryly. “I played too much in my time;
games of chance and backing horses bit me hard when I was almost
a boy.”
The major laughed.
“Boys will be boys,” he said lightly, as he puffed at his cigar.
“And fools will be fools,” Preston retorted. “I was one of the fools
who ‘made their prayer,’ and have regretted it ever since.”
“Yet you have no objection to your future wife’s playing? That
seems to me strange.”
“Indeed, I have the strongest objection,” Preston answered
quickly, in a strange voice. “I have been through the mill, and I know
what it means when the craving to gamble gets a grip on you which,
try as you will, you can’t shake off. Unfortunately Miss Hagerston
met an acquaintance here yesterday—​that tall, handsome woman—​
you must have noticed her—​who last night induced her to play, and
they won a lot of money. Miss Hagerston became so exultant that
she promised Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson she would play with her again
to-night, and nothing I could say would dissuade her. I can only hope
that to-night their luck will be reversed, and then Miss Hagerston will
see the folly of the whole thing.”
For a minute the major did not reply. Then he said abruptly:
“Who are the two men who are always in Mrs. Mervyn-
Robertson’s company—​I think you said that was her name?”
“Just friends. They are constantly with her in London too, where
she is well-known in Society; some say there is no romance or
scandal associated with their friendship; others say there is.”
For a long while they conversed on various topics, and particularly
about the war. Presently the major said:
“I noticed a person in the hotel to-day who had a curious
reputation before the war—​a man called Michaud, Alphonse
Michaud. Have you ever heard of him?”
“Odd, your asking that,” Preston answered. “He was pointed out
to me last night at supper at the Casino—​a dark man, rather Jewish
looking, with black wavy hair.”
“That’s the fellow. He was mixed up in several shady affairs some
years before the war, and I understand he is now ‘commander-in-
chief’ of a most successful inquiry agency in London, with branches
on the Continent and abroad. I suppose it is the old idea, ‘set a thief
to catch a thief,’” and he laughed.
“What do you know about him?” Preston asked, suddenly
interested. “How the Metropolitan Secret Agency is so successful in
ferreting out secrets in people’s private lives has long puzzled
London Society, also the London police, and I have often heard it
hinted that the Agency in question of which I now understand
Michaud is the moving force, has recourse to questionable methods
to obtain its information.”
“That I can believe,” Major Guysburg answered, “if Michaud has
to do with it. Mind, he is an extraordinarily clever man. One ramp he
was generally supposed eight or ten years ago to have had a hand
in concerned the insurance of some valuable stones owned by a
diamond merchant whose place of business is in the Kalverstraat in
Amsterdam—​I formerly lived near Rotterdam. Within six months after
the insurance had been effected the stones disappeared from the
merchant’s safe, and to this day nobody knows how the robbery was
carried out—​the merchant kept the key of his safe on him day and
night. The opinion in Amsterdam, however, was that Michaud, who
had insured the stones and who was paid the insurance under
protest, was himself the thief. Oh, but there were other queer doings
in which he was said to be mixed up, but they would take too long to
tell. Incidentally he was supposed at one time to have in his
possession a remarkable drug, a sort of perfumed poison, with most
peculiar attributes—​it was said that the drug, properly administered,
rendered people unconscious, and left their minds a blank after they
recovered consciousness, from a period before they inhaled it.”
Preston became greatly interested.
“Tell me, major,” he said, “did you read the report recently of the
exhumation of the body of a Jew who died suddenly, and under
rather mysterious circumstances, at a ball at the Albert Hall?”
“No. I am not a great newspaper reader.”
“Well, naturally I was interested in the affair because I and a friend
of mine found the man dead in one of the boxes during the ball,” and
he went on to give Major Guysburg a brief account of what had
occurred that night. “Why I am interested in what you say about that
peculiar drug is that the man who was believed to know something
about the Jew’s death, or rather what caused it, admitted having
imported from Shanghai, for his own use only, he said, a drug
apparently similar to the one you have just mentioned—​it may,
indeed, have been the identical drug.”
“Shanghai, did you say? Why, I remember now that is the place
where the drug I have told you about was supposed to have come
from.”
“How strange! And there was another affair when apparently
some drug of the sort was used, but on that occasion the victim was
La Planta himself.”