We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
34 THE GREAT GOD PAN
jured out of a wink, a gesture, the way he strolled and grimaced and careened across the stage, a magician who could invent a world with a crook of a finger, a man without character who could assume the character of his inventions.
There was something amorphous about Beckmann which put Kierkegaard in mind of the Greek gods, who could change their appearance at will. He noted that Beckmann's contours were masterly, though the shading was weak. It hardly mattered, for there was no time to watch for shading or depth. Incredible forces were bottled up in Beckmann, whose rages were superb:
I call him the Incognito, whose body is the home of the crackbrained, insane devil of comedy, a devil who will break out of his chains at any moment and destroy everything in berserk fury. As for his dancing, it is incomparable. He sings a verse, then he dances, dances so furiously that at any moment you imagine he will break his neck. The ritual of the dance offers him no solace. He is beside himself with rage, yet his wild laughter has nothing at all to do with the usual comic foolery. Like Baron Munchhausen, his soul achieves perfection only when he takes himself by the neck and throws himself into a delirious abandon of joy. I have said that anyone can taste these joys, but it is only a genius, working in the name and with the authority of genius, who can play with them. Unless genius is present, the result is disastrous.
There was Beckmann, but there was also Grobecker, whose voice was harsh and piercing where Beckmann's possessed, even in its rages, a human warmth. Grobecker was sentimental, but it was a cold sentimentality. He attracted attention to himself, not to the world he created, and his forte lay in his absurd postures. Once he took the part of a steward waiting for the arrival of his masters. Grobecker decided that on their return from the city nothing would please them so much as a fete-champetre, a charming introduction to the life of the country. He could not bring the peasants to life; he could only bring himself to life as the obedient steward, waiting to serve his master. But how? He decided to disguise himself as Mercury, attaching wings to his feet and decorat