conventional forms. The work
of the group bordered often upon archaic preciosity, yet its influence
was wholesome in holding up the ideal of a formalism which is after all
one of the basic conditions of art. Though not a native of Vienna,
Stefan George settled there after launching the movement and found
among its young intellectuals not a few disciples that have since
followed in his wake. There is something about an art for art's sake
that appeals to an aristocracy of birth and breeding; it touched a
responsive chord in the soul of Hugo von Hofmannsthal,[A] whose earlier
work distinctly shows its influence and who to that influence still
owes his admirable mastery of form.

[Footnote A: For Hofmannsthal, compare Vol. XVII, pp. 482-527.]

Hofmannsthal's descent from an old nobility that had passed the zenith
of its power and was but little modified by a strain of the more
democratic Hebrew blood, seemed to predestine him for the part he has
played in the literature of the present. He made his debut as a mere
youth of seventeen, when in 1891 he published the dramatic study
_Yesterday_, giving evidence of an amazingly precocious mind and a
prematurely developed formal talent. Gifted writers of that kind are
usually doomed to remain prodigies whatever may be their medium of
expression. Coming into their heritage, which is the accumulated
knowledge and experience of their ancestors, before they have acquired
a direct and profound grasp of life, they seem to enter the world
full-fledged, while it is only that ancestral heritage that works
through the impressions of the youthful brain and gives them the color
of age. Knowing and satiated when the mind is most receptive, such
individualities rarely develop beyond their first brilliant phase. Hugo
von Hofmannsthal was for a long time considered a perfect specimen of
that type. For the hero of that first work, as of every work published
by him during the first decade of his career, was his double, was
Hofmannsthal himself. All the virtuosity of style could not conceal the
paucity of invention in subject matter and in the creation of real
living characters. Even in that charming Oriental play _The Marriage of
Sobeide_ (1899) and _The Mine of Falun_ (1906) the personality of the
author obtrudes itself upon the vision of the reader.

These works, however, marked a transition. For with his thirtieth year
Hofmannsthal entered upon a new period and a new manner. The study of