GAt the end of his well-composed collection of aphorisms, which was given the title “Book of Friends” borrowed from Goethe, Hugo von Hofmannsthal placed a word from the French painter Nicolas Poussin, with whom he had studied more intensively. It is an “end point” in several senses, because Hofmannsthal was aware of the extreme demands expressed in it: “Je n’ai rien négligé.” In one of the fragments of his novel “Andreas,” the Austrian writer writes: “ That word: I have neglected nothing, who can say it with a clear conscience.” He had found this bon mot at the end of Otto Grautoff’s introduction to his two-volume Poussin monograph, which Hofmannsthal had read in 1916.
The fact that he did not use this word in the sense of presumptuous self-assurance, but rather as a divining rod of self-questioning, is shown by his use, for example in a letter to Rudolf Pannwitz from November 1919, in which the author asks himself: “Was George stronger than I? I don’t know, there’s too much artificiality about him, and he leaves out too much.” Here the high demand to justify oneself to Stefan George’s strict art religion becomes clear, whose circle had accused Hofmannsthal, who was considered a renegade, of moving from the temple to the street, so to speak, by turning to the opera, an “everyman” and daily politics have.
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