Master Olof.

by August Strindberg.

INTRODUCTION

The original prose version of Master Olof, which is here presented for the first time in English form, was written between June 8 and August 8, 1872, while Strindberg, then only twenty-three years old, was living with two friends on one of the numerous little islands that lie between Stockholm and the open sea.

Up to that time he had produced half-a-dozen plays, one of which had been performed at the Royal Theatre of Stockholm and had won him the good-will and financial support of King Carl XV. Thus he had been able to return to the University of Upsala, whence he had been driven a year earlier by poverty as well as by spiritual revolt. During his second term of study at the old university Strindberg wrote some plays that he subsequently destroyed. In the same period he not only conceived the idea later developed in Master Olof, but he also acquired the historical data underlying the play and actually began to put it into dialogue.

During that same winter of 1871-72 he read extensively, although his reading probably had slight reference to the university curriculum. The two works that seem to have taken the lion's share of his attention were Goethe's youthful drama Goetz von Berlichingen and Buckle's History of Civilization in England. Both impressed him deeply, and both became in his mind logically connected with an external event which, perhaps, had touched his supersensitive soul more keenly than anything else: an event concerning which he says in the third volume of The Bondwoman's Son, that "he had just discovered that the men of the Paris Commune merely put into action what Buckle preached."

Such were the main influences at work on his mind when, early in 1872, his royal protector died, and Strindberg found himself once more dependent on his own resources. To continue at the university was out of the question, and he seems to have taken his final departure from it without the least feeling of regret. Unwise as he may have been in other respects, he was wise enough to realize that, whatever his goal, the road to it must be of his own making. Returning to Stockholm, he groped around for a while as he had done a year earlier, what he even tried to eke out a living as the editor of a trade journal. Yet the seeds sown within him during the previous winter were sprouting. An irresistible impulse urged him to continue the work of Buckle. History and philosophy were the ultimate ends tempting his mind, but first of all he was impelled to express himself in terms of concrete life, and the way had been shown him by Goethe. Moved by Goethe's example, he felt himself obliged to break through the stifling forms of cla.s.sical drama.

"No verse, no eloquence, no unity of place," was the resolution he formulated straightway. [Note: See again The Bondwoman's Son, vol. iii: In the Red Room.]

Having armed himself with a liberal supply of writing-paper, he joined his two friends in the little island of Kymmendo. Of money he had so little that, but for the generosity of one of his friends, he would have had to leave the island in the autumn without settling the small debt he owed for board and lodging. Yet those months were happy indeed--above all because he felt himself moved by an inspiration more authentic than he had ever before experienced. Thus page was added to page, and act to act, until at last, in the surprisingly brief time of two months, the whole play was ready--mighty in bulk and spirit, as became the true firstling of a young t.i.tan.

Strindberg had first meant to name his play "What Is Truth?" For a while he did call it "The Renegade," but in the end he thought both t.i.tles smacked too much of tendency and decided instead, with reasoned conventionalism, to use the t.i.tle of Master Olof after its central figure, the Luther of Sweden.

From a dramatic point of view it would have been hard to pick a more promising period than the one he had chosen as a setting for his play.

The early reign of Gustaf Vasa, the founder of modern Sweden, was marked by three parallel conflicts of equal intensity and interest: between Swedish and Danish nationalism; between Catholicism and Protestantism; and, finally, between feudalism and a monarchism based more or less on the consent of the governed. Its background was the long struggle for independent national existence in which the country had become involved by its voluntary federation with Denmark and Norway about the end of the fourteenth century. That Struggle--made necessary by the insistence of one sovereign after another on regarding Sweden as a Danish province rather than as an autonomous part of a united Scandinavia--had reached a sort of climax, a final moment of utter blackness just before the dawn, when, at Stockholm in 1520, the Danish king, known ever afterward as Christian the Tyrant, commanded the arbitrary execution of about eighty of Sweden's most representative men.

Until within a few months of that event, named by the horror-stricken people "the blood-bath of Stockholm," the young Gustaf Eriksson Vasa had been a prisoner in Denmark, sent there as a hostage of Swedish loyalty.

Having obtained his freedom by flight, he made his way to the inland province of Dalecarlia, where most of the previous movements on behalf of national liberty had originated, and having cleared the country of foreign invaders, chiefly by the help of an aroused peasantry that had never known the yoke of serfdom, he was elected king at a Riksdag held in the little city of Strangnas, not far from Stockholm, in 1523.

Strangnas was a cathedral city and had for several years previous been notorious for the Lutheran leanings of its clergy. After the death of its bishop as one of the victims of King; Christian, its temporary head had been the archdeacon, the ambitious and learned Lars Andersson--or Laurentius Andreae, as, in accordance with the Latinizing tendency of the time, he was more frequently named. One of its canons was Olof Pedersson--also known as Olaus Petri, and more commonly as Master Olof (Master being the vernacular for Magister, which was the equivalent of our modern Doctor)--who, during two years spent in studies at the University of Wittenberg, had been in personal contact with Luther, and who had become fired with an aspiration to carry the Reformation into his native country. By recent historians Master Olof has been described as of a "naively humble nature," rather melancholy in temperament, but endowed with a gift for irony, and capable of fiery outbursts when deeply stirred. At Strangnas he had been preaching the new faith more openly and more effectively than any one else, and he had found a pupil as well as a protector in the temporary head of the diocese.

Immediately after his election, the new King called Lars Andersson from Strangnas to become his first chancellor. Later on, he pressed Olof, too, into his service, making him Secretary to the City Corporation of Stockholm--which meant that Olof practically became the chief civil administrator of the capital, having to act as both clerk and magistrate, while at the same time he was continuing his reformatory propaganda as one of the preachers in the city's princ.i.p.al edifice, officially named after St. Nicolaus, but commonly spoken of as Greatchurch. As if this were not sufficient for one man, he plunged also into a feverish literary activity, doing most of the work on the Swedish translations of the New and Old Testaments, and paving the way for the new faith by a series of vigorous polemical writings, the style of which proclaims him the founder of modern Swedish prose. Centuries pa.s.sed before the effective simplicity and homely picturesqueness of his style were surpa.s.sed. He became, furthermore, Sweden's first dramatist. The Comedy of Tobit, from which Strindberg uses a few pa.s.sages in slightly modernized form at the beginning of his play, is now generally recognized as an authentic product of Olof's pen, although it was not written until a much later period.

Strindberg's drama starts at Strangnas, at the very moment when Olof has been goaded into open revolt against the abuses of the Church, and when he is saved from the consequences of that revolt only by the unexpected arrival of King Gustaf and his own appointment as City Secretary. From the slightly strained, but not improbable, coincidence of that start to the striking climax of the last act, the play follows, on the whole, pretty closely the actual course of events recorded in history. To understand this course, with its gradually intensified conflict between the King and Olof, it is above all necessary to bear in mind that the former regarded the Reformation princ.i.p.ally as a means toward that political reorganization and material upbuilding of the country which formed his main task; while to Olof the religious reconstruction a.s.sumed supreme importance. This fundamental divergence of purpose is clearly indicated and effectively used by Strindberg, and we have reason to believe that he has pictured not only Gustaf Vasa and Master Olof, but also the other historical characters, in close accordance with what history has to tell us about them. Among the chief figures there is only one--Gert the Printer--who is not known to history, and one--the wife of Olof--who is so little known that the playwright has been at liberty to create it almost wholly out of his own imagination.

At the juncture represented by the initial scenes of the play, Olof was in reality thirty-one years old, but he is made to appear still younger.

The King should be, and is, about twenty-seven, while Lars Andersson is about fifty-four, and Bishop Brask about seventy. Gert must be thought a man of about sixty, while Christine must be about twenty. The action of the play lasts from 1524 to 1540, but Strindberg has contracted the general perspective, so to speak, giving us the impression that the entire action takes place within a couple of years. I have tried to work out a complete chronology, and think it fairly safe to date the several parts of the play as follows:

The first act takes place on Whitsun Eve, 1524, which means that the exact date must fall between May 10 and June 13 of that year, and probably about June 1.

The first scene of the second act occurs in the early evening of a Sat.u.r.day in the summer--probably in June--of 1524. The second scene is fixed at midnight of the same day, and the third scene on the following morning, which, in view of the fact that Olof is to preach, we may a.s.sume to be a Sunday.

The first scene of the third act seems to take place four days later, but Olof was not married until February, 1525,--to "Christine, a maiden of good family,"--and it was only during the winter of 1526-27 that the Church reformers were given free rein by the King, and Olof himself was despatched to the University of Upsala for the purpose of challenging Peder Galle, the noted Catholic theologian, to a joint discussion. This was also the time when the first Swedish version of the New Testament was completed by Olof and Lars Andersson--an event referred to in the scene in question.

The exact date of the second scene of the third act is St. John's Eve, or June 24, 1527, at which time occurred the important Riksdag at Vesters, where the King broke the final resistance of the n.o.bility and the Catholic clergy by threatening to abdicate. The debate between Olof and Peder Galle took place at the Riksdag, Galle having evaded it as long as he could.

The date of the fourth act is very uncertain, but it seems safe to place it in the summer of 1539, when Stockholm was ravaged by an epidemic of a virulent disease known as "the English sweat."

The first scene of the fifth act is laid on New Year's Eve, 1539, when Olof and Lars Andersson were arrested and charged with high treason for not having informed the proper authorities of a plot against the King's life. This plot was an old story, having been exposed and punished in 1536. Their defence was that they had learned of it through secret confession, which they as ministers had no right to reveal. The trial took only two days, and on January 2, 1540, both were sentenced to death.

The second scene of the final act must be laid in the spring of 1540, as the ceremony of confirmation has generally taken place about Easter ever since the Swedish church became Lutheran.

While, in the main, Strindberg made the events of his play accord with what was accepted as historical fact when he wrote, there are anachronisms and inaccuracies to be noted, although to none of them can be attached much importance. When, in the first and second acts, he represents the Anabaptist leaders, Rink and Knipperdollink, as then in Stockholm and actually introduces one of them on the stage, he has merely availed himself of a legend which had been accepted as truth for centuries, and which has been exploded only by recent historical research. We know now that Rink and Knipperdollink could never have been in Sweden, but we know also that a German lay preacher named Melchior Hofman appeared at Stockholm about the time indicated in the play, and that, in 1529, another such preacher, named Tilemann, made Olof himself the object of his fierce invectives. These instances serve, in fact, to prove how skilfully Strindberg handled his historical material. He is never rigid as to fact, but as a rule he is accurate in spirit. Another instance of this kind is found in the references in the first act to the use of Swedish for purposes of worship. It is recorded--and by himself, I think--that Olof once asked his mother whether she really understood the Latin prayers, since she was so very fond of them. She answered: "No, I don't understand them, but when I hear them I pray devoutly to G.o.d that they may please Him, which I don't doubt they do."

On the other hand, what maybe regarded as rather an awkward slip is found in the first scene of the fifth act, where Gert cries exultantly to Olof: "You don't know that Thomas Munster has established a new spiritual kingdom at Muhlhausen." The name of the great Anabaptist "prophet" was Thomas Munzer, and the place where he established his brief reign was Munster. Strindberg's habit was to fill his head with the facts to be used, and then to rely on his memory. Marvellous as his memory was, it sometimes deceived him, and checking off names or dates seems to have been utterly beyond him. Thus it is quite probable that the pa.s.sage in question represents an unconscious error. At the same time it is barely possible that the mistake may have been purposely laid in the mouth of a fanatic, from whom exactness of statement could hardly be expected. Thus, in the first act, Gert remarks that "Luther is dead." We understand, of course, that this expression is metaphorical, signifying that Luther has done all that can be expected of him, but it is nevertheless characteristically ambiguous.

The second scene of the third act is apparently laid in Olof's house at Stockholm, although the location of the building is not definitely indicated. We find him waiting for a messenger who is to announce the results of the Riksdag then in session. But the Riksdag was held at Vesters, and we know that Olof was one of two delegates sent by the burghers and the peasants to the King, whom they implored "on their knees and with tears" to withdraw his abdication. The Courtier's reference to Olof's debate with Galle renders it still more uncertain whether we are in Stockholm or in Vesters. The Courtier also informs Olof of his appointment as pastor of Greatchurch, the facts being that Olof was not ordained until 1539 and received his appointment a year after the events described in the last act of the play. In the metrical version, Strindberg makes his most radical departure from the historical course of events by letting Luther's marriage precede and influence that of Olof, although in reality Olof's antic.i.p.ated that of Luther by several months.

The complaints of the Man from Smland in the first scene of the second act could scarcely have been warranted in 1524, when that act takes place. The hold of the young King was far too precarious at that early date to permit any regulations of the kind referred to. The establishment of a maximum price on oxen does not seem to have occurred until 1532, and a prohibition against the shooting of deer by the peasants was actually issued in 1538, both measures helping to provoke the widespread uprising that broke out in Smland in 1541. It was named the "Dacke feud" after its princ.i.p.al leader, the peasant-chieftain Nils Dacke, to whom the s.e.xton refers in the second scene of the last act--also a little prematurely.

Whether these be conscious or unconscious anachronisms, they matter very little when the general accuracy of the play is considered. From the moment the Danes had been driven out of the country, one of the most serious problems confronting the King was the financial chaos into which the country had fallen, and his efforts, first of all to raise enough means for ordinary administrative purposes, and secondly to reorganize trade and agriculture, brought him almost immediately into conflict with the peasants, who, during the long struggle for national independence, had become accustomed to do pretty much as they pleased. The utterances of the Man from Smland are typical of the sentiments that prevailed among the peasants throughout the country, not least when he speaks of the King's intention to "take away their priests and friars," for the majority of the Swedish people were at that time still intensely Catholic, and remained so to a large extent long after the Reformation officially had placed Sweden among Protestant countries.

Much more serious than any liberties taken with dates or facts, I deem certain linguistic anachronisms, of which Strindberg not rarely becomes guilty. Thus, for instance, he makes the King ask Bishop Brask: "What kind of phenomenon is this?" The phrase is palpably out of place, and yet it has been used so deliberately that nothing was left for me to do but to translate it literally. The truth is that Strindberg was not striving to reproduce the actual language of the Period--a language of which we get a glimpse in the quotations from The Comedy of Tobit. Here and there he used archaic expressions (which I have sometimes reproduced and sometimes disregarded, as the exigencies of the new medium happened to require). At other times he did not hesitate to employ modern colloquialisms (most of which have been "toned down"). He did not regard local color or historical atmosphere as a supreme desideratum. He wanted to express certain ideas, and he wanted to bring home the essential humanity of historical figures which, through the operations of legendary history, had a.s.sumed a strange, unhuman aspect. The methods he employed for these purposes have since been made familiar to the English-speaking public by the historical plays of Bernard Shaw and the short stories and novels of Anatole France.

In his eagerness, however, to express what was burning for utterance in his own breast, the second purpose was sometimes lost sight of; and at such times Strindberg hesitated as little to pa.s.s the bounds imposed by an historical period as to break through the much more important limitations of cla.s.s and personal antecedents. Thus, for example, the remarks of Olof's mother are at one moment characterized by the simplicity to be expected from the aged widow of a small city tradesman in the early part of the sixteenth century, while in the next--under the pressure of the author's pa.s.sion for personal expression--they grow improbably sophisticated. Yet each figure, when seen in proper perspective, appears correctly drawn and strikingly consistent with the part a.s.signed to it in the play. In his very indifference to minor accuracies, Strindberg sometimes approaches more closely to the larger truth than men more scrupulous in regard to details. How true he can be in his delineation of a given type is perhaps best shown by the figure of Gert. The world's literature holds few portrayals of the anarchistic temperament that can vie with it in psychological exactness, and it is as true to-day as it was in 1524 or in 1872.

This verisimilitude on a universal rather than a specific plane a.s.sumes still greater significance if we consider it in the light of what Strindberg has told us about his purpose with the main characters of his first great play. As I have already said, those characters were meant to be both mouthpieces of the author and revived historical figures, but they were also meant--and primarily, I suspect--to be something else: embodiments of the contradictory phases of a single individual, namely the author himself.

"The author meant to hide his own self behind the historical characters," Strindberg tells us, apropos of this very play. [Note: In one of his biographical novels, The Bondwoman's Son, vol. iii: In the Red Room.] "As an idealist he was to be represented by Olof; as a realist by Gustaf; and as a communist by Gert." Farther on in the same work, he continues his revelation as follows: "The King and his shadow, the shrewd Constable, represented himself [the author] as he wished to be; Gert, as he was in moments of aroused pa.s.sion; and Olof, as, after years of self-scrutiny, he had come to know himself: ambitious and weak-willed; unscrupulous when something was at stake, and yielding at other times; possessed of great self-confidence, mixed with a deep melancholy; balanced and irrational; hard and gentle."

Finally, he gives us this illuminating exposition of his own views on the moral validity of the main characters, thus disposing once for all of the one-sided interpretations made by persons anxious to use this or that aspect of the play in support of their own political or social idiosyncrasies: "All the chief characters are, relatively speaking, in the right. The Constable, from the standpoint of his own day, is right in asking Olof to keep calm and go on preaching; Olof is right in admitting that he had gone too far; the scholar, Vilhelm, is right when, in the name of youth, he demands the evolution of a new truth; and Gert is right in calling Olof a renegade. The individual must always become a renegade--forced by the necessity of natural laws; by fatigue; by inability to develop indefinitely, as the brain ceases to grow about the age of forty-five; and by the claims of actual life, which demand that even a reformer must live as man, mate, head of a family, and citizen. But those who crave that the individual continue his progress indefinitely are the shortsighted--particularly those who think that the cause must perish because the individual deserts it.... It is an open question, for that matter, whether Olof did not have a better chance to advance his cause from the pulpit of the reformed Greatchurch than he would have had in low-cla.s.s taverns."

These pa.s.sages were written by Strindberg fourteen years after the completion of the play to which they refer. We have other evidence, however, that, while he might have seen things more clearly in retrospect, he had not been lured by the lapse of time into placing his characters in a light different from that in which they were conceived.

On the list of characters forming part of the original handwritten ma.n.u.script of the first version of Master Olof, now preserved in the Public Library of Gothenburg, Sweden, the author has jotted down certain very significant notes opposite the more important names. Thus he has written opposite the name of the King: "To accomplish something in this world, one has to risk morality and conscience;" opposite the name of Olof: "He who strives to realize an idea develops greatness of personality--he accomplishes good by his personal example, but he is doomed to perish;" opposite that of Bishop Brask: "There is movement in whatever exists--whatever stands still must be crushed;" and opposite that of Gert: "He who wills more than his reason can grasp must go mad."

Such was the play with which the young Strindberg returned to the Swedish capital in the fall of 1872; and let us remember in this connection, that up to the time in question no dramatic work of similar importance had ever been produced in Sweden. Its completion was more epoch-making for Sweden than that of Brand was for Norway in 1865--since the coming of Ibsen's first really great play was heralded by earlier works leading up to it, while Master Olof appeared where n.o.body had any reason to expect it. This very fact militated against its success, of course; it was too unexpected, and also too startlingly original, both in spirit and in form.

At the time there was only one stage in Sweden where such a work could be produced--the Royal Theatre at Stockholm. To the officials of this state--supported inst.i.tution Strindberg submitted his work--hopefully, as we know from his own statement. It was scornfully and ignominiously rejected, the main criticism being that a serious historical drama in prose was unthinkable. I shall make no comment whatever on that judgment, having in mind how several years later Edmund Gosse bewailed the failure of Ibsen to give a metrical form to his Emperor and Galilean.

Strindberg's next effort concerned publication. In this respect he was equally unsuccessful, although as a rule it has never been very difficult in Sweden to find a publisher for any work of reasonable merit. But the play was not only too original, it was too dangerously radical for a country where a truly modern form of representative government had not been achieved until seven years earlier. Strindberg was at first stunned by this failure. He seriously contemplated giving up writing altogether. When he had recovered somewhat, he seems reluctantly to have faced the possibility that the fault might be found in the play and not in the public.

So he set about to re-write it--and he did so not only once but repeatedly, producing in all six versions that differ more or less from one another. At first he clung to the prose form. Gradually he began to introduce verse, until finally, in 1877 or 1878, he completed an almost new play, where the metrical form predominated without being used exclusively. This version was actually published in 1878. Originally, an epilogue was appended to it, but this was dropped from all but a small part of the first edition. It is supposed to take place a number of years later than the fifth act, and shows Olof with his two sons outside the city walls of Stockholm, where they witness a miracle-play introducing G.o.d as the principle of darkness and Lucifer as the overthrown but never conquered principle of light. The bitter generalizations of this afterthought explain Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later Strindberg--the man who wrote Advent, for instance--it must have seemed one of his most unforgivable offences.

Although Strindberg's main object in working over his play undoubtedly was to obtain its production, the metrical version was not put on the stage until 1890, when, however, it was performed at the Royal Theatre, toward which its author had looked so longingly and so vainly eighteen years earlier. The prose version, on the other hand, was produced as early as 1881, at the New Theatre in Stockholm, but was not published until the same year, when it appeared in book form grouped with a number of other writings from Strindberg's earliest period.

Of the five unprinted versions connecting the original prose drama of 1872 with the final metrical form of 1878, more or less complete ma.n.u.scripts have been preserved, and these are now being examined in detail by the Swedish literary historian, Professor Karl Warburg. A summary a.n.a.lysis by Dr. John Landquist is appended to the second volume of the definitive edition of Strindberg's complete works (Albert Bonnier, Stockholm), where the epilogue to the metrical version is also reprinted after so many years of oblivion.

"Of all the ma.n.u.scripts preceding the final metrical version," says Dr.

Landquist, "the original one, written when Strindberg was twenty-three, is the masterpiece. There everything is consistent; there the dialogue has a power and an incisiveness to which it does not attain in any of the unprinted ma.n.u.scripts. On the contrary, these seem more youthful than the original, producing at times an impression of immaturity and uncertainty on the part of the author. Even when some isolated phrase strikes one as fortunate, it does not tend to strengthen the drama as a whole. The later versions lack that sense of inner unity and that audacious touch which lend fascination and power to the original ma.n.u.script.

"Not until we reach the first metrical version (of 1876) does the full power of the playwright begin to rea.s.sert itself in such fashion that out of his untiring labors at last springs a new work, the mood of which differs essentially from that of the first prose version. These two versions--the first and the final--are the results of diametrically opposed methods of work. The first was written with a certainty and swiftness of inspiration that raised the young poet far above the productive powers generally characteristic of his years. The subsequent modifications prove merely how futile are the efforts of reason to improve what intuition has inspired. But gradually it seems to have dawned on the poet that he was about to evolve a wholly new work--that what he had come to aim at was quite distinct from what he had been aiming at in the beginning, and from that moment his artistic reasoning carried him onward until at last a new inspiration brought the work to its completion."

Concerning the final metrical version, I can give only a few outstanding and rather superficial facts, hoping that I may some time have the opportunity of presenting it entire to the American public. Like the prose version, it has five acts, but these are not subdivided into scenes. It is briefer, more concentrated both in spirit and in form, and may be said to display a greater unity of purpose. It is more human, too, and less t.i.tanic. The change shows itself strikingly in a figure like that of Mrten, who in the metrical version has become softened into an unconscionable but rather lovable rapscallion. The last remark but one made by Mrten when driven from Dame Christine's deathbed by Olof is: "Talk to your mother, son--the two of you have so much to forgive each other."

In strength and pa.s.sion and daring, on the other hand, the final version falls far short of the original one, and the very fact that it is more logical, more carefully reasoned, tends at times to render it less psychologically true. Each version has its own merits and its own faults, and in their appeal they are so radically different that a choice between them must always remain meaningless except on temperamental grounds. At one point, however--and an important one at that--the metrical version seems to me the happier by far.

That cry of "renegade," which, echoing from the dim recesses of the church, makes the prose version end on a note of perplexing irony, may be theatrically effective, but it can hardly be called logical. Gert has been disposed of. His sudden return out of the clutches of the soldiers is inexplicable and unwarranted. Worse still, he has only a short while previous been urging Olof to live on for his work. If Olof be a renegade, he is so upon the advice of Gert himself, and to call the concession made by Olof for the saving of his own life far-reaching enough to explain Gert's sudden change of att.i.tude approaches dangerously near to quibbling. In the metrical version, on the other hand, the same cry of "renegade" is quite logically and suitably wrung from the lips of Vilhelm, the scholar who is still dreaming of uncompromised ideals. But it is not the final word. This comes from Olof, and takes the form of a brief apostrophe to the fleeing Vilhelm, which I think ranks with the finest pa.s.sages produced by Strindberg.

Apologetically, I offer this English version of it as a fitting close to my Introduction:

Olof. Oh, what a word! But though it shook the air, These columns did not stir, nor fell the dome, And I stand calm upon this lonely sh.o.r.e, Where I was dropped by the receding waves-- For, after all, I am ash.o.r.e. And now A last "good luck upon the road" I send To speed the daring sailor who will give No ear to one that just has come to grief.

With sails hauled close, steer for the open sea And for the far-off goal your soul desires!

Ere long you must fall off like all the rest, Although a star your guiding landmark be For in due time the stars themselves must fall!