by Robert Musil
Clarisse and Walter listened attentively, flattered. Clarisse, moreover, made note of the chain of ideas “music-ice-hailstorm” in order to use it in the next domestic musical struggle with Walter.
Meingast meanwhile, having worked himself up to a high pitch, explained himself by way of examples from the old Italian still-healthy music. He whistled it for them. He had stepped a little to the side and was standing in the meadow like a totem pole, the describing hand long-limbed, his words an interminable monologue. This really had nothing to do anymore with mere art or an exchange of aesthetic views: Meingast whistled metaphysical examples, absolute shapes, and phenomena of sound that occur only in music and nowhere else in the world. He whistled hovering curves or ineffable images of grief, anger, love, and cheerfulness; challenged the couple to test the extent to which this resembled what in life is understood under the name of music, and expected of Clarisse and Walter that they, pursuing their own feelings, would arrive at the end of a bridge that breaks off in the middle, from which point they would first glimpse the absolute melodic figure as it drifted away in its total ineffability.
Which was also, as it appeared, what happened, diffusing a fixed shudder of happiness over the three of them. —Once it’s been pointed out, you yourself feel—said Meingast—that music cannot arise out of us alone. It is the image of itself, and just for that reason not merely an image of your feelings. So it’s not an image at all. Not anything that would receive its existence through the existence of something else. It is itself simply existence, being, scorning every motivation. And then, with a motion of his hand, Meingast pushed music far behind him, where it became the fragment of something greater, —for—he said—art does not idealize, but realizes. One must, to come to the essential point, break entirely with the view that art lifts up, beautifies, or the like, something within us. It is precisely the other way around. Take greed, greatness, cheerfulness, or whatever you like: it is only the hollow earthly characterization of processes that are far more powerful than their ridiculous trailing thread, which our understanding seizes in order to pull them down to us. In truth, all our feelings are inexpressible. We press them out in drops and think that these drops are our feelings. But they are clouds rushing away! All our experiences are more than we experience of them. I could now simply apply the example of music to this; all our experiences would then be of the essence of music, were it not surrounded by a still greater circle. For—
But here an interruption ensued, for Schmeisser, whose lips had long mated dryly together, could no longer restrain the birth of an objection. He said loudly: —If you derive the birth of morality from the spirit of music, you’re forgetting that all the emotions you might care to talk about receive their meaning from middle-class habits and middle-class assumptions!
Meingast turned amicably to the young man. —When, ten years ago, I came to Zurich for the first time—he said slowly—something of that sort would have been considered revolutionary. At that time you would have had great success with your interjection. I may tell you that it was there that I received my first spiritual training, in the left wing of your party, which had members from all the countries of the world. But today it is clear to us that the creative accomplishment of Social Democracy—he emphasized the component “Democracy”—has so far remained zero, and will never get beyond whitewashing the cultural content of liberalism as neo-revolutionary!
Schmeisser had no intention of responding to this. It was sufficient that he threw back his hair with a shake of his neck muscles and smiled with sternly closed lips. One could perhaps also say: Oh, don’t let me bother you! He was thinking that a few lines in The Shoemaker, a few juicily pointed sarcastic comments, would be appropriate anytime as warning yet again against bourgeois like these, who never stuck it out for long in the movement. But Ulrich interrupted: —Don’t run him through with a quotation from Marx; Herr Meingast would answer with Goethe, and we’d never get home today! But still Schmeisser let himself be carried away, because he had to say something. Since he lacked the will to do battle his answer was too modest. He simply said: —The new culture that socialism has brought into the world is the feeling of solidarity.… The response was not immediate; Meingast seemed to be leaving himself time. He replied slowly: —That’s correct. But it’s precious little. Now Schmeisser lost his patience: —So-called academic learning—he exclaimed—has long since lost its right to be taken seriously as an intellectual center! Poking around among antiquities, pasting together treatises about the poems of some fifth-rate writer, cramming Roman un-Law; that only breeds empty arrogance. The workers’ movement, with its definable goals, has long been developing the real intellectual workers, the fighters in the class struggle with their clear aims, who are going to do away with the barbarism of exploitation, and they are the ones who will create the foundations for a culture of the future!
Now it was Meingast’s turn to get angry; for years he had not felt as warmly about the culture of the present as he did now, faced with this battler for the future. But with a good-natured motion, Meingast cut off his counterattack. —We are really not at all as far apart as you think, he answered Schmeisser. —I don’t think much of academic learning either, and I, too, believe that a new feeling of community, a turning away from the individualism of the most recent age, signifies the most important development under way today. But— And again Meingast stood in the meadow like a totem pole, stretching out the hand that descriptively accompanied his words, and could continue precisely where he had been interrupted: But that had happened before his new doctrine of the will. By “will” one was not, of course, to understand something like the intention of seeking out a specific business because its drawing paper is cheaper, or composing a poem meant to be arrhythmic because up to then all other poems had been rhythmic. Nor was trampling on a superior in order to get ahead a sign of will. On the contrary, that’s merely the scum of will, caused by the many obstacles that today stand in the way of will, and is, therefore, broken will. That one applies the word “will” to such things is a sign that its true meaning is no longer felt. Meingast’s charter was the unbroken cosmic stream of will. He illustrated its appearance by great men like Napoleon. Compare Shaw’s assertion that it is only great men who do anything, and that in vain. The will of such people is uninterrupted activity, an art of burning up like breathing, it must incessantly produce heat and movement, and for such natures standing still and turning back are equivalent to death. But one can illustrate this just as well by the will of primeval mythic times; when the wheel was invented, language, fire, religion: those were breakthroughs with which nothing since can be compared. At most in Homer there are perhaps the last traces of this great simplicity of the will and collected creative energy. Now Meingast brought together with extraordinary force these two discrepant examples: It was no accident that they were talking about a statesman and an artist. —For, if you all remember what I was telling you about music, the aesthetic phenomenon is that which needs nothing in addition to itself; as a phenomenon it is already all that it can possibly be: in other words, purely realized will! Will belongs not to morality but to aesthetics, to unmotivated phenomena. There are three conclusions that can be drawn from this: First, the world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon; every attempt to give it a moral basis has failed up to now, and now we can understand why it must be that way. Second, our statesmen must, as the ancient wisdom of Plato already demanded, learn music again; and Plato drew his impetus for this from the wisdom of the East. Third, systematically executed cruelty is the only means now available for the European peoples, still stupefied by humanitarianism, to find their strength again!
Even though this conversation might at times have been rather opaque to ear and understanding, it was different with eye and feeling; it came tumbling down from a philosophical height where everything is in any case One, and Clarisse felt its onrush. She was enthusiastic. All the emotions in her were stirred up and swam, if one may put it thi
s way, once more in feeling. For a while she had placed herself in the meadow not far from Meingast in order to hear better and to be able to conceal her excitement behind a glance that appeared to be distractedly gazing into the distance. But the inner burning of the world of which Meingast spoke opened her thoughts like nuts bursting with flames. Strange things became clear to her: summer noons, freezing with the fever of light; starry nights, mute as fish with gold scales; experiences without reflection or preparation that sometimes overcame her and remained without response, indeed really without content; tension, whenever she made music, certainly, today, worse than any concert pianist, but to the absolute best of her ability and clearly, with the uncanny feeling that something titanic, nameless experiences, a still-nameless person, greater than the greatest music can encompass, was forcing itself against the limits of her fingers. Now she understood her battles with Walter: they were suddenly moments as when a boat glides over an infinite chasm; in words, perhaps not comprehensible to anyone else. Clarisse’s fingers and wrists began barely perceptibly to play along; one saw the young woman translating the prophet’s wisdom into her own bodily will. The effect he had on her was related to the essence of a dance, a dancing wandering. Her feet released themselves from the impoverished and hardened present; her soul released itself from the uncertainty of instinct and weakness; the distance reared up; she held a flower with three heads in her hand; to follow after Meingast, following Christ, to redeem Walter, those were the three heads; if they were not, then Clarisse was not thinking it the way one counts or reads, from left to right, but like a rainbow from one end to the other; out of this rainbow arose the smell of the closet in which she kept her traveling clothes, then the three flowers consisted of the three terms I seek, self-search, self-seeking—Clarisse had already forgotten what the flower had consisted of before. Walter was a stem, even Meingast was just a stem, from the soles of her feet Clarisse grew taller and taller, it happened with dizzying speed, before one could hold one’s breath, and Clarisse threw herself down in the grass, horrified at her enthusiasm for herself. Ulrich, who was already lying there, had misunderstood her movements, and thoughtlessly tickled her with a blade of grass. Clarisse shot out sparks of loathing.
Walter had been observing Clarisse, but something he had to talk about drew him more strongly to Meingast. This was Homer. Homer already a phenomenon of decay? No, decay first set in with Voltaire and Lessing! Meingast was probably the most important person one could encounter today, but what he said about music only showed what a misfortune it was that throughout his life Walter had felt too crippled to put his own views in the form of a book. He could understand Clarisse so well; he had long seen how she was carried away by Meingast; he felt so sorry for her; she was wrong, for despite everything she put the fortissimo of her enthusiasm into unimportant things; this coupling pregnant with destiny made his feelings for her flare up in great flames. While he was walking over to Meingast, Clarisse lay stretched out in the grass, Ulrich at her side not understanding anything at all, only, by lying there, pushing the optical center of gravity of the picture somewhat in his direction; Walter felt totally like an actor walking across a stage; here they were playing out their destiny, their story; in the seconds before he spoke to Meingast he felt lifted out of himself and frozen to icy silence, performer and poet of his self.
Meingast saw him coming. Four paces away like four ages of the world to be strode through. He had recently called Walters helplessness that of a democracy of feelings, and with that given him the key to his condition, but he had no desire to carry this discussion further, and before Walter reached him he turned to the quarrelsome stranger.
—Perhaps you are a Socialist—Schmeisser answered him—but you are an enemy of democracy!
—Well, thank God you noticed! Meingast turned completely to face him and succeeded in forgetting Walter and Clarisse. —I was, as you heard, a Socialist too. But you say that a new culture will arise by itself out of the workers’ movement; and I say to you: on the path that socialism has taken among us, never!
Schmeisser shrugged his shoulders. —The world is certainly not going to be put on a better path by talking about art, love, and the like!
—Who’s talking about art? It seems that you haven’t understood me in the least. I am of the same opinion as you that the present condition will not last much longer. The culture of bourgeois individualism will perish the way all previous cultures have perished. Of what? I can tell you: Of the increase of all quantities without a corresponding increase of the central quality. Of there being too many people, things, opinions, needs, wills. The firming energies, the perfusing of the community with its mission, its will to get ahead, its community feeling, the connective tissue of public and private institutions: these are not all growing at the same rate; it is rather left far too much to accident and falls further and further behind. The point comes in every culture where this disproportion gets to be too much. From then on, the culture is vulnerable like a weakened organism, and it takes only a push to bring it down. Today the growing complexity of relations and passions can still barely be maintained.
Schmeisser shook his head. —We’ll give the push, when the time comes.
—When it comes! It will never come! The materialistic view of history produces passivity! The time will perhaps be here tomorrow. Perhaps it’s already here today! You won’t take advantage of it, for with democracy you ruin everything! Democracy produces neither thinkers nor doers, but gabblers. Just ask yourself what the characteristic creations of democracy are! Parliament and newspapers! What an idea—Meingast exclaimed—taking over from the whole despised bourgeois world of ideas precisely the most ridiculous one, democracy!
Walter had stood irresolute for a moment and then, since politics repelled him, joined Clarisse and Ulrich. Ulrich was saying: —Such a theory functions only when it is false, but then it’s a tremendous machine for happiness! The two of them seem to me like a ticket machine arguing with a candy machine. But he found no echo.
Schmeisser had stood up to Meingast smiling, without responding. He told himself that it made no difference at all what an individual person thought.
Meingast was saying: —A new order, structure, cohesion of energy, is what’s needed; that is correct. Pseudohistorical individualism and liberalism have been ruined by mismanagement; that is correct. The masses are coming; that is correct. But their agglomeration must be great, hard, and with the power to do things! And when he had said that he looked probingly at Schmeisser, turned around, plucked a handful of grass, and silently strode away.
Ulrich felt himself superfluous and went off with Schmeisser. Schmeisser did not say a word. —We’re each carrying—Ulrich thought to himself—beside each other two glass balloons on our necks. Both transparent, of different colors, and beautifully, hermetically sealed. For heaven’s sake don’t stumble, so they don’t break!
Walter and Clarisse remained behind on their “stage.”
***
Addendum: Clarisse notices criminal instincts everywhere (which later lead to war).
The blue parasol of the sky stretched above the green parasol of the pines; the green parasol of the pines stretched over the red coral trunks; at the foot of one of the coral trunks Clarisse was sitting, feeling the large, armadillo-like scales of the bark against her back. Meingast was standing to one side in the meadow. The wind was playing with his leanness as it does around the fence of a steel tower; Clarisse thought: If one could bend one’s ear that way one would hear his joints sing. Her heart felt: I am his younger brother.
The struggles with Walter, those attempted embraces from which she had to push her way out—chiseling herself out, she called it, although she herself was not made of stone—had left behind in her an excitement that at times chased over her skin in a flash, like a pack of wolves; she had no idea where it had broken out from or where it vanished to. But as she sat there, her knees drawn up, listening to Meingast, who was speaking of men’s groups,
her panties under her thin dress lying as tight as boy s trousers against her thighs, she felt calmed.
—A league or covenant of men—Meingast was saying—is armed love that one can no longer find anywhere today. Today one knows only love for women. A covenant of men demands: loyalty, obedience, standing one for all and all for one; today the manly virtues have been turned into the caricature of a general obligatory military service, but for the Greeks they were still living eros. Male eroticism is not restricted to the sexual; its original form is war, alliance, united energies. Overcoming the fear of death! He stood and spoke into the air.
—When a man loves a woman it is always the start of his becoming a bourgeois: Clarisse completed the thought, convinced. —Tell me, does one have any business wishing for a child in a time like ours?
—Oh God, a child! Meingast warded her off. —Well, yes; only children! You should desire a child. This eroticism of the bourgeoisie, it’s all people know today, and the only possibility leading to suffering and sacrifice is by means of a child. And anyway, childbearing is still one of the few great things in life. A certain rehabilitation.
Clarisse slowly shook her head. They had recently begun addressing each other again with the familiar Du and had recalled their friendship of long ago, but not in the sensual form it had had before. —If it were only a child of yours! Clarisse said with a smile. —But Walter isn’t fit for that.
—Me? That’s a really new idea! Besides, I’m going back to Switzerland in a few days. My book is finished.
—I’m coming with you, Clarisse said.
—That’s out of the question! My friends are expecting me. There’s hard work to be done. We’re subject to all sorts of dangers and have to stick together like a phalanx. Meingast said this with a quiet, inward-directed smile. —That’s no job for women!
