The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  As the pious soul of the Salvation Army employs military uniform and customs, so had Lindner taken certain soldierly ways of thinking into his service; indeed, he did not even flinch from concessions to the “man of power” Nietzsche, who was for middle-class minds of that time still a stumbling block, but for Lindner a whetstone as well. He was accustomed to say of Nietzsche that it could not be maintained that he was a bad person, but his doctrines were surely exaggerated and ill equipped for life, the reason for this being that he rejected empathy; for Nietzsche had not recognized the marvelous counterbalancing gift of the weak person, which was to make the strong person gentle. And opposing to this his own experience, he thought with joyful purpose: “Truly great people do not pay homage to a sterile cult of the self, but call forth in others the feeling of their sublimity by bending down to them and indeed, if it comes to that, sacrificing themselves for them!” Sure of victory and with an expression of amicable censure that was meant to encourage them, he looked into the eyes of a pair of young lovers who, intricately intertwined, were coming up toward him. But it was a quite ordinary couple, and the young idler who formed its male component squeezed his eyelids shut as he responded to this look of Lindner’s, abruptly stuck out his tongue, and said: “Nyaa!” Lindner, unprepared for this mockery and vulgar menace, was taken aback; but he acted as if he did not notice. He loved action, and his glance sought a policeman, who ought to have been in the vicinity to guarantee honors public safety; but as he did so his foot struck a stone, and the sudden stumbling motion scared off a swarm of sparrows that had been regaling themselves at God’s table over a pile of horse manure. The explosion of wings was like a warning shot, and he was just able at the last moment, before falling ignominiously, to hop over the double obstacle with a balletically disguised jump. He did not look back, and after a while was quite satisfied with himself. “One must be hard as a diamond and tender as a mother!” he thought, using an old precept from the seventeenth century.

  Since he also esteemed the virtue of modesty, at no other time would he have asserted anything like this in regard to himself; but there was something in Agathe that so excited his blood! Then again, it formed the negative pole of his emotions that this divinely tender female whom he had found in tears, as the angel had found the maiden in the dew…oh, he did not want to be presumptuous, and yet how presumptuous yielding to the spirit of poetry does make one! And so he continued in a more restrained manner: that this wretched woman was on the point of breaking an oath placed in the hands of God—for that is how he regarded her desire for a divorce. Unfortunately, he had not made this forcefully clear when they had stood face-to-face—God, what nearness again in these words!—unfortunately, he had not presented this idea with sufficient firmness; he merely remembered having spoken to her in general about loose morals and ways of protecting oneself against them. Besides, the name of God had certainly not passed his lips, unless as a rhetorical flourish; and the spontaneity, the dispassionate, one might even say the irreverent, seriousness with which Agathe had asked him whether he believed in God offended him even now as he remembered it. For the truly pious soul does not permit himself to simply follow a whim and think of God with crude directness. Indeed, the moment Lindner thought of this unreasonable question he despised Agathe as if he had stepped on a snake. He resolved that if he should ever be in the situation of repeating his admonitions to her, he would follow only the dictates of that powerful logic which is in keeping with earthly matters and which has been placed on earth for that purpose, because not every ill-bred person can be permitted to ask God to trouble Himself on behalf of his long-established confusions; and so he began to make use of this logic straightaway, and many expressions occurred to him that it would be appropriate to use to a person who has stumbled. For instance, that marriage is not a private affair but a public institution; that it has the sublime mission of evolving feelings of responsibility and empathy, and the task (which hardens a people) of exercising mankind in the bearing of difficult burdens; perhaps indeed, although it could only be adduced with the greatest tact, that precisely by lasting over a fairly long period of time, marriage constituted the best protection against the excesses of desire. He had an image of the human being, perhaps not wrongly, as a sack full of devils that had to be kept firmly tied shut, and he saw unshakable principles as the tie.

  How this dutiful man, whose corporeal part could not be said to project in any direction but height, had acquired the conviction that one had to rein oneself in at every step was indeed a riddle, which could only be solved, though then quite easily, when one knew its benefit. When he had reached the foot of the hill a procession of soldiers crossed his path, and he looked with tender compassion at the sweaty young men, who had shoved their caps back on their heads, and with faces dulled from exhaustion looked like a procession of dusty caterpillars. At the sight of these soldiers, his horror at the frivolity with which Agathe had dealt with the problem of divorce was dreamily softened by a joyful feeling that such a thing should be happening to his freethinking colleague Hagauer; and this stirring in any event served to remind him again of how indispensable it was to mistrust human nature. He therefore resolved to make ruthlessly plain to Agathe—should the occasion actually, and through no fault of his own, arise—that selfish energies could in the last analysis have only a destructive effect, and that she should subordinate her personal despair, however great it might be, to moral insight, and that the true basic touchstone of life is living together.

  But whether the occasion was once again to offer itself was evidently just the point toward which Lindner’s mental powers were so excitedly urging him. “There are many people with noble qualities, which are just not yet gathered into an unshakable conviction,” he thought of saying to Agathe; but how should he do so if he did not see her again; and yet the thought that she might pay him a visit offended all his ideas about tender and chaste femininity. “It simply has to be put before her as strongly as possible, and immediately!” he resolved, and because he had arrived at this resolution he also no longer doubted that she really would appear. He strongly admonished himself to selflessly work through with her the reasons she would advance to excuse her behavior before he went on to convince her of her errors. With unwavering patience he would strike her to the heart, and after he had imagined that to himself too, a noble feeling of fraternal attention and solicitude came over his own heart, a consecration as between brother and sister, which, he noted, was to rest entirely on those relations that the sexes maintain with each other. “Hardly any men,” he cried out, edified, “have the slightest notion how deep a need noble feminine natures have for the noble man, who simply deals with the human being in the woman without being immediately distracted by her exaggerated desire to please him sexually!” These ideas must have given him wings, for he had no idea how he had got to the terminus of the trolley line, but suddenly there he was; and before getting in he took off his glasses in order to wipe them free of the condensation with which his heated inner processes had coated them. Then he swung himself into a corner, glanced around in the empty car, got his fare ready, looked into the conductors face, and felt himself entirely at his post, ready to begin the return journey in that admirable communal institution called the municipal trolley. He discharged the fatigue of his walk with a contented yawn, in order to stiffen himself for new duties, and summed up the astonishing digressions to which he had surrendered himself in the sentence: “Forgetting oneself is the healthiest thing a human being can do!”

  40

  THE DO-GOODER

  Against the unpredictable stirrings of a passionate heart there is only one reliable remedy: strict and absolutely unremitting planning; and it was to this, which he had acquired early, that Lindner owed the successes of his life as well as the belief that he was by nature a man of strong passions and hard to discipline. He got up early in the morning, at the same hour summer and winter, and at a washbasin on a small iron table washed his face, neck, hands,
and one seventh of his body—every day a different seventh, of course—after which he rubbed the rest with a wet towel, so that the bath, that time-consuming and voluptuous procedure, could be limited to one evening every two weeks. There was in this a clever victory over matter, and whoever has had occasion to consider the inadequate washing facilities and uncomfortable beds that famous people who have entered history have had to endure will hardly be able to dismiss the conjecture that there must be a connection between iron beds and iron people, even if we ought not exaggerate it, since otherwise we might soon be sleeping on beds of nails. So here, moreover, was an additional task for reflection, and after Lindner had washed himself in the glow of stimulating examples he also took advantage of drying himself off to do a few exercises by skillful manipulation of his towel, but only in moderation. It is, after all, a fateful mistake to base health on the animal part of one’s person; it is, rather, intellectual and moral nobility that produce the body’s capacity for resistance; and even if this does not always apply to the individual, it most certainly applies on a larger scale, for the power of a people is the consequence of the proper spirit, and not the other way around. Therefore Lindner had also bestowed upon his rubbings-down a special and careful training, which avoided all the uncouth grabbing that constitutes the usual male idolatry but on the contrary involved the whole personality, by combining the movements of his body with uplifting inner tasks. He especially abhorred the perilous worship of smartness that, coming from abroad, was already hovering as an ideal before many in his fatherland; and distancing himself from this was an integral part of his morning exercises. He substituted for it, with great care, a statesmanlike attitude in the calisthenic application of his limbs, combining the tensing of his willpower with timely yielding, the overcoming of pain with commonsense humanity, and if perchance, in a concluding burst of courage, he jumped over an upside-down chair, he did so with as much reserve as self-confidence. Such an unfolding of the whole wealth of human talents made his calisthenics, in the few years since he had taken them up, true exercises in virtue for him.

  That much can also be said in passing against the bane of transitory self-assertion that, under the slogan of body care, has taken possession of the healthy idea of sports, and there is even more to be said against the peculiarly feminine form of this bane, beauty care. Lindner flattered himself that in this, too, he was one of the few who knew how to properly apportion light and shadow, and thus, as he was ever ready to remove from the spirit of the times an unblemished kernel, he also recognized the moral obligation of appearing as healthy and agreeable as he possibly could. For his part, he carefully groomed his beard and hair every morning, kept his nails short and meticulously clean, put lotion on his skin and a little protective ointment on the feet that in the course of the day had to endure so much: given all this, who would care to deny that it is lavishing too much attention on the body when a worldly woman spends her whole day at it? But if it really could not be otherwise—he gladly approached women tenderly, because among them might be wives of very wealthy men—than that bathwaters and facials, ointments and packs, ingenious treatments of hands and feet, masseurs and friseurs, succeed one another in almost unbroken sequence, he advocated as a counterweight to such one-sided care of the body the concept of inner beauty care—inner care, for short—which he had formulated in a public speech. May cleanliness thus serve as an example to remind us of inner purity; rubbing with ointment, of obligations toward the soul; hand massage, of that fate by which we are bound; and pedicure, that even in that which is more deeply concealed we should offer a fair aspect. Thus he transferred his image to women, but left it to them to adapt the details to the needs of their sex.

  Of course it might have happened that someone who was unprepared for the sight Lindner offered during his health and beauty worship and, even more, while he was washing and drying himself, might have been moved to laughter: for seen merely as physical gestures, his movements evoked the image of a multifariously turning and twisting swan’s neck, which, moreover, consisted not of curves but of the sharp element of knees and elbows; the shortsighted eyes, freed from their spectacles, looked with a martyred expression into the distance, as if their gaze had been snipped off close to the eye, and beneath his beard his soft lips pouted with the pain of exertion. But whoever understood how to see spiritually might well experience the spectacle of seeing inner and outer forces begetting each other in ripely considered counterpoint; and if Lindner was thinking meanwhile of those poor women who spend hours in their bathrooms and dressing rooms and solipsistically inflame their imaginations through a cult of the body, he could seldom refrain from reflecting on how much good it would do them if they could once watch him. Harmless and pure, they welcome the modern care of the body and go along with it because in their ignorance they do not suspect that such exaggerated attention devoted to their animal part might all too easily awaken in it claims that could destroy life unless strictly reined in!

  Indeed, Lindner transformed absolutely everything he came in contact with into a moral imperative; and whether he was in clothes or not, every hour of the day until he entered dreamless sleep was filled with some momentous content for which that hour had been permanently reserved. He slept for seven hours; his teaching obligations, which the Ministry had limited in consideration of his well-regarded writing activity, claimed three to five hours a day, in which was included the lecture on pedagogy he held twice weekly at the university; five consecutive hours—almost twenty thousand in a decade!—were reserved for reading; two and a half served for the setting down on paper of his own articles, which flowed without pause like a clear spring from the inner rocks of his personality; mealtimes claimed an hour every day; an hour was dedicated to a walk and simultaneously to the elucidation of major questions of life and profession, while another was dedicated to the traveling back and forth determined by his profession and consecrated also to what Lindner called his “little musings,” concentrating the mind on the content of an activity that had recently transpired or that was to come; while other fragments of time were reserved, in part permanently, in part alternating within the framework of the week, for dressing and undressing, gymnastics, letters, household affairs, official business, and profitable socializing. And it was only natural that this planning of his life not only was carried out along its more general disciplinary lines but also involved all sorts of particular anomalies, such as Sunday with its nondaily obligations, the longer cross-country hike that took place every two weeks, or the bathtub soak, and it was natural, too, for the plan to contain the doubling of daily activities that there has not yet been room to mention, to which belonged, by way of example, Lindners association with his son at mealtimes, or the character training involved in patiently surmounting unforeseen difficulties while getting dressed at speed.

  Such calisthenics for the character are not only possible but also extremely useful, and Lindner had a spontaneous preference for them. “In the small things I do right I see an image of all the big things that are done right in the world” could already be read in Goethe, and in this sense a mealtime can serve as well as a task set by fate as the place for the fostering of self-control and for the victory over covetousness; indeed, in the resistance of a collar button, inaccessible to all reflection, the mind that probes more deeply could even learn how to handle children. Lindner of course did not by any means regard Goethe as a model in everything; but what exquisite humility had he not derived from driving a nail into a wall with hammer blows, undertaking to mend a torn glove himself, or repair a bell that was out of order: if in doing these things he smashed his fingers or stuck himself, the resulting pain was outweighed, if not immediately then after a few horrible seconds, by joy at the industrious spirit of mankind that resides even in such trifling dexterities and their acquisition, although the cultivated person today imagines himself (to his general disadvantage) as above all that. He felt with pleasure the Goethean spirit resurrected in him, and enjoyed it all
the more in that thanks to the methods of a more advanced age he also felt superior to the great classic master s practical dilettantism and his occasional delight in discreet dexterity. Lindner was in fact free of idolatry of the old writer, who had lived in a world that was only halfway enlightened and therefore overestimated the Enlightenment, and he took Goethe as a model more in charming small things than in serious and great things, quite apart from the seductive Ministers notorious sensuality.

  His admiration was therefore carefully meted out. There had nevertheless been evident in it for some time a remarkable peevishness that often stimulated Lindner to reflection. He had always believed that his view of what was heroic was more proper than Goethe’s. Lindner did not think much of Scaevolas who stick their hands in the fire, Lucretias who run themselves through, or Judiths who chop the heads off the oppressors of their honor—themes that Goethe would have found meaningful anytime, although he had never treated them; indeed, Lindner was convinced, in spite of the authority of the classics, that those men and women, who had committed crimes for their personal convictions, would nowadays belong not on a pedestal but rather in the courtroom. To their inclination to inflict severe bodily injury he opposed an “internalized and social” concept of courage. In thought and discourse he even went so far as to place a duly pondered entry on the subject into his classbook, or the responsible reflection on how his housekeeper was to be blamed for precipitate eagerness, because in that state one should not be permitted to follow one’s own passions only, but also had to take the other person’s motives into account. And when he said such things he had the impression of looking back, in the well-fitting plain clothes of a later century, on the bombastic moral costume of an earlier one.