The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “But what a strange story it is!” Ulrich asserted seriously, although he had to laugh at this development.

  “A real accident of history,” the General said with satisfaction. “Such mystifications have often been important.”

  “And Diotima?” Ulrich inquired cautiously.

  “Well, she has speedily had to jettison Amor and Psyche and is now, together with a painter, designing the parade of regional costumes. It will be called: The clans of Austria and Hungary pay homage to internal and external peace,’” Stumm reported, and now turned pleadingly toward Agathe as he noticed that she, too, was parting her lips to smile. “I entreat you, dear lady, please don’t say anything against it, and don’t permit any objection to it either!” he begged. “For the parade of regional costumes, and apparently a military parade, are all that is definite so far about the festivities. The Tyrolean militia will march down the Ringstrasse, because they always look picturesque with their green suspenders, the rooster feathers in their hats, and their long beards; and then the beers and wines of the Monarchy are to pay tribute to the beers and wines of the rest of the world. But even here there is still no unanimity on whether, for instance, only Austro-Hungarian beers and wines shall pay tribute to those of the rest of the world, which would allow the charming Austrian character to stand out more hospitably by renouncing a tribute from the other side, or whether the foreign beers and wines should be allowed to march along as well so that they can pay homage to ours, and whether they have to pay customs duties on them or not. At any rate, one thing is certain: that there never has been and never can be a parade in this country without people in Old Germanic costumes sitting on carts with casks and on beer wagons drawn by horses; and I just can’t imagine what it must have been like in the actual Middle Ages, when the Germanic costumes weren’t yet old and wouldn’t even have looked any older than a tuxedo does today!”

  But after this question had been sufficiently appreciated, Ulrich asked a more delicate one. “I’d like to know what our non-German nationalities will say to the whole thing!”

  “That’s simple: they’ll be in the parade!” Stumm assured him cheerfully. “Because if they won’t, we’ll commandeer a regiment of Bohemian dragoons into the parade and make Hussite warriors out of them, and we’ll drag in a regiment of Ulans as the Polish liberators of Vienna from the Turks.”

  “And what does Leinsdorf say to these plans?” Ulrich asked hesitantly.

  Stumm placed his crossed leg beside the other and turned serious. “He’s not exactly delighted,” he conceded, relating that Count Leinsdorf never used the word “parade” but, in the most stubborn way possible, insisted on calling it a “demonstration.” “He’s apparently still thinking of the demonstrations he experienced,” Ulrich said, and Stumm agreed. “He has often said to me,” he reported, “ ^Whoever brings the masses into the street is taking a heavy responsibility upon himself, General!’ As if I could do anything for or against it! But you should also know that for some time we’ve been getting together fairly often, he and I….”

  Stumm paused, as if he wanted to leave space for a question, but when neither Agathe nor Ulrich asked it, he went on cautiously: “You see, His Excellency ran into another demonstration. Quite recently,

  on a trip, he was nearly beaten up in B by the Czechs as well as

  the Germans.”

  “But why?” Agathe exclaimed, intrigued, and Ulrich, too, showed his curiosity.

  “Because he is known as the bringer of peace!” Stumm proclaimed. “Loving peace and people is not so simple in reality—”

  “Like with the apple woman!” Agathe broke in, laughing.

  “I really wanted to say, like with a candy jar,” Stumm corrected her, adding to this discreet reproach for Ulrich the observation on Leinsdorf: “Still, a man like him, once he has made up his mind, will totally and completely exercise the office he has been given.”

  “What office?” Ulrich asked.

  “Every office!” the General stated. “On the festival reviewing stand he will sit beside the Emperor, only in the event, of course, that His Majesty sits on the reviewing stand; and, moreover, he is drafting the address of homage from our peoples, which he will hand to the All-Highest Ruler. But even if that should be all for the time being, I’m convinced it won’t stay that way, because if he doesn’t have any other worries, he creates some: such an active nature! By the way, he would like to speak with you,” Stumm injected tentatively.

  Ulrich seemed not to have heard this, but had become alert. “Leinsdorf is not ‘given’ an office!” he said mistrustfully. “He’s been the knob on top of the flagstaff all his life!”

  “Well,” the General said reservedly. “I really didn’t mean to say anything; of course he is and always was a high aristocrat. But look, for example, not long ago Tuzzi took me aside and said to me confidentially: ‘General! If a man brushes past me in a dark alley, I step aside; but if in the same situation he asks me in a friendly way what time it is, then I not only reach for my watch but grope for my gun too!’ What do you say to that?”

  “What should I say to that? I don’t see the connection.”

  “That’s just the government’s caution,” Stumm explained. “In relation to a World Peace Congress it thinks of all the possibilities, while Leinsdorf has always been one to have his own ideas.”

  Ulrich suddenly understood. “So in a word: Leinsdorf is to be removed from leadership because people are afraid of him?”

  The General did not answer this directly. “He asks you through me to please resume your friendly relations with your cousin Tuzzi, in order to find out what’s going on. I’m saying it straight out; he, of course, expressed it in a more reserved fashion,” Stumm reported. And after a brief hesitation, he added by way of excuse: “They’re not telling him everything! But then that’s the habit of ministries: we don’t tell each other everything among ourselves either!”

  “What relationship did my brother really have with our cousin?” Agathe wanted to know.

  Stumm, snared in the friendly delusion that he was pleasantly joking, unsuspectingly assured her: “He’s one of her secret loves!” adding immediately to encourage Ulrich: “I have no idea what happened between you, but she certainly regrets it! She says that you are such an indispensable bad patriot that all the enemies of the Fatherland, whom we are trying to make feel at home here, must really love you. Isn’t that nice of her? But of course she can’t take the first step after you withdrew so willfully!”

  From then on the leave-taking became rather monosyllabic, and Stumm was mightily oppressed at such a dim sunset after he had stood at the zenith.

  Thus it was that Ulrich and Agathe got to hear something that brightened their faces again and also brought a friendly blush to the General’s cheeks. “We’ve got rid of Feuermaul!” he reported, happy that he had remembered it in time and adding, full of scorn for that poet’s love of mankind: “In any event, it’s become meaningless.” Even the “nauseating” resolution from the last session, that no one should be forced to die for other people’s ideas, whereas on the other hand everyone should die for his own—even this resolution, which would fundamentally ensure peace, had, as was now apparent, been dropped, along with everything belonging to the past, and at the General’s instigation was no longer even on the agenda. “We suppressed a journal that printed it; no one believes such exaggerated rumors anymore!” Stumm added to this news, which seemed not quite clear in view of the preparations under way for a pacifistic congress. Agathe then intervened a little on behalf of the young people, and even Ulrich finally reminded his friend that the incident had not been Feuermaul’s fault. Stumm made no difficulties about this, and admitted that Feuermaul, whom he had met at the house of his patroness, was a charming person. “So full of sympathy with everything! And so spontaneously, absolutely, really good!” he exclaimed appreciatively.

  “But then he would most certainly be an estimable addition to this Congress!” Ulrich aga
in threw in.

  But Stumm, who had meanwhile been making serious preparations to leave, shook his head animatedly. “No! I can’t explain so briefly what’s involved,” he said resolutely, “but this Congress ought not to be blown out of proportion!”

  50

  AGATHE FINDS ULRICH’S DIARY

  While Ulrich was personally escorting the parting guest to the door, Agathe, defying an inner self-reproach, carried out something she had decided on with lightning speed. Even before Stumm’s intrusion, and again a second time in his presence, her eye had been caught by a pile of loose papers lying in one of the drawers of the desk, on both occasions through a suppressed motion of her brother’s, which had given the impression that he would have liked to refer to these papers during the conversation but could not make up his mind—indeed, deliberately refrained from doing so. Her intimacy with him had allowed her to sense this more than guess it on any substantive basis, and in the same way she also understood that this concealment must be connected with the two of them. So when he was barely out of the room she opened the drawer, doing so, whether it was justified or not, with that feeling which furthers quick decisions and does not admit moral scruples. But the notes that she took up in her hands, with many things crossed out, loosely connected and not always easily decipherable, immediately imposed a slower tempo on her passionate curiosity.

  “Is love an emotion? This question may at first glance seem nonsensical, since it appears so certain that the entire nature of love is a process of feeling; the correct answer is the more surprising: for emotion is really the least part of love! Looked at merely as emotion, love is hardly as intense and overwhelming, and in any event not as strongly marked, as a toothache.”

  The second, equally odd note ran: “A man may love his dog and his wife. A child may love a dog more dearly than a man his wife. One person loves his profession, another politics. Mostly, we seem to love general conditions; I mean—if we don’t happen to hate them—their inscrutable way of working in concert, which I might call their ‘horse-stall feeling’: we are contentedly at home in our life the way a horse is in its stall!

  “But what does it mean to bring all these things that are so disparate together under the same word, love’? A primordial idea has settled in my mind, alongside doubt and derision: Everything in the world is love! Love is the gentle, divine nature of the world, covered by ashes but inextinguishable! I wouldn’t know how to express what I understand by ‘nature’; but if I abandon myself to the idea as a whole without worrying about it, I feel it with a remarkably natural certainty. At least at moments.”

  Agathe blushed, for the following entries began with her name. “Agathe once showed me places in the Bible; I still vaguely remember how they ran and have decided to write them down: ‘Everything that happens in love happens in God, for God is love.’ And a second says: ‘Love is from God, and whosoever loves God is born of God.’ Both these places stand in obvious contradiction to each other: in one, love comes from God; in the other, it is God!

  “Therefore the attempts to express the relationship of ‘love’ to the world seem fraught with difficulty even for the enlightened person; how should the uninstructed understanding not fail to grasp it? That I called love the nature of the world was nothing but an excuse; it leaves the choice entirely open to say that the pen and inkpot I am writing with consist of love in the moral realm of truth, or in the empirical realm of reality. But then how in reality? Would they then consist of love or would they be its consequences, the embodying phenomenon or intimation? Are they already themselves love, or is love only what they would be in their totality? Are they love by nature, or are we talking about a supranatural reality? And what about this ‘in truth’? Is it a truth for the more heightened understanding, or for the blessedly ignorant? Is it the truth of thinking, or an incomplete symbolic connection that will reveal its meaning completely only in the universality of mental events assembled around God? What of this have I expressed? More or less everything and nothing!

  “I could also just as well have said about love that it is divine reason, the Neoplatonic logos. Or just as well something else: Love is the lap of the world: the gentle lap of unselfconscious happening. Or, again differently: O sea of love, about which only the drowning man, not the ship-borne traveler, knows! All these allusive exclamations can transmit their meaning only because one is as untrustworthy as another.

  “Most honest is the feeling: how tiny the earth is in space, and how man, mere nothing compared with the merest child, is thrown on the resources of love! But that is nothing more than the naked cry for love, without a trace of an answer!

  “Yet I might perhaps speak in this way without exaggerating my words into emptiness: There is a condition in the world the sight of which is barred to us, but that things sometimes expose here or there when we find ourselves in a state that is excited in a particular way. And only in this state do we glimpse that things are ‘made of love.’ And only in it, too, do we grasp what it signifies. And only this state is then real, and we would only then be true.

  “That would be a description I would not have to retract in any part. But then, I also have nothing to add to it!”

  Agathe was astonished. In these secret entries Ulrich was holding himself back much less than usual. And although she understood that he allowed himself to do this, even for himself, only under the reservation of secrecy, she still imagined she could see him before her, stirred and irresolute, in the act of opening his arms toward something.

  The notes went on: “That, too, is a notion reason itself might almost chance upon, although to be sure only reason that has to some extent managed to get out of its passive position: imagining the All-Loving as the Eternal Artist. He loves creation as long as he is creating it, but his love turns away from the finished portions. For the artist must also love what is most hateful in order to shape it, but what he has already shaped, even if it is good, cools him off; it becomes so bereft of love that he hardly still understands himself in it, and the moments when his love returns to delight in what it has done are rare and unpredictable. And so one could also think: What lords over us loves what it creates; but this love approaches and withdraws from the finished part of creation in a long ebbing flow and a short returning swell. This idea fits the fact that souls and things of the world are like dead people who are sometimes reawakened for seconds.”

  Then came a few other quick entries, which looked as if they were only tentative.

  “A lion under the morning sky! A unicorn in the moonlight! You have the choice between love’s fire and rifle fire. Therefore there are at least two basic conditions: love and violence. And without doubt it is violence, not love, that keeps the world moving and from going to sleep!

  “Here the assumption might also, of course, be woven in that the world has become sinful. Before, love and paradise. That means: the world as it is, sin! The possible world, love!

  “Another dubious question: The philosophers imagine God as a philosopher, as pure spirit; wouldn’t it make sense, then, for officers to imagine Him as an officer? But I, a mathematician, imagine the divine being as love? How did I arrive at that?

  “And how are we to participate without more ado in one of the Eternal Artist’s most intimate experiences?”

  The writing broke off. But then Agathe’s face was again suffused with a blush when, without raising her eyes, she took up the next page and read on:

  “Lately Agathe and I have frequently had a remarkable experience! When we undertook our expeditions into town. When the weather is especially fine the world looks quite cheerful and harmonious, so that you really don’t pay attention to how different all its component parts are, according to their age and nature. Everything stands and moves with the greatest naturalness. And yet, remarkably, there is in such an apparently incontrovertible condition of the present something that leads into a desert; something like an unsuccessful proposal of love, or some similar exposure, the moment one does not unreser
vedly participate in it.

  “Along our way we find ourselves walking through the narrow violet-blue streets of the city, which above, where they open to the light, burn like fire. Or we step out of this tactile blue into a square over which the sun freely pours its light; then the houses around the square stand there looking taken back and, as it were, placed against the wall, but no less expressively, and as if someone had scratched them with the fine lines of an engraving tool, lines that make everything too distinct. And at such a moment we do not know whether all this self-fulfilled beauty excites us profoundly or has nothing at all to do with us. Both are the case. This beauty stands on a razor’s edge between desire and grief

  “But does not the sight of beauty always have this effect of brightening the grief of ordinary life and darkening its gaiety? It seems that beauty belongs to a world whose depths hold neither grief nor gaiety. Perhaps in that world even beauty itself does not exist, but merely some kind of almost indescribable, cheerful gravity, and its name arises only through the refraction of its nameless splendor in our ordinary atmosphere. We are both seeking this world, Agathe and I, without yet being able to make up our minds; we move along its borders and cautiously enjoy the profound emanation at those points where it is still mingled with the powerful lights of every day and is almost invisible!

  It seemed as if Ulrich, through his sudden idea of speaking of an Eternal Artist, had been led to bring the question of beauty into his observations, especially since, for its part, beauty also expressed the oversensitivity that had arisen between brother and sister. But at the same time he had changed his manner of thinking. In this new sequence of entries he proceeded no longer from his dominant ideas as they faded down to the vanishing point of his experiences, but from the foreground, which was clearer but, in a few places that he noted, really too clear, and again almost permeable by the background.