by Robert Musil
Since Ulrich still did not react, Stumm went on:
“But the man who invented that also established the following law: You will remember that in the regiment one used to admonish the younger men when there had been too much barnyard talk by telling them: ‘Don’t say it, just do it!’ And what’s the opposite of that? In some sense, the challenge: If, because you’re a civilized human being, you can’t do what you want, at least talk it over with a learned man; for he will convince you that everything that exists rests on something that ought not to exist! Of course I can’t judge this from a scientific point of view, but in any case you can see from this that the new rules are absolutely the reverse of those that prevailed before, and the man who introduced them is praised today as a top-notch genius!”
Since Ulrich was apparently still not convinced, and Stumm himself did not feel he had got where he wanted, he repeated his argument using “relativity theory,” as he conceived of it: “like me, you learned at school that everything that moves happens in ‘space and time,’” was where his thinking started. “But what is it like in practice? Permit me to say something quite ordinary: You are supposed to be with the front of your squadron at a particular place on the map at such and such a time. Or when you get the order, you’re supposed to bring your cavalry from a formation to form a new front, which bears no relation at all to the straight lines on the exercise field. It happens in space and time, but it never happens without incident and never works out the way you want. I, at least, received a hundred reprimands so long as I was with the troops, I tell you that candidly. Even at school I always, so to speak, resisted when I had to calculate a mechanical motion in space and time on the blackboard. So I found it a real inspiration of genius the instant I heard that someone had finally discovered that space and time are quite relative concepts, which change at every moment whenever they are put to serious use, although since the creation of the world they have been regarded as the solidest thing there is. That’s why this man, and in my view quite rightly, is at least as famous as the other. But it can also be said of him that he’s tethered the horse by its tail, which, at least today, is what more or less amounts to the fixed main idea of what a genius is! And that’s what I would like to make you see, if you place any value on my experience,” Stumm concluded.
Ulrich, in his partiality for him, had conceded that the most important scientific teachings of the present had their eccentric aspects, or at least showed no fear of them. It might not mean much; but if one is so inclined, a sign can be seen in this as well. Fearless showiness, a predisposition for the paradoxical, self-starting ambition, surprise, and revision of everything on the basis of contradictory details that previously had hardly been noticed, all this had doubtless been part of the fashion in thinking for some time, for with their great achievements these things had just begun to crown precisely those fields where one would not have expected it and where one had been accustomed to the steady administration and constant increase of an enormous intellectual estate.
“But why?” Stumm asked. “How did it happen?”
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He thought of his own abandoned science, the broaching of its basic questions, their being skewered when their logic was checked out. It had not been much different with other sciences; they felt their edifices shaken through discoveries they had a hard time accommodating. That was the dispensation and the violence of truth. Nevertheless, it still seemed possible to speak of a boredom with every day, never-ending progress, which up to now, and for the longest time, had been the ideal of real, silent faith amid the racket of all convictions. There was no denying a creeping doubt in all fields about the lightness of the bare, exact process of taking one step before another. That, too, might be a cause. Finally, Ulrich answered: “Perhaps it’s simply the same as when you get tired: you need a prospect that refreshes you, or a shove in the back of your knees.”
“Why not sit down instead?” Stumm asked.
“I don’t know. In any event, after the longish calm flowering of the mind, you prefer to flirt with revolution. Some such thing seems to be in the offing. By way of comparison, you might perhaps think of the prevailing disjointedness in the arts. I don’t understand much about politics, but perhaps sometime in the future someone will say that this intellectual restlessness already held signs of a revolution.”
“The hell you say!” Stumm exclaimed, arts and revolutionary unrest reminding him of his impressions at Diotima’s.
“Perhaps only as a transition to a new stability to come!” Ulrich said soothingly.
That made no difference to Stumm. “Since that tactless business in front of the War Minister I’ve avoided Diotima’s parties,” he related. “Don’t get me wrong, I have no objection whatever to all those geniuses we’ve been talking about, who are already preserved in amber—or if I do, it’s only that the way they’re revered seems to me exaggerated. But I really have it in for the rest of that rabble!” And after a brief but obviously bitter moment he brought himself to ask the question: “Tell me honestly, is genius really so valuable?”
Ulrich had to smile, and disregarding what he had said before, he now mentioned the enormous—he even called it the magically simpleminded—sense of release that one recognized in the solution to any land of problem that the most talented and even the greatest specialists had vainly striven to find. Genius is the single unconditional human value, it is human value, he said. Without the involvement of genius there would not even be the animal group of the higher primates. In his eagerness, he even passionately praised that genius which he was later to call merely the genius of degree and dexterity, to the extent that it was not fundamentally genius by nature.
Stumm nodded with satisfaction. “I know: the invention of fire and the wheel, gunpowder and printing, and so on! In short, from log canoe to logarithms!” But after he had demonstrated his sympathy he went on: “Now let me tell you something, and it’s from the conversations at Diotima’s: Trom Sophocles to Feuermaul!’ Some young dolt once shouted that in complete seriousness!”
“What bothers you about Sophocles?”
“Ah! I don’t know anything about him. But Feuermaul! And here you are claiming that genius is an unconditional value.”
“The touch of genius is the only moment in which that ugly and obdurate pupil of God, man, is beautiful and candid!” Ulrich intensified his statement. “But I did not say that it’s easy to decide what’s genius and what merely fantasy. I’m just saying that wherever a new value really enters the human game, genius is behind it!”
“How can you know whether something is ‘really a new value’?”
Ulrich hesitated, smiling.
“And then, in any case, whether the value really is worth anything!” Stumm added with curiosity and concern.
“You often feel it at first sight,” Ulrich said.
“I’ve been told that people have been mistaken at first sight!”
The conversation faltered. Stumm was perhaps preparing a fundamentally different question.
Ulrich said: “You hear the first bars of Bach or Mozart; you read a page of Goethe or Corneille: and you know that you’ve touched genius!”
“Maybe with Mozart and Goethe, because with them I already know that; but not with an unknown!” the General protested.
“Do you believe it wouldn’t have electrified you even when you were young? The enthusiasm of youth is in itself related to genius!”
“What do you mean, ‘in itself’? But if you’re really forcing me to answer: maybe an opera diva might have aroused my enthusiasm. And Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon excited me once too. But ‘in itself,’ writers or composers of any kind have always left me cold!”
Ulrich beat a retreat, although he felt that he had merely got hold of a good argument from the wrong end. “I meant to say that a young person, as he develops intellectually, sniffs out genius the way a migrating bird senses direction. But apparently that would be confusing things.
/> For the young person has only the most limited access to what is significant. He has no particular sense of it, but only a sense for what excites him. He’s not even looking for genius, but he’s searching for himself and for whatever is an appropriate foothold for the shape of his biases. What speaks to him,” he declared, “is what’s like him, in all the vagueness that goes along with it. It’s more or less what he himself believes he can be, and has the same importance in his formation as the mirror, in which he gazes at himself happily, but by no means only out of vanity. That’s why it’s only to be expected of works of genius that they should have this effect on him; usually it’s contemporary things, and among those rather the ones that stimulate moods than those clearly formed by the intellect, just as he prefers mirrors that make his face thin or his shoulders broad to faithful ones.”
“That may well be,” Stumm agreed pensively. “But do you believe that people get cleverer later on?”
“There’s no doubt that the mature person is more capable and has more experience in recognizing what is significant; but his mature personal aims and powers also force him to exclude many things. It’s not that he refuses from lack of understanding but that he leaves things aside.”
“That’s it!” Stumm exclaimed, relieved. “He’s not as limited as a young person, but I would say he’s more circumscribed! And that has to be too. Whenever people like us associate with immature young people of the kind favored by your cousin, God knows we must be ready for anything and have the good sense not to understand half of what they’re saying!”
“You might well criticize them.”
“But your cousin says they’re geniuses! How do you prove the opposite?”
Ulrich would not have been disinclined to follow up this question as well. “A genius is a person who finds a solution where many have looked for it in vain by doing something nobody before him thought of doing,” he defined, in order finally to get on, because he was curious himself.
But Stumm declined. “I can stick to the facts themselves,” he commented. “At Frau von Tuzzi’s I’ve met enough critics and professors in person, and every time that one of the geniuses who improve life or art made assertions that were entirely too far out of line, I discreetly sought these experts’ advice.”
Ulrich allowed himself to be distracted. “And what was the result?”
“Oh, they were always very respectful to me and said: ‘You shouldn’t bother your head about that, General!’ Of course that may be a kind of arrogance they have; for though they nervously praise all new artists, they nonetheless seem to imagine that these artists, in their own assertions, dangerously contradict each other, indeed that they feel something like blind rage toward each other, and that summa summarum they perhaps don’t know what they’re doing!”
“And did you also find out what those sun-stricken minds that Diotima cools with laurel think about the critics and professors, to the extent these people don’t praise them?” Ulrich asked. “As if the artists were the ones feeding these beasts of intellect with their flesh, and these beasts were the ones who would leave a mere struggle over bones as the final remains of all man’s humanity!”
“You’ve observed them well!” Stumm agreed as a delighted connoisseur.
“But in the face of so much contradiction, how do you recognize whether you’ve really got hold of a ‘genius’ or not?” Ulrich asked logically.
Stumm’s answer was honest, if not compelling: “I don’t give a damn,” he said.
Ulrich looked at him in silence. If he wanted merely to engage in a rearguard skirmish and avoid problems that were more difficult than the circumstances warranted, then it was a mistake for him not to use this moment “to disengage himself from the enemy,” as good tactics would have dictated. But he himself did not know what mood he was in. So he finally said: “Nothing gives fake geniuses so much luck with the masses as the incomprehension that genuine geniuses ordinarily have for each other, and, following their example, the pseudo-genuine ones; lamp polishers can’t clean Prometheus!” At this conclusion Stumm looked up at him, uncomprehending but thoughtful. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he added cautiously. “Remember my eagerness when I was searching for a great idea for Diotima. I know what intellectual aristocracy is. Nor am I Count Leinsdorf, for whom that’s always a kind of minor nobility. Just now, for example, you brilliantly defined what a genius is. How did it go? It finds a solution by doing something that hadn’t occurred to anyone before! That really says the same thing I’ve been saying: the important thing is that a genius gets hold of his subject from the wrong end. But that’s not intellectual aristocracy! And why isn’t it intellectual aristocracy? Because the usual polestar of our age is that whatever the circumstances, what happens must be meaningful, but whether you call it genius or intellectual aristocracy, progress or, as you now often hear people say, a record, just doesn’t matter much to our time!”
“But then why did you mention intellectual aristocracy?” Ulrich prompted impatiently.
“I can’t really say precisely, for that very reason!” Stumm defended himself. “Anyway,” he continued, thinking busily, “perhaps you could say in a way that an intellectual aristocracy in particular is not permitted to leave character in peace. Aren’t I right?”
“Yes, you’re right!” Ulrich encouraged him, made aware for the first time this precise moment, quite incidentally, as it happened, to heed a distinction like the one between genius and dexterity.
“Yes,” Stumm repeated thoughtfully. And then he asked: “But what is character? Is it what helps a man develop the ideas that will distinguish him? Or is it what keeps him from having such ideas? For a man who has character doesn’t do much flitting around!”
Ulrich decided to shrug his shoulders and smile.
“Presumably it’s connected with what one is accustomed to calling great ideas,” Stumm went on skeptically. “And then intellectual aristocracy would be nothing except the possession of great ideas. But how does one recognize that an idea is great? There are so many geniuses, at least a couple in every profession; indeed, it’s a distinctive mark of our time that we have too many geniuses. How is one to understand them all and not overlook any!” His painful familiarity with the question of what a really great idea was had brought him back to its role in genius.
Ulrich shrugged again.
“There are of course some people, and I’ve met them,” Stumm said, “who never miss the smallest genius that can be dug up anywhere!”
Ulrich replied: “Those are the snobs and intellectual pretenders.”
The General: “But Diotima is one of these people too.”
Ulrich: “Makes no difference. A person into whom everything he finds can be stuffed must be built with no shape of his own, like a sack.”
“It’s true,” the General replied rather reproachfully, “that you’ve often said that Diotima was a snob. And you’ve sometimes said it about Arnheim as well. But that made me imagine a snob to be someone who is quite stimulating! I’ve honestly tried hard to be one myself and not let anything slip past me. It’s hard for me to suddenly hear you say that you can’t even depend on a snob to understand genius. Because you said before that youth couldn’t answer for it, nor age either. And then we discussed how geniuses don’t, and critics not at all. Well then, genius will finally have to reveal itself to everyone of its own accord!”
“That will happen in time,” Ulrich soothed him, laughing. “Most people believe that time naturally turns up what is significant.”
“Yes, one hears that too. But tell me if you can,” Stumm asked impatiently. “I can understand that one is cleverer at fifty than one was at twenty. But at eight o’clock in the evening I’m no cleverer than I was at eight in the morning; and that one should be cleverer after nineteen hundred and fourteen years than after eight hundred and fourteen, that I can’t see either!” This led them to go on a bit discussing the difficult subject of genius, the only thing, in Ulrich’s opinion, that justifie
d mankind, but at the same time the most exciting and confusing, because you never know whether you’re looking at genius or at one of its half-baked imitations. What are its distinguishing characteristics? How is it passed on? Could it develop further if it were not constantly being thwarted? Is it, as Stumm had asked, such a desirable thing anyway? These were problems that for Stumm belonged to the beauty of the civilian mind and its scandalous disorder, while Ulrich, on the other hand, compared them with a weather forecast that not only didn’t know whether it would be fair tomorrow but didn’t know whether it had been fair yesterday either. For the judgment of what constitutes genius changes with the spirit of the times, assuming that anyone is interested in it at all, which by no means need be the mark of greatness of soul or of mind.
Such puzzles would no doubt have been well worth solving, and so it came about in this part of the conversation that Stumm finally, after shaking his head a few times, proffered his observation about the Engineering[/Genius] Staff that Ulrich later repeated to his sister. This explanation, that genius needed a Genius Staff, reminded him somewhat painfully, moreover, of what Ulrich himself had half ironically called the General Secretariat of Precision and Soul, and Stumm did not neglect to remind him that he had last mentioned it in his own and Count Leinsdorf’s presence during the unfortunate gathering at Diotima’s. “At that time you were demanding something quite similar,” he held up to him, “and if I’m not mistaken, it was a department for geniuses and the intellectual aristocracy.” Ulrich nodded silently. “For the intellectual aristocracy,” Stumm continued, “would ultimately be what ordinary geniuses don’t have. No matter how you define them, our geniuses are geniuses and nothing more, nothing but specialists! Am I right? I can really understand why many people say: today there’s no such thing as genius!”
Ulrich nodded again. A pause ensued.
“But there’s one thing I’d like to know,” Stumm asked with that hint of egotism that attaches to a recurrent perplexing thought: “Is it a reproach or a distinction that people never say about a general: he’s a genius?”
