Hofmannsthal and Bacon: The Sources of the Chandos Letter

Abstract

N OCTOBER 18 and 19, 1902 Hugo von Hofmannsthal published in the Berlin daily, Der Tag, an imaginary letter under the simple title, Ein Brief.1 The letter, which purports to have been written on August 22, 1603 by a Philip Chandos to Francis Bacon, gives a detailed explanation of the writer's renunciation of all future literary activity. The first four of fifteen printed pages describe what Chandos wrote and planned to write as a young man. The twenty-six-year-old writer then links his literary activity to a general state of mind in which the whole of human existence and of the world appeared to him as one great unity. There follows an account of how Chandos fell from this state of presumptuous exuberance. His world is shattered to fragments, all coherence gone. This fragmentation and atomization is primarily due to a distrust of language; words are insufficient to say what is.