Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  And they had become witnesses against him. That was why it had been necessary for them to come. That was why he had had to await their coming. They had appeared as witnesses and complainants, to accuse him of sharing in their guilt, alleging that he was one of them, an accomplice, a perjurer, and guilty even as they, because, like them, he knew nothing of the pledge which had been broken and continued to be broken, because from the outset he had been oblivious of the pledge and of duty, aye, and it was this that increased his guilt, notwithstanding the necessity by which his life, just as theirs, was fate-ordered to reach this point, the point of relinquishing the creation again: the creation was once more relinquished, gods and men again abandoned to the unborn state of the pre-creation in which life and death are equally doomed to be meaningless, for duty derived only from the pledge, for meaning derived only from the pledge, and nothing retained meaning when, duty being forgotten, the pledge was broken, the pledge given at the obscure beginning, the pledge which must be kept by gods and men although no one knows what it is, no one except the unknown god, for all language stemmed from him, the most hidden of heavenly creatures, only to return to him, the guardian of the pledge of prayer, of duty. It was to await him, the unknown god, that his own glance had been compelled earthward, peering to see the advent of him whose redeeming word, born from and giving birth to duty, should restore language to a communication among men who supported the pledge, hoping thereby to retrieve language from the regions above and below speech, the regions into which man—this too his prerogative—had plunged it, seeking to rescue it from the cloudy state of beauty and the tatterdom of laughter, that it might be led out of the thicket of opacity, in which it had been squandered, and reinstated as the instrument of the pledge. This hope had been a vain one, and the world, sunk back into amorphousness, into meaninglessness, sunk back into an unborn state, encircled by the shadowy mountains of its pre-natal death over which it could not be lifted by the wings of any earthly death, lay spread out before him, the world threaded with beauty and sundered by laughter, its language lost and without human brotherhood, because of the broken pledge of which it too was guilty; instead of the unknown god, instead of him bearing the pledge that led to duty, these three had come hither: the bearers of dereliction.

  The one duty, earthly duty, the duty of helpfulness, the duty of awakening; there was no other duty, and even man’s duty toward divinity and the god’s duty toward humanity consisted of nothing other than helpfulness. And he, whom fate had necessarily and inevitably made fellow to the bearers of dereliction, was just as unwilling for duty and helpfulness as they; and probably the apparent modesty of his needs was no more than disdain for the help that came to him from all sides, and which he accepted without gratitude, for he resembled the mob in this respect also, the mob which demands all sorts of favors but repulses all real help in consequence of its own incapacity for helpfulness: one who from the beginning has yielded to perjury, who has grown up and lived in stony caves, who therefore starts out saddled with the perjurer’s fear, such a one from his youth on is far too knowing, far too tricky, far too pleasure-loving and quick-witted to take stock in anything that does not promise immediate gratification of his dawning greed, that does not point to licentious coupling in an all-permitting lawlessness or, if not this, then at least to an advantage measurable in sesterces; it was all one whether these three down there demanded wine, flour, or garlic, or whether others cried out for circus games in order to deaden their fear with these bloody burlesques, with these murderous distorted games which were played on the perilous border where beauty and laughter meet, bringing them in self-betrayal and god-betrayal to the heavenly powers, in a sham penance for their perjury; it was all one whether this was done for pleasure or in placation of the gods, since it was not for an awakening, not for help, for real help that they sued but only for advantage, real advantage; and if Caesar wished to tame these lawless ones to lawfulness again, then circuses, wine and flour were simply the price he had to pay for their obedience. And yet, strangely unaccountable, they even loved him, although in reality they loved no one, although they knew no solidarity save the spurious solidarity of the mob, in which, lacking a common perception, none loves the other, none helps the other, none comprehends the other, none trusts the other, none hears the other’s voice, theirs being the non-solidarity of those who lack a common speech, the speech-robbed non-solidarity of unrelated beings: not only had their tricky fear and cocksure suspicion made perception seem sheer superfluity to them, an empty swindle with words, productive of neither pleasure nor advantage, and which, moreover, could be outdone at any time by the play of still slyer words, not only had love, helpfulness, communication, trust, and language, each dependent upon the other, been dissolved by such means to an empty nothingness, not only, in consequence of all this had a simple calculation come to seem their one remaining and reliable hold, but even that appeared no longer reliable enough, and their fear, despite their passionate preoccupation with counting and reckoning, had not been allayed thereby; they saw through it now as a windy nothing and therefore they felt themselves driven to despair, even though despair expressed itself in a wittily-knowing, voluptuously-witty self-mockery; shaken by laughter, because nothing is able to withstand a fear so deep as theirs, because even what could be counted did not become credible or reliable until one had spat upon the coin, using the appropriate magic formula; though believing every miracle—basically their most human and even their most likable characteristic—they were skeptical of truth, and it was this which made them, who believed themselves such excellent accountants, entirely unaccountable, made each of them, cut off in his fear, simply dense and finally unapproachable. Had he, according to the plans of his youth, approached them as a physician, they would have derided and disdained his help were it ever so gratuitously offered, preferring the ministrations of any herb-witch; that had been their standpoint and conditions had not changed and his recognition of this was one of the reasons why he had finally changed his profession; but convincing as these reasons had once seemed to him, today it became clear that they had been the beginning of his own descent to the mob pattern, that he had never been entitled to abandon medical science, that even the doubtful help which it could offer would have been more honorable than the delusive hope of helpfulness with which he had subsequently decked out his profession as poet, hoping against his inner conviction that the might of beauty, that the magic of song, would finally bridge the abyss of incommunication and would exalt him, the poet, to the rank of perception-bringer in the restored community of men; lifted out of the mob pattern and therefore able to abolish that pattern, Orpheus chose to be the leader of mankind. Ah, not even Orpheus had attained such a goal, not even his immortal greatness had justified such vain and presumptuous dreams of grandeur, such flagrant overestimation of poetry! Certainly many instances of earthly beauty—a song, the twilit sea, the tone of the lyre, the voice of a boy, a verse, a statue, a column, a garden, a single flower—all possess the divine faculty of making man hearken unto the innermost and outermost boundaries of his existence, and therefore it is not to be wondered at that the lofty art of Orpheus was esteemed to have the power of diverting the streams from their beds and changing their courses, of luring the wild beasts of the forest with tender dominance, of arresting the cattle a-browse upon the meadows and moving them to listen, caught in the dream and enchanted, the dream-wish of all art: the world compelled to listen, ready to receive the song and its salvation. However, even had Orpheus achieved his aim, the help lasts no longer than the song, nor does the listening, and on no account might the song resound too long, otherwise the streams would return to their old courses, the wild beasts of the forest would again fall upon and slay the innocent beasts of the field, and man would revert again to his old, habitual cruelty; for not only did no intoxication last long, and this was likewise true of beauty’s spell, but furthermore, the mildness to which men and beasts had yielded was only half of the intoxication of be
auty, while the other half, not less strong and for the most part far stronger, was of such surpassing and terrible cruelty—the most cruel of men delights himself with a flower—that beauty, and before all the beauty born of art, failed quickly of its effect if in disregard of the reciprocal balance of its two components it approached man with but one of them. Wherever and however art was practised, it had to follow this rule, indeed the following of it was one of the artist’s essential virtues, and very often, though not always, that of his protagonist: had the virtuous Aeneas remained as soft-hearted as might once have been expected of him, had he, either in the upsurge of his compassion or for the sake of the poem’s beautiful tension, been reluctant to kill his mortal enemy, had he not, with better judgment, decided in that moment to do the terrible deed, he would by no means have become the example of gentleness which had to be emulated, but instead he would have become a tedious and unheroic figure unworthy of portrayal by any poem; whether the hero and his deed were Aeneas or another, the concern of art was how to maintain equilibrium, the great equilibrium at the transported periphery, and its unspeakably floating and fugitive symbol, which never reflected the isolated content of things but only their interconnections, this being the only way in which the symbol fulfilled its function, since it was only through this interconnection that the contradictions of existence fell into a balance, in which alone the various contradictory trends of the human instincts were comprehended—were it otherwise, how could art be created and understood by men!—gentleness and cruelty comprehended in the equilibrium of beauty’s language, comprehended in the symbol of the balance which they maintained between the ego and the universe, in the intoxicating magic of a unity which endured with the song, but no longer. And it could not have been otherwise with Orpheus and his poem, for he was an artist, a poet, an enchanter of those who hearken, singer and hearer enshrouded in the same twilight, he, like they, demonically caught in the spell of beauty, demonic in spite of his divine gifts, the enchanter, but not the savior of man—a privilege never to be his: for the grace-bearing savior was one who has cast off from himself the language of beauty, he has reached beyond its cold surface, beyond the surface of poetry, he has pushed on to simple words which, because they come close to death and to the knowledge of death are able to knock on the imprisoned souls of his fellowmen, to appease their fear and their cruelty, and make them approachable to real help; he has attained the simple language of spontaneous kindness, the language of spontaneous human virtue, the language of awakening. Was it not this very language for which Orpheus had striven when, in search of Eurydice, he made ready for the descent into the realm of the shades? Was he not also in despair, one who perceived the impotence of the artist in his discharge of human duty? Oh, when fate has thrown one into the prison of art, he may nevermore escape it; he remains confined within the unsurpassable boundary on which the transported and beautiful occurrence takes place, and if he is incompetent he becomes a vain dreamer within this enclosure, an ambitious trifler with un-art; if, however, he is a real artist he becomes despairing, for he hears the call beyond the border, and all he may do is to capture it in the poem but not to follow it, paralyzed by the injunction and bound to the spot, a scrivener this side of the border, although he has taken on the vocation of the sybil and, piously like Aeneas, has touched the high altar of the priestess, thus accepting the pledge—

  —easy the pathway that leads down to Hades, and the gateway of Pluto stands ever open, but the road back is sorely beset, threatened by the swift turns and the whirlpools of the river Cocytus; only those crowned by their virtue, or of a lineage divine and hence favored by Jupiter, may return from grim Tartarus and its terrors; yet if your courage constrains you to cross the Styx twice in your rashness, listen to all that is needful: sacred to her who reigns in the regions below, deep in the dark valleys, growing amidst the wild forest, in the heart of the densest of thickets, there is a branch that is shimmering and golden, putting forth a wealth of gold leaves; and never shall you succeed in making the downward journey until, in honor of Persephone and in obedience to her will, you have broken a gleaming shoot from that self-renewing, golden tree; hence you must be ever alert to espy this branch, you must search for it always, and if destiny be gracious you shall pluck it with the lightest touch of your naked hand; yet no might is so strong, no weapon of steel so compelling, that it could tear this bough from its stalk if it be not the will of fate, the all-commanding, who has in reserve another duty for you—, that first, in expiation, you take care of the unburied body of your friend whose soul has flown, the body which asks for the grave, his right, and your duty—

  —, then, called both from fate and the god, their will being one, the border shall be opened for him whose privilege it is to assume the holy duty of helpfulness; but he who is destined by the double will of fate and the god to be an artist, damned but to know and surmise, damned but to write down and speak out, he is denied the purification in life and in death as well, and even his tomb means no more to him than a beautiful structure, an earthly abode for his body, providing him with neither entrance nor exit, neither entrance for the illimitable descent nor exit for the illimitable return; destiny denies him the golden bough of leadership, the bough of perception, and in consequence he is condemned by Jupiter. Hence he too had been condemned to perjury and to the abandonment of the perjured, and his glance, forced earthward, had been allowed to encounter only the three perjuring accomplices staggering over the pavement, bringing him the sentence of guilt; his glance had not been permitted to pierce deeper, not beneath the surface of the stones, not beneath the surface of the world, neither beneath that of language nor of art; the descent was forbidden him, most forbidden the titanic return from the depths, the return by which the humanity of man is proven; the ascent was forbidden him, the ascent toward the renewal of the creative pledge, and he knew now more clearly what he had always known, that once and for all he was excluded from those to whom was pledged the help of the savior, because the help of the pledge and human help implemented each other, and only through their conjunction could the Titan fulfill his task of establishing community and, beyond that, humanity, which, though born of the earth aimed toward heaven, because only in humanity and true community which reflected the whole of man’s humanness and humanity as a whole did the perception-borne and perception-bearing cycle of question and answer become perfected, excluding those unfit for helpfulness, for duty, and the pledge, excluding them because they had excluded themselves from the titanic task of mastering, realizing, and deifying human life; verily this he knew,

  and he also knew that the same thing held true in the realm of art, that art existed—oh, did it still exist, was it allowed to exist?—only insofar as it contained pledge and perception, only insofar as it represented the fate of man and his mastery of existence, insofar as it renewed itself by fresh and hitherto unaccomplished tasks, only insofar as, in achieving them, it summoned the soul to continuous self-mastery, compelling the soul to reveal level after level of her reality as, descending step by step, penetrating deeper and deeper through the inner thickets of her being, she gradually approached the unattainable darkness which she had always surmised and been conscious of, the darkness from which the ego emerged and to which it returned, the dark regions where the ego developed and became extinguished, the entrance and exit of the soul, but likewise the entrance and exit of that which was the soul’s truth, pointed out to her by the path-finding, the goldly-gleaming bough of truth which was neither to be found nor plucked by means of force, since the grace of finding it and the grace of the descent were one and the same, the grace of self-knowledge, which belonged as much to the soul as to art, their common truth; verily, this he knew,

  and he knew also that the duty of all art lay in this sort of truth, lay in the self-perceptive finding and proclaiming of truth, the duty which has been laid on the artist, so that the soul, realizing the great equilibrium between the ego and the universe, might recover herself in the
universe, perceiving in this self-recognition that the deepening of the ego was an increase of substance in the universe, in the world, especially in humanity, and even though this doubled growth was only a symbolic one, bound from the beginning to the symbolization of the beautiful, to that of the beautiful boundary, even though it were but a symbolic perception, it was precisely by this means that it was enabled to widen the inner and outer boundaries of existence to new reality, even though these boundaries might not be crossed, widening them not merely to a new form but to the new content of reality which they enclosed, in which the deepest secret of reality, the secret of correlation was revealed, the mutual relation existing between the realities of the self and the world, which lent the symbol the precision of rightness and exalted it to be the symbol of truth, the truth-bearing correlation from which arose every creation of reality, pressing on through level after level, penetrating toward, groping toward the unattainable dark realms of beginning and ending, pushing on toward the inscrutable divinity in the universe, in the world, in the soul of one’s fellow-man, pushing on toward that ultimate spark of the divine, that secret, which, ready to be disclosed and to be awakened, could be found everywhere, even in the soul of the most degraded—, this, the disclosure of the divine through the self-perceptive knowledge of the individual soul, this was the task of art, its human duty, its perceptive duty and therefore its reason for being, the proof of which was art’s nearness to death, and its duty, since only in this nearness might art become real, only thus unfolding into a symbol of the human soul; verily this he knew,