ABSTRACT
Hofmannsthal's experience of the inadequacy of words already hinted at in his first verse play of 1891 involved a whole complex of related matters. Art, in the early phase, was the means of creating dreams and illusions powerful enough to banish the barbarous realities of the age. Hofmannsthal's earliest references to dance belong to the brief phase in which he combined a Nietzschean vitalism and primitivism with a taste for the latest refinements of decadent art. His writings on the visual arts, including architecture, are as perceptive as those on literature, the theatre, and the dance, and as rich in those moments of vision which make his essays an essential part of his imaginative work. In an address of 1902 Hofmannsthal had described art as second nature', saying that in colours it is the totality of nature which seeks to reveal itself to the human eye.
