The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  But now he was dissatisfied. His Grace was far from thinking that other people were stupid, even if he did think himself more intelligent than they were, and he could not comprehend why all these intelligent people taken together made such a poor impression on him. Indeed, life as a whole made this impression on him, as though all the intelligence in individuals and in official institutions—among which he was known to count religion and science—somehow added up to a state of total unaccountability. New ideas that one had not heard of before kept popping up, aroused passions, and then vanished again after running their course; people were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that had always been Count Leinsdorf’s image of a lunatic, although he had hitherto had little occasion to think about it. Glumly he stood here now, in the midst of the men surrounding him, and reflected that the whole idea of the Parallel Campaign had been to bring out the truth behind all this, and he found himself unable to formulate some vague idea about faith that was there in his mind; all he could feel was something as pleasantly soothing as the shade of a high wall—a church wall, presumably.

  “Funny,” he said to Ulrich, giving up his thought after a while. “If you look at all this with some detachment, it somehow reminds you of starlings—you know, the way they flock together in autumn in the fruit trees.”

  Ulrich had come back after seeing Gerda. Their conversation had not lived up to its promising beginning; Gerda had not managed to utter more than brief, laborious answers hacked off from something that stuck like a hard wedge in her breast, while Hans Sepp talked all the more; he had set himself up as her watchdog and let it be known at once that he was not to be intimidated by his decadent surroundings.

  “You don’t know the great racial theorist Bremshuber?” he had asked Ulrich.

  “Where does he live?” Ulrich had asked.

  “In Schärding on the Laa,” Hans Sepp had told him.

  ‘What does he do?” Ulrich had asked.

  “What difference does that make?” Hans had said. “New people are coming to the top! He’s a druggist.”

  Ulrich had said to Gerda: “I hear you’re now formally engaged.”

  And Gerda had replied: “Bremshuber demands the ruthless suppression of all alien races; that’s surely less cruel than toleration and contempt!” Her lip had trembled again as she forced out this sentence that was so badly patched together from broken bits of thought.

  Ulrich had merely looked at her and shaken his head. “I don’t understand that,” he had said, holding out his hand to say goodbye, and now, standing beside Leinsdorf, he felt as innocent as a star in the infinity of space.

  “But if you don’t regard it with detachment”—Count Leinsdorf slowly continued his new thought, after a pause—”then it keeps circling around in your head like a dog trying to catch its tail! Now I’ve let my friends have their way with me,” he added, “and I’ve let the Baroness Wayden have her way, and if you go around listening to what we’re saying here, each separate bit sounds quite sensible, but in the nobler spiritual context we’re looking for, it sounds really rambling and incoherent!”

  Around the War Minister and Feuermaul, whom Arnheim had brought over, a group had formed in which Feuermaul was holding forth, loving all mankind, while a second, more distant group was collecting around Arnheim, who had moved away; in it Ulrich saw Hans Sepp and Gerda some while later. Feuermaul could be heard proclaiming: “We don’t learn about life by studying it in books, but through kindness. We must believe in life!” Frau Professor Drangsal stood ramrod straight behind him and pressed his point home by saying:

  “After all, Goethe was no Ph.D.!”

  In her eyes, Feuermaul bore a strong resemblance to Goethe. The War Minister also held himself very straight and smiled tenaciously, as he was accustomed to doing when graciously acknowledging the salute of parading troops.

  Count Leinsdorf asked Ulrich: “Tell me, who is this Feuermaul?”

  “His father owns some factories in Hungary,” Ulrich answered. “I think it has something to do with phosphorus, since none of the workers lives past forty. Occupational disease: necrosis of the bone.”

  “Hmm, I see, but the son?” Leinsdorf was unmoved by the factory workers’ fate.

  “He was slated to go to the university; law, I believe. The father is a self-made man, and he took it hard that his son was not interested in studying.”

  “Why wasn’t he interested in studying?” Count Leinsdorf persisted; he was being very thorough today.

  “Who knows?” Ulrich shrugged. “Probably Fathers and Sons. When the father is poor, the sons love money; when Papa has money, the sons love mankind. Hasn’t Your Grace heard about the father-son problem in our day?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about it. But why is Arnheim playing the patron to this young man? Has it anything to do with those oil fields?”

  “Your Grace knows about that?” Ulrich exclaimed.

  “Of course; I know everything,” Leinsdorf said patiently. “But what I still don’t understand is this: That people should love each other, and that it takes a firm hand in government to make them do it, is nothing new. So why should it suddenly be a case of either/or?”

  Ulrich answered: ‘Tour Grace has always wanted a spontaneous rallying cry arising from the entire nation; this is the form it’s bound to take!”

  “Oh, that’s not true!” Count Leinsdorf disagreed spiritedly, but before he could go on they were interrupted by Stumm von Bordwehr, coming from the Arnheim group with a burning question for Ulrich.

  “Excuse me for interrupting, Your Grace,” he said. “But tell me,” he turned to Ulrich, “can one really claim that people are motivated entirely by their feelings and never by their reason?”

  Ulrich stared at him blankly.

  “There’s one of those Marxists over there,” Stumm explained, “who seems to be claiming that a person’s economic substructure entirely determines his ideological superstructure. And there’s a psychoanalyst denying it and insisting that the ideological superstructure is entirely the product of man’s instinctual substructure.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Ulrich said, hoping to wriggle out of it.

  “That’s just what I always say! It didn’t do me a bit of good, though,” the General answered promptly, keeping his eyes fixed on Ulrich. But now Leinsdorf entered the discussion.

  “Now there, you see,” he said to Ulrich, “is something rather like the question I was about to raise myself. No matter whether the substructure is economic or sexual, well, what I wanted to say before is: Why are people so unreliable in their superstructure? You know the common saying that the world is crazy; it is getting all too easy to believe it’s true!”

  “That’s the psychology of the masses, Your Grace,” the learned General interposed again. “So far as it applies to the masses it makes sense to me. The masses are moved only by their instincts, and of course that means by those instincts most individuals have in common; that’s logical. That’s to say, it’s illogical, of course. The masses are illogical; they only use logic for window dressing. What they really let themselves be guided by is simply and solely suggestion! Give me the newspapers, the radio, the film industry, and maybe a few other avenues of cultural communication, and within a few years—as my friend Ulrich once said—I promise I’ll turn people into cannibals! That’s precisely why mankind needs strong leadership, as Your Grace knows far better than I do. But that even highly cultivated individuals are not motivated by logic in some circumstances is something I find it hard to believe, though Arnheim says so.”

  What on earth could Ul
rich have offered his friend by way of support in this scattered debate? like a bunch of weeds an angler catches on his hook instead of a fish, the General’s question was baited with a tangled bunch of theories. Does a man follow only his feelings, doing, feeling, even thinking only that to which he is moved by unconscious currents of desire, or even by the milder breeze of pleasure, as we now assume? Or does he not rather act on the basis of reasoned thought and will, as we also widely assume? Does he primarily follow certain instincts, such as the sexual instinct, as we assume? Or is it above all not the sexual instinct that dominates, but rather the psychological effect of economic conditions, as we also assume today? A creature as complicated as man can be seen from many different angles, and whatever one chooses as the axis in the theoretical picture one gets only partial truths, from whose interpretation the level of truth slowly rises higher—or does it? Whenever a partial truth has been regarded as the only valid one, there has been a high price to pay. On the other hand, this partial truth would hardly have been discovered if it had not been overestimated. In this fashion the history of truth and the history of feeling are variously linked, but that of feeling remains obscure. Indeed, to Ulrich’s way of thinking it was no history at all, but a wild jumble. Funny, for instance, that the religious ideas, meaning the passionate ideas, of the Middle Ages about the nature of man were based on a strong faith in man’s reason and his will, while today many scholars, whose only passion is smoking too much, consider the emotions as the basis for all human activity. Such were the thoughts going through Ulrich’s head, and he naturally did not feel like saying anything in response to the oratory of Stumm, who was in any case not waiting for an answer but only cooling off a bit before returning to Arnheim’s group.

  “Count Leinsdorf,” Ulrich said mildly. “Do you remember my old suggestion to establish a General Secretariat for all those problems that need the soul as much as the mind for a solution?”

  “Indeed I do,” Leinsdorf replied. “I remember telling His Eminence about it, and his hearty laugh. But he did say that you had come too late!”

  “And yet it’s the very thing you were feeling the lack of, Your Grace,” Ulrich continued. “You notice that the world no longer remembers today what it wanted yesterday, that its mood keeps changing for no perceptible reason, that it’s in a constant uproar and never resolves anything, and if we imagined all this chaos of humanity brought together in a single head, we’d have a really unmistakable case of recognizable pathological symptoms that one would count as mental insufficiency.…”

  “Absolutely right!” cried Stumm von Bordwehr, whose pride in everything he had learned that afternoon had welled up again. “That’s precisely the configuration of…well, I can’t think of the name of that mental disease at the moment, but that’s it exactly!”

  “No,” Ulrich said with a smile. “It’s surely not the description of any specific disease; the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!”

  “Brilliantly put!” Stumm and Leinsdorf cried as with one voice, though in slightly different words, and then added in the same way: “But what does that mean exactly?”

  “It means this,” Ulrich stated. “If I understand by morality the ordering of all those interrelations that include feeling, imagination, and the like, each of these takes its relative position from the others and in that way attains some sort of stability; but all of them together, in moral terms, don’t get beyond the state of delusion!”

  “Come, that’s going too far,” Count Leinsdorf said good-naturedly. And the General said: “But surely every man has to have his own morals; you can’t order anyone to prefer a cat to a dog…?”

  “Can one prescribe it, Your Grace?” Ulrich asked intently.

  “Well, in the old days,” Count Leinsdorf said diplomatically, although he had been challenged in his religious conviction that “the truth” existed in every sphere. “It was easier in the old days. But today…?”

  “Then that leaves us in a permanent state of religious war,” Ulrich pointed out.

  “You call that a religious war?”

  “What else?”

  “Hmm…not bad. Quite a good characterization of modern life. Incidentally, I always knew that there’s not such a bad Catholic secretly tucked away inside you.”

  “I’m a very bad one,” Ulrich said. “I don’t believe that God has been here yet, but that He is still to come. But only if we pave the way for Him more than we have so far!”

  His Grace rejected this with the dignified words: “That’s over my head.”

  38

  A GREAT EVENT IS IN THE MAKING.

  BUT NO ONE HAS NOTICED

  The General, however, cried: Tm afraid I must get back to His Excellency the Minister at once, but you absolutely will have to explain all that to me—I won’t let you off! I’ll join you gentlemen again soon, if I may.”

  Leinsdorf gave the impression of wanting to say something—his mind was clearly hard at work—but he and Ulrich had hardly been left alone for a moment when they found themselves surrounded by people borne toward them by the constant circulation of the guests and the charisma of His Grace. There could, of course, be no more talk about what Ulrich had just said, and no one besides him was giving it a thought, when an arm slipped into his from behind; it was Agathe.

  “Have you found grounds for my defense yet?” she asked in a maliciously caressing tone.

  Ulrich took a grip on her arm and drew her aside from the crowd around them.

  “Can’t we go home?” Agathe asked.

  “No,” Ulrich said. “I can’t leave yet.”

  “I suppose,” she teased him, “that times to come, for whose sake you’re keeping yourself pure here, won’t let you go?”

  Ulrich pressed her arm.

  “Isn’t it greatly in my favor that I don’t belong here but in jail?” she whispered in his ear.

  They looked for a place where they could be alone. The party had reached the boiling point and was impelling the guests to constantly circulate. On the whole, however, the twofold grouping was still distinguishable: around the Minister of War the talk was of peace and love, and around Arnheim, at the moment, about how the German love of peace flourished best in the shadow of German power.

  Arnheim lent a benevolent ear to this, because he never snubbed an honest opinion and was especially interested in new ones. He was worried that the deal for the oil fields might run into opposition in Parliament. He was certain of the unavoidable opposition of the Slavic contingent, and hoped he could count on the pro-German faction to support him. On the Ministry level all seemed to be going well, except for a certain antagonism in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but he did not regard this as particularly significant. Tomorrow he was going to Budapest.

  There were plenty of hostile “observers” around him and other leading personages. They were easily spotted in that they always said yes to everything and were unfailingly polite, while the others tended to have different opinions.

  Tuzzi was trying to win one of them over by asserting: “What they’re saying doesn’t mean a thing. It never means anything!” His listener, a member of Parliament, believed him. But this did not change his mind, made up before he had come, that something fishy was going on here.

  His Grace, on the other hand, spoke up on behalf of the evening’s seriousness by saying to another skeptic: “My dear sir, ever since 1848 even the revolutions have been brought about by nothing more than a lot of talk!”

  It would be wrong to regard such differences as no more than acceptable variants on the otherwise usual monotony of life; and yet this error, with all its grave consequences, occurs almost as frequently as the expression “It’s a matter of feeling,” without which our mental economy would be unthinkable. This indispensable phrase divides what must be in life from what can be.

  “It sets apart,” Ulrich said to Agathe, “the given
order of things from a private, personal preserve. It separates what has been rationalized from what is held to be irrational. As commonly used, it is an admission that we are forced to be humane on major counts, but being humane on minor counts is suspiciously arbitrary. We think life would be a prison if we were not free to choose between wine or water, religion or atheism, but nobody believes in the least that we have any real option in matters of feeling; on the contrary, we draw a line, ambiguous though it may be, between legitimate and illegitimate feelings.”

  The feelings between Ulrich and Agathe were of the illegitimate land, although they did no more than talk about the party as, still arm in arm, they looked in vain for a private corner, while experiencing a wild and unacknowledged joy in being reunited after their estrangement. By contrast, the choice between loving all one’s fellow human beings, or first annihilating some of them, obviously involved doubly legitimate feelings, or it would not have been so eagerly debated in Diotima’s house and in the presence of His Grace, even though it also split the company into two spiteful parties. Ulrich maintained that invention of “a matter of feeling” had rendered the worst possible service to the cause of feeling, and as he undertook to describe to his sister the curious impression this evening’s affair had awakened in him, he soon found himself saying things that unintentionally took up where their talk of the morning had broken off and were apparently intended to justify it.

  “I hardly know where to start,” he said, “without boring you. May I tell you what I understand by ‘morality’?”

  “Please do,” Agathe said.

  “Morality is regulation of conduct within a society, beginning with regulation of its inner impulses, that is, feelings and thoughts.”