by Robert Musil
The tall gentleman was dismayed, for he had not meant to offend her, and Agathe gave him a friendly smile. “You seem to be confusing me with the rights of the free personality. And what’s more, with a rather neurasthenic and quite unpleasant personality!”
“I was only speaking of the essential foundation of the personal life,” he said apologetically, “and admittedly, the situation in which I found you gave me the feeling that you might be in need of counsel. The essential foundation of life goes frequently unrecognized these days. All the neurosis of modern life, with all its excesses, only comes from a slack inner atmosphere where there’s a lack of will, because without a special effort of the will no one can gain that unity and constancy that raise one above the dark tumult of the organism!”
Here again two words, “unity” and “constancy,” came up like a memory recalling Agathe’s yearning and self-reproaches. “Explain to me what you mean by that,” she said. “Surely one can only have a will if one already has a goal?!”
“It doesn’t matter what I mean,” he replied in a tone that was as mild as it was curt. “Don’t all of humanity’s great scriptures tell us with unsurpassable clarity what we must and must not do?”
Agathe was baffled.
“Establishing fundamental ideals for living,” her companion explained, “demands such a penetrating knowledge of life and of man, and at the same time such a heroic mastery of the passions and of one’s own selfish nature, as has only been granted to very few people in the course of thousands of years. And these teachers of humanity have at all times professed the same truth.”
Agathe involuntarily resisted, as would any young person who values his or her flesh and blood more highly than the bones of dead sages. “But laws made for all of humanity thousands of years ago can’t possibly apply to conditions today!” she exclaimed.
“They are far more timely than is acknowledged by skeptics who have lost touch with living experience and self-knowledge!” her chance companion replied with bitter satisfaction. “The deep truths of life are not arrived at through debate, as Plato already said; man hears them as the living exegesis and fulfillment of himself! Believe me, what makes man truly free, and what robs him of his freedom, what gives him true felicity, and what destroys it: this is not subject to progress, every person with an honest conscience knows this in his heart, if he will but listen!”
The words “living exegesis” appealed to Agathe, but now an unexpected thought occurred to her: “Are you by any chance religious?” she asked. She looked at him with curiosity. He did not answer. “You don’t happen to be a priest?!” she continued, but was reassured by his beard, for the rest of his appearance suddenly seemed capable of delivering such a surprise. It must be said to her credit that she would not have been more astounded if the stranger had casually referred to “our sublime ruler, the divine Augustus”: she knew that religion plays a great role in politics, but one is so used to not taking seriously the ideas that serve public discourse that to expect the religious parties to consist of believers can seem as far-fetched as it would be to require of a mail clerk that he be a philatelist.
After a long, somehow vacillating pause the stranger replied: “I would rather not answer your question; you are too far removed from all this.”
But Agathe had been seized by a lively desire. “Now I want to know who you are!” she demanded, and that was of course a feminine privilege that could not be flatly denied. Again the stranger showed the same somewhat comical insecurity as before, when he had hastened to make good his failure to salute her properly; he appeared to be feeling an itch in his hand to lift his hat again, but then something stiffened in him; one mental army seemed to be battling another until it finally won.
“My name is Lindner and I am a teacher at the Franz-Ferdinand-Gymnasium,” he said. After a moment’s reflection he added: “I also lecture at the university.”
“Then perhaps you know my brother?” Agathe asked eagerly and went on to give him Ulrich’s name. “If I’m not mistaken, he recently gave a lecture at the Pedagogical Society on mathematics and the humanities, or something like that.”
“I know who he is. And yes, I attended that lecture,” Lindner admitted. Agathe thought this answer involved some rejection, but she forgot it in the course of what followed:
“Your father was the well-known lawyer?” Lindner asked.
“Yes, he died recently, and I am now staying with my brother,” Agathe said blithely. “Wouldn’t you like to come and see us sometime?”
“I’m afraid I have no time for social calls,” Lindner replied brusquely, his eyes downcast in evident unease.
“In that case you must not object to my visiting you,” Agathe continued, ignoring his reluctance. “I need some advice.” And since he had been addressing her as Fräulein, she added: “I’m married. My name is Hagauer.”*
“Could it be, then,” Lindner exclaimed, “that you are the wife of that accomplished educationalist, Professor Hagauer?”
He had begun the sentence on a note of sheer delight and ended it in a hesitant, muted register. For Hagauer was two things: he was an educationalist, and he was a progressive educationalist; Lindner was actually opposed to his ideas, but how bracing it is when, in the unsteady mists of a female psyche, moments after she has conceived the impossible whim of visiting a stranger in his house, one discerns such a familiar enemy; it was the drop from the second to the first of these sentiments that was echoed in the tone of his question.
Agathe had noticed it. She did not know if she should tell Lindner what the status of her relationship with her husband was. Telling him might put an immediate end to everything between herself and this new friend: she had that impression very clearly. And she would have been sorry; for precisely because there was much about Lindner that provoked her to mock him, he also made her feel she could trust him. The impression, credibly supported by his appearance, that this man seemed to want nothing for himself strangely compelled her to be sincere: he put all desire to rest, and then sincerity rose unprompted of its own accord. “I’m about to get a divorce,” she finally admitted.
A silence followed; Lindner looked despondent, and Agathe now found him just a bit too pathetic.
Finally, Lindner said with an aggrieved smile: “I already thought it might be something like that when I first saw you!”
“Don’t tell me you’re an enemy of divorce as well?!” Agathe cried, giving free rein to her annoyance. “Of course, how could you not be! But you know, you’re really a little behind the times!”
“At least I don’t think it’s as unquestionable as you do,” Lindner pensively said in defense, took off his glasses, polished them, put them on again, and contemplated Agathe.
“I think you have too little willpower,” he concluded.
“Willpower? My will is precisely to get a divorce!” Agathe exclaimed, well aware that she was missing the point.
“That is not the sense in which I am using this term,” Lindner gently corrected her. “I’m prepared to believe that you have good reasons. I just happen to think differently: the free and easy morals people allow themselves nowadays never amount to more, in practice, than a sign that an individual is immovably chained to his ego and not capable of living and acting from a wider perspective. Our gentle poets,” he added jealously, attempting a jibe at Agathe’s impassioned pilgrimage that turned slightly sour in his mouth, “who flatter the sensibilities of the ladies, for which the ladies overrate them in return, are of course in an easier position than I am when I tell you that marriage is an institution of responsibility and mastery over the passions! But before an individual divests himself of the external safeguards that the human race has erected in true self-knowledge against its own unreliability, he would do well to tell himself that isolation from and disobedience to the higher totality constitute worse damage than the body’s disappointments we are so afraid to countenance!”
“That sounds like a martial code for archangels,
” Agathe said, “but I can’t see that you’re right. I’ll walk with you a little way. You must explain to me how one can think as you do. Where are you going now?”
“I have to go home,” Lindner replied.
“Would your wife have something against my accompanying you to your house? We can take a cab in town. I still have time!”
“My son will be coming home from school,” Lindner said, fending her off with dignity. “We always eat punctually; that is why I must go home. My wife, by the way, died suddenly several years ago,” he said in correction of Agathe’s mistaken assumption, and with a glance at his watch he added, anxiously and annoyed: “I must hurry!”
“Then you must explain it to me another time, it’s important to me!” Agathe eagerly insisted. “If you won’t come to see us, I can look you up.”
Lindner gasped for air, but nothing came of it. Finally, he said: “But you as a woman can’t pay me a visit!”
“Yes, I can!” Agathe assured him. “You’ll see, one day I’ll show up. I don’t know when yet. And I assure you there’s no harm in it!”
With this she said goodbye and started down a path that diverged from his.
“You have no willpower!” she said under her breath, trying to imitate Lindner, but the word “will” was fresh and cool in her mouth. It evoked feelings like pride, toughness, confidence; a proud tonality of the heart. The man had done her good.
*“Ich bin Frau und heiße Hagauer”—“I am a woman” or “I am to be addressed as Frau” (in acknowledgment of her married status) “and my name is Hagauer”—involves both a subtle piquancy and an indication of Agathe’s inner divorcement from Hagauer that can’t be reproduced in English.
22
A CONVERSATION ON MORALITY
That same evening Ulrich attends a gala reception for the Parallel Campaign at his cousin Diotima’s house, where a large panoply of characters from The Man Without Qualities, along with a number of new ones—fashionable members of the social elite, pillars of industry and finance, influential journalists, military men, reputed possessors of literary genius, and elegant ladies—mingle and converse. Beneath the polite chatter an ideological polarity can be discerned, pitting those who trust in the good and pacific nature of man against those who hold that only the most modern weaponry and a strong leader can establish lasting peace. Agathe arrives late, and the siblings’ private conversation soon turns from her still unresolved legal predicament to the general subject of ethics. Morality, according to Ulrich, comes into being, like every other form of order, through force and compulsion; and if after centuries of social development the moral law seems to span all human life as autonomously as the vault of heaven, that sovereignty itself is without moral foundation: “Everything is moral, but morality itself is not moral.” His sister is not convinced.
“That is charming of morality,” Agathe said. “But do you know that I met a good man today?”
Ulrich was taken aback by this interruption, but when Agathe started telling him about her meeting with Lindner, he first tried to find a place for it in his train of thought. “You can find good people here by the dozen as well,” he said, “but I’ll show you why the bad ones cannot fail to be among them, if you’ll let me continue.”
As they talked, they tried to get away from the party’s commotion and had reached the anteroom, where they remained for the time being among the uninhabited coats that were hanging in the lobby. Ulrich could not find a way to resume his thoughts. “I really should start again from the beginning,” he said with an impatient and helpless gesture. And suddenly he said: “You don’t want to know whether you’ve done something good or bad; rather you are unsettled by the fact that you do both without any solid reason.”
Agathe nodded.
He had taken both her hands in his.
The faint glow of his sister’s skin, with its fragrance of plants unknown to him rising from her slight décolleté, lost for a moment all earthly conception. The thrust of the blood throbbed from one hand to the other. A deep moat of unworldly origin seemed to enclose her and him in a nowhereland.
He suddenly lacked the ideas to describe it. He could not even find formulations he had often made use of before. “We don’t want to act out of the intuition of particular moments, but out of the state that endures to the end.” “In such a way that it takes us to the center from which one cannot return to take anything back.” “Not from the periphery with its constantly changing conditions, but out of the one, immutable happiness.” Such phrases did come to his lips, and he might well have found it possible to use them if it were just a matter of conversation. But applying them to the immediacy of this moment between him and his sister was suddenly impossible. This left him helplessly agitated. But Agathe understood him clearly. And it should have made her happy that for the first time the shell encasing her “hard brother” had cracked open entirely, exposing what was inside, like an egg that had fallen to the floor. To her surprise however, her feelings this time were not quite ready to go along with his. Between the morning and the evening lay her curious encounter with Lindner, and although this man had merely aroused wonderment and curiosity in her, even that small grain was enough to prevent the infinite mirroring of eremitic love from coming into being.
Ulrich felt it in her hands even before she responded, and Agathe—did not respond.
He guessed that this unexpected self-renunciation had something to do with the experience he had been obliged to hear about moments ago. Abashed and confused by the rebound of his unreciprocated emotion, he said, shaking his head: “It really is annoying how much you seem to expect from the goodness of such a man.”
“You’re probably right,” Agathe conceded.
He looked at her. He realized that this encounter meant more to his sister than any of the courting she had experienced since she had been under his protection. He even knew this man slightly. Lindner was a public figure; he was the man who at the very first session of the Parallel Campaign had made that brief speech, received with embarrassing silence, concerning the “historic occasion” or something like that: awkward, sincere, and mediocre . . . Inadvertently Ulrich looked around; but he did not recall having noticed the man among the guests, and now he realized that Lindner had never been invited back. He must have run into him elsewhere from time to time, probably at some learned society, and have read one or another of his publications, for as he collected his memory, ultramicroscopic traces of images from the past condensed like a viscous, repulsive drop into the verdict: “That insipid ass! If one wants to maintain a certain elevation in one’s state of being, one cannot take such a person any more seriously than Professor Hagauer!”
He said this to Agathe.
Agathe responded with silence. She even pressed his hand.
He had the feeling: Something here makes no sense at all, but there’s no way to stop it.
At this moment people came into the anteroom, and the siblings drew apart.
“Shall I go back inside with you?” Ulrich asked.
Agathe said no and looked around for an escape.
It suddenly occurred to Ulrich that the only way they could avoid the other guests was by retreating to the kitchen.
There they found the cook and the servants Rachel and Soliman filling batteries of glasses and loading trays with cakes. Rachel dropped a curtsy as they came in, and Ulrich said: “It’s too hot in there, can we get some refreshment here?” He sat down on a window ledge with Agathe and put a glass and a plate down for show so that if anyone should see them it would look as if two friends of the house were permitting themselves an amusing breach of decorum. When they were seated, he said with a little sigh: “So it’s merely a matter of feeling whether one finds such a Professor Lindner good or insufferable!”
Agathe was occupying her fingers with a wrapped sweet.
“Which is to say,” Ulrich continued, “that feeling is neither true nor false. Feeling has remained a private matter! It has been left at
the mercy of suggestion, fantasy, persuasion! You and I are no different from those people in there. Do you know what those people want?”
“No, but does it matter?”
“It may very well matter. Because they are forming two parties, each of which is as right or as wrong as the other.”
Agathe said it seemed to her somewhat better to believe in human goodness than only in guns and politics, even if the manner of the belief was risible.
“What is he like, this man you met?” Ulrich asked.
“Oh, that’s impossible to say. He’s good!” his sister replied, laughing.
“You can no more rely on what appears good to you than on what appears good to Count Leinsdorf,” Ulrich retorted testily.
Both their faces were tensed with excitement and laughter: the flow of polite and lighthearted humor was restrained by deeper countercurrents.
“For centuries,” Ulrich continued, “the world has known truth in the realm of thought and accordingly, to a certain degree and on a rational plane, freedom of thought. But during the same time, feeling has not known the stern school of truth, nor has it been schooled in freedom of movement. For every morality in its time has regulated feeling only insofar—and rigidly at that, even within this perimeter—as certain basic tenets and basic emotions were needed for whatever action that morality favored; the rest was left to discretion, to the private play of emotions, to the ambiguous efforts of art, and to academic discussion. So morality has adapted feelings to the needs of morality and in doing so neglected to develop them, even though it is itself dependent on feelings: morality is, after all, the order and integrity of the emotional life.”