Agathe

by Robert Musil

  Here he paused, feeling Rachel’s fascinated stare on his zealously animated face.

  “I suppose it’s funny that I talk about morality even here in the kitchen,” he said, embarrassed.

  Agathe was looking at him intently and thoughtfully. He leaned in closer to his sister and added softly, with a quick, jocular smile: “But it’s only another manifestation of a state of passion that takes up arms against the whole world!”

  Without intending to, he was reenacting their confrontation of the morning, in which he had performed the unappealing part of the would-be preceptor. He could not help it. For him morality was neither social authority nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite wholeness of what is possible. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely in the usual notion of stages of moral understanding, as if morality were something already complete for which man was just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific morality. Morality is generally understood to be a set of police regulations for keeping life in order; and since life does not obey even these, they come to seem not quite possible to live up to and in this paltry way gain the status of an ideal. But morality must not be brought to this level. Morality is imagination. That was what he wanted Agathe to see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once the imagination is given over to whim, there is a price to pay. The words twitched in Ulrich’s mouth. He was on the verge of talking about the neglected difference between the way various historical epochs developed the rational mind in their own fashion, and the way, also in their own fashion, they fixed and closed off the moral imagination. He was on the verge of saying this because the consequence, however much one may doubt it, has been a more or less steadily rising line, through all the mutations of history, of rational thought and its creations, as against a heap of feelings, ideas, and vital possibilities that are piled up in stratified layers like shards of eternal side issues just the way they were left when they came into being and were then abandoned. Because a further consequence is that there are countless possibilities of having an opinion one way or another as soon as one enters the realm of fundamentals, without there ever being any possibility of bringing these possibilities together. Because one consequence is that these opinions come to blows, as there is no possibility of their coming to an understanding. Because consequently, all told, the affective life of mankind slops back and forth like water in a tub that lacks a firm foundation. And Ulrich had an idea that had been haunting him all evening, an old idea of his, incidentally, but everything that had happened this evening had simply continuously confirmed it, and he wanted to show Agathe where the fault lay and how it could be remedied if everyone wanted it, and in truth, all that he had wanted to express with that thought was the painful intention to prove that one could not any more read­ily trust the discoveries of one’s own imagination either.

  And Agathe said, with a little sigh, the way a woman subjected to amorous pressure might quickly resist one more time before she surrenders: “So it boils down to having to do everything ‘on principle’ after all?” And she looked at him, returning his smile.

  But he answered: “Yes, but only on one principle!” And this now was something quite different from what he had intended to say. It again came from the realm of the Siamese Twins and the Millennium, where life grows in magical stillness like a flower, and while it may not have been plucked from thin air, it did point directly to frontiers of thought that are solitary and treacherous. Agathe’s eye was like a burst agate. If at this instant he had said only a little more or laid his hand on her, something would have happened which, soon after, she was unable to name, as it was already gone. For Ulrich did not want to say any more. He took a knife and a piece of fruit and began to peel it. He was happy because the distance that had separated him from his sister only a short while ago had melted into an immense closeness; but he was also glad that at this moment they were interrupted.

  •

  The social demands of the party engulf them. Ulrich gets drawn into conversation with several guests, all of them oddly preoccupied with the same subject of morality, albeit in decidedly worldly terms. (“That was virtually the whole agenda this evening!” sighs Ulrich’s friend General Stumm von Bordwehr, who was hoping for a more productive, historically significant meeting of minds.) Agathe listens to her brother from a distance, herself caught up in obligatory chatter.

  •

  “Why is he talking with everyone? He should have left with me! He’s cheapening what he said to me!” She liked some of the things she could hear him say through the hubbub, but they hurt her nonetheless. Everything that came from Ulrich was hurting her again, and for the second time that day she suddenly felt the need to get away from him. She despaired of ever being able, with her one-sided nature, to be what he needed, and the prospect that after a while they would be going home like any two people, gossiping about the evening behind them, was unbearable.

  •

  Not long after, she goes home by herself, leaving word for Ulrich that she had not wanted to disturb him.

  23

  AFTER THE ENCOUNTER

  As Professor August Lindner, the man who had entered Agathe’s life by the poet’s grave, climbed down towards the valley, what he saw before him were images of salvation.

  If Agathe had looked back at him after they parted, she would have been struck by the man’s ramrod-stiff, prancing gait, for he had a peculiarly buoyant, proud, and yet anxious manner of walking. Lindner carried his hat in one hand and occasionally passed the other hand through his hair; such a free and cozy feeling had come over him.

  “How few people,” he said to himself, “have a truly empathic soul!” He imagined a soul that is able to put itself completely in the place of a fellow human being, suffer his most hidden sorrows with him, and descend into his profound weakness. “What a prospect!” he cried out to himself. “What a miraculous proximity of divine mercy, what consolation, what a feast day for the soul!” But then he recalled how few people were even able to listen attentively to their neighbors; for he was one of those well-meaning ramblers who free-associate from the solemn to the trite without noticing the difference. “How rarely, for instance, is the question ‘How are you?’ meant seriously,” he thought. “One needs only to answer in detail how one feels in one’s heart, and soon enough one finds oneself looking into a bored and distracted face.”

  Well, he had not been guilty of this error! According to his principles, protecting the weak was the particular and indispensable hygienics of the strong, who without such benevolent self-limitation would all too easily lapse into brutality; and culture, too, needed works of mercy to protect against the dangers inherent within itself. “Anyone wishing to enlighten us about ‘universal education,’” he confirmed for himself through inner acclamation, deliciously refreshed by a sudden lightning bolt hurled at his fellow pedagogue Hagauer, “should truly first be advised: Experience how another person feels! Knowing through empathy means a thousand times more than knowing through books!” It was evidently an old difference of opinion he was now venting on the liberal concept of education on the one hand, and on the wife of his colleague on the other, for Lindner’s glasses were peering about like two shields of a doubly puissant warrior. He had been inhibited in Agathe’s presence, but if she had seen him now he would have appeared to her like a commander, and in charge of troops that were anything but frivolous. For a truly manly soul is prepared to help, and it is prepared to help because it is manly. He raised the question of whether he had acted correctly when faced with that beautiful woman, and answered himself: “It would be wrong if the high challenge of subordination to the law were left to those who are too weak for it; and it would be a disheartening spectacle if only mindless pedants were permitted to be the protectors and shapers of moral norms; that is why the vital and strong have the obligation, out of their very instinct for health and strength, to call for disc
ipline and limits; they must support the weak, shake the thoughtless, rein in the unbridled.” He had the impression that he had done so.

  Just as the pious soul of the Salvation Army employs uniforms and military customs, Lindner had taken certain soldierly forms of thought into his service; indeed, he did not even shy away from concessions to Nietzsche’s “man of power,” who was still a stumbling block for civil society at that time but was for Lindner a whetstone as well. He liked to say of Nietzsche that he could not be characterized as a bad man, but that his doctrine was quite extreme and life-denying, the reason for this being that he rejected pity; for thus he had failed to recognize the wonderful reciprocal gift of the weak, which is to make the strong man gentle! And opposing to this his own experience, he thought, full of joyful aspiration: “Truly great souls do not pay homage to a barren cult of the self; instead they awaken in others a sense of their own majesty by bending down to them and, if need be, sacrificing themselves for them!” Two young lovers were coming up the path towards him, closely entwined; he looked into their eyes, confident of victory and with an expression of friendly reproof that was meant to encourage virtue. But it was a rather ordinary couple, and the young lout who formed its male component pinched his eyes together and said: “Boo!” Lindner, who was not prepared for this vulgar and derisive threat, was taken aback: but he acted as if he did not notice. He loved decisive action, and looked around for a policeman, who ought to be nearby to guarantee the public safety of honor; but his foot struck against a stone, the hasty stumbling movement scared up a swarm of sparrows that had been feasting at God’s table on a heap of horse manure, and the sparrows’ rustling flight warned Lindner, enabling him, an instant before falling ignominiously, to clear the double obstacle with a balletically disguised leap. He did not look back, and after a while he was very satisfied with himself. “One must be hard as a diamond and tender as a mother!” he thought, finding happy support in that seventeenth-century maxim.

  Since he also valued the virtue of modesty, he would at no other time have made such a pronouncement in regard to himself, but Agathe had aroused such a tumult in the blood! Then again, his emotions were negatively grounded, as it were, in the knowledge that this divinely tender female 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 indulging in poetry makes one!—and so he continued in a more severe manner: that this miserable woman was on the verge of breaking an oath placed in the hands of God; for that was how he regarded her desire for a divorce. Regrettably, he had not impressed this upon her with the necessary resoluteness when they were standing face-to-face—God, what nearness again in these words!—no, he had not said it strongly enough; he merely remembered talking to her in general terms about loose morals and ways of protecting oneself against them. The name of God, by the way, had certainly not passed his lips when they spoke, except maybe as an empty figure of speech; and the casualness, the candid—one was tempted to say disrespectful—seriousness with which Agathe had asked him if he believed in God offended him even now as he remembered it. For a truly devout person does not permit himself to simply follow a whim and think about God in a crude, direct way. Indeed, the moment Lindner recalled this impertinence, he detested Agathe as if he had stepped on a snake. He resolved that if he should ever be in the position of repeating his admonitions to her, he would definitely employ only the powerful language of reason, which is suitable to earthly concerns and exists in the world so that not every ill-bred person may trouble God with his long-established confusions; and so he began to employ reason straightaway, and many a phrase occurred to him that might be offered to a woman who has stumbled. For example, that marriage is not a private affair but a public institution; that it has the sublime mission of developing feelings of responsibility and empathy, and the task, so conducive to strengthening a nation’s mettle, of training the individual to countenance even the greatest difficulties; perhaps indeed, though this could only be advanced with the greatest discretion, that precisely by lasting a fairly long time, marriage also constitutes the best protection against the limitlessness of desire. He had an image of humanity, perhaps not wrongly, as a sack full of devils that had to be firmly tied shut, and he saw unshakable principles as the tie. How this sympathetic man, whose corporeal part could not be said to have exceeded its bounds in any direction but height, had arrived at the conviction that one must constrain oneself at every step was indeed a riddle, which could only be easily solved if one knew its benefit. When he had already reached the foot of the hill, a train of soldiers crossed his path, and he looked with tender commiseration at the sweat-soaked young men, who had pushed their caps back on their heads and, with faces dulled by exhaustion, looked like a procession of dusty caterpillars. At their sight, his revulsion at the frivolity with which Agathe had treated the question of divorce was dreamily softened by joy that such a thing was happening to his freethinking colleague Hagauer, and this stirring, though not commendable, at least served to remind him how indispensable it was to mistrust human nature. He therefore resolved to make uncompromisingly clear to Agathe—should the occasion actually, and without any fault of his own, present itself again—that in the end the forces of self-interest have only a destructive effect, and that she must subordinate her personal despair, however great it might be, to the moral insight that the true touchstone of life is found in living together.

  But whether this occasion was to present itself once again was apparently just the point toward which Lindner’s mental powers were so excitedly pressing. “There are many people with noble qualities that are just not yet concentrated in an adamant 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 clashed with all his notions of chaste and tender womanhood. “One would have to confront her with it unequivocally, and right away!” he decided, and now that he had actually formed this resolution, he also no longer doubted that she would really come. He exhorted himself to selflessly endure with her the reasons she would submit to excuse her behavior before he went on to convince her of her errors. With unwavering patience, he would aim at the innermost core of her heart, and after he had envisioned that too, a noble feeling of fraternal vigilance and solicitude descended into his own heart, a consecration as between brother and sister, which he noted, should rest altogether upon the relations the sexes maintain with each other. “Hardly any men,” he cried out, uplifted, “have the slightest notion how deep a need noble feminine natures have for the noble man who consorts with the human being in the woman without being immediately unbalanced by coquetry and sexual allure!” These thoughts must have given him wings, for he did not know how he had got to the streetcar terminal, but suddenly there it was; and before stepping in, he took off his glasses in order to cleanse them of the mist with which the heat of his inner processes had coated them. Then he swung himself into a corner, glanced around the empty car, got his fare ready, looked into the conductor’s face, and felt quite on his mettle, ready to begin his return voyage on that admirable communal institution called the municipal streetcar. With a pleasurable yawn he discharged the fatigue of his walk, the better to ready himself for new duties, and summed up in one sentence the astonishing digressions to which he had abandoned himself: “Forgetting oneself is surely the healthiest thing a human being can do!”

  24

  THE DO-GOODER

  There is only one reliable remedy against the incalculable stirrings of a passionate heart: adherence to schedules, carried out to the last detail; and it was to this practice, which he had adopted in good time, that Lindner owed the successes in 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 in summer and winter, washed his face, hands, and one-seventh of his body—a different seventh each day, of course—at a small iron washstand, whereupon he rubbed the rest with a wet
towel, so that the full bath, that time-consuming and voluptuous procedure, could be limited to one evening every two weeks. This constituted a clever victory over matter, and whoever has had occasion to consider the inadequate washing facilities and uncomfortable beds personalities who have become historical made do with will hardly be able to dismiss the conjecture that there must be a connection between iron beds and iron men, although we must not put too fine a point on this, lest we all immediately proceed to sleep on beds of nails. So here reflection was tasked with an additional, educative function, and after Lindner had washed himself in the reflected glow of inspiring examples, he also (but only within measure) made adroit use of the towel to give the body some movement while drying himself at the same time. It is after all a fateful misunderstanding to base health on the animal part of the person; rather, it is spiritual and moral nobility that produce the body’s powers of resistance; and though that does not always apply to the individual case, it applies most certainly on a large scale, for the strength of a people is a consequence of the right spirit, and not the other way around. That is why Lindner had bestowed on his rubdowns a special, meticulous discipline that avoided the crude gripping and grabbing involved in the usual male idolatry but instead engaged the participation of the whole personality by associating the body’s movements with beautiful inner tasks. He particularly detested the worship of the dashing daredevil, a foreign import that many in his fatherland were already holding up as an ideal, and distancing himself from this was an integral part of his morning exercises. He substituted for it, with great circumspection, a more statesmanlike attitude in the gymnastic use of his limbs, combining exertion of willpower with properly timed indulgence, mastery over pain with humane common sense, and if, as a concluding exercise for the practice of bravery, he leapt over an upside-down chair, he would do so with as much reserve as self-confidence. Such development of the whole wealth of human capacity made his calisthenics, ever since he had taken them up a few years ago, true exercises in virtue.