by Robert Musil
“Your Grace knows about that?” Ulrich exclaimed.
“Of course; I know everything,” Leinsdorf said patiently. “But what I still don’t understand is this: That people should love each other, and that it takes a firm hand in government to make them do it, is nothing new. So why should it suddenly be a case of either/or?”
Ulrich answered: “Your Grace has always wanted a spontaneous rallying cry arising from the entire nation; this is the form it’s bound to take!”
“Oh, that’s not true!” Count Leinsdorf disagreed spiritedly, but before he could go on they were interrupted by Stumm von Bordwehr, coming from the Arnheim group with a burning question for Ulrich.
“Excuse me for interrupting, Your Grace,” he said. “But tell me,” he turned to Ulrich, “can one really claim that people are motivated entirely by their feelings and never by their reason?”
Ulrich stared at him blankly.
“There’s one of those Marxists over there,” Stumm explained, “who seems to be claiming that a person’s economic substructure entirely determines his ideological superstructure. And there’s a psychoanalyst denying it and insisting that the ideological superstructure is entirely the product of man’s instinctual substructure.”
“It’s not that simple,” Ulrich said, hoping to wriggle out of it.
“That’s just what I always say! It didn’t do me a bit of good, though,” the General answered promptly, keeping his eyes fixed on Ulrich. But now Leinsdorf entered the discussion.
“Now there, you see,” he said to Ulrich, “is something rather like the question I was about to raise myself. No matter whether the substructure is economic or sexual, well, what I wanted to say before is: Why are people so unreliable in their superstructure? You know the common saying that the world is crazy; it is getting all too easy to believe it’s true!”
“That’s the psychology of the masses, Your Grace,” the learned General interposed again. “So far as it applies to the masses it makes sense to me. The masses are moved only by their instincts, and of course that means by those instincts most individuals have in common; that’s logical. That’s to say, it’s illogical, of course. The masses are illogical; they only use logic for window dressing. What they really let themselves be guided by is simply and solely suggestion! Give me the newspapers, the radio, the film industry, and maybe a few other avenues of cultural communication, and within a few years—as my friend Ulrich once said—I promise I’ll turn people into cannibals! That’s precisely why mankind needs strong leadership, as Your Grace knows far better than I do. But that even highly cultivated individuals are not motivated by logic in some circumstances is something I find it hard to believe, though Arnheim says so.”
What on earth could Ulrich have offered his friend by way of support in this scattered debate? Like a bunch of weeds an angler catches on his hook instead of a fish, the General’s question was baited with a tangled bunch of theories. Does a man follow only his feelings, doing, feeling, even thinking only that to which he is moved by unconscious currents of desire, or even by the milder breeze of pleasure, as we now assume? Or does he not rather act on the basis of reasoned thought and will, as we also widely assume? Does he primarily follow certain instincts, such as the sexual instinct, as we assume? Or is it above all not the sexual instinct that dominates, but rather the psychological effect of economic conditions, as we also assume today? A creature as complicated as man can be seen from many different angles, and whatever one chooses as the axis in the theoretical picture one gets only partial truths, from whose interpretation the level of truth slowly rises higher—or does it? Whenever a partial truth has been regarded as the only valid one, there has been a high price to pay. On the other hand, this partial truth would hardly have been discovered if it had not been overestimated. In this fashion the history of truth and the history of feeling are variously linked, but that of feeling remains obscure. Indeed, to Ulrich’s way of thinking it was no history at all, but a wild jumble. Funny, for instance, that the religious ideas, meaning the passionate ideas, of the Middle Ages about the nature of man were based on a strong faith in man’s reason and his will, while today many scholars, whose only passion is smoking too much, consider the emotions as the basis for all human activity. Such were the thoughts going through Ulrich’s head, and he naturally did not feel like saying anything in response to the oratory of Stumm, who was in any case not waiting for an answer but only cooling off a bit before returning to Arnheim’s group.
“Count Leinsdorf,” Ulrich said mildly. “Do you remember my old suggestion to establish a General Secretariat for all those problems that need the soul as much as the mind for a solution?”
“Indeed I do,” Leinsdorf replied. “I remember telling His Eminence about it, and his hearty laugh. But he did say that you had come too late!”
“And yet it’s the very thing you were feeling the lack of, Your Grace,” Ulrich continued. “You notice that the world no longer remembers today what it wanted yesterday, that its mood keeps changing for no perceptible reason, that it’s in a constant uproar and never resolves anything, and if we imagined all this chaos of humanity brought together in a single head, we’d have a really unmistakable case of recognizable pathological symptoms that one would count as mental insufficiency… .”
“Absolutely right!” cried Stumm von Bordwehr, whose pride in everything he had learned that afternoon had welled up again. “That’s precisely the configuration of … well, I can’t think of the name of that mental disease at the moment, but that’s it exactly!”
“No,” Ulrich said with a smile. “It’s surely not the description of any specific disease; the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!”
“Brilliantly put!” Stumm and Leinsdorf cried as with one voice, though in slightly different words, and then added in the same way: “But what does that mean exactly?”
“It means this,” Ulrich stated. “If I understand by morality the ordering of all those interrelations that include feeling, imagination, and the like, each of these takes its relative position from the others and in that way attains some sort of stability; but all of them together, in moral terms, don’t get beyond the state of delusion!”
“Come, that’s going too far,” Count Leinsdorf said good-naturedly. And the General said: “But surely every man has to have his own morals; you can’t order anyone to prefer a cat to a dog …?”
“Can one prescribe it, Your Grace?” Ulrich asked intently.
“Well, in the old days,” Count Leinsdorf said diplomatically, although he had been challenged in his religious conviction that “the truth” existed in every sphere. “It was easier in the old days. But today…?”
“Then that leaves us in a permanent state of religious war,” Ulrich pointed out.
“You call that a religious war?”
“What else?”
“Hmm … not bad. Quite a good characterization of modern life. Incidentally, I always knew that there’s not such a bad Catholic secretly tucked away inside you.”
“I’m a very bad one,” Ulrich said. “I don’t believe that God has been here yet, but that He is still to come. But only if we pave the way for Him more than we have so far!”
His Grace rejected this with the dignified words: “That’s over my head.”
161
A GREAT EVENT IS IN THE MAKING. BUT NO ONE HAS NOTICED
The General, however, cried: “I’m afraid I must get back to His Excellency the Minister at once, but you absolutely will have to explain all that to me—I won’t let you off! I’ll join you gentlemen again soon, if I may.”
Leinsdorf gave the impression of wanting to say something—his mind was clearly hard at work—but he and Ulrich had hardly been left alone for a moment when they found themselves surrounded by people borne toward them by the constant circulation of the guests and the charisma of His Grace. There cou
ld, of course, be no more talk about what Ulrich had just said, and no one besides him was giving it a thought, when an arm slipped into his from behind; it was Agathe.
“Have you found grounds for my defense yet?” she asked in a maliciously caressing tone.
Ulrich took a grip on her arm and drew her aside from the crowd around them.
“Can’t we go home?” Agathe asked.
“No,” Ulrich said. “I can’t leave yet.”
“I suppose,” she teased him, “that times to come, for whose sake you’re keeping yourself pure here, won’t let you go?”
Ulrich pressed her arm.
“Isn’t it greatly in my favor that I don’t belong here but in jail?” she whispered in his ear.
They looked for a place where they could be alone. The party had reached the boiling point and was impelling the guests to constantly circulate. On the whole, however, the twofold grouping was still distinguishable: around the Minister of War the talk was of peace and love, and around Arnheim, at the moment, about how the German love of peace flourished best in the shadow of German power.
Arnheim lent a benevolent ear to this, because he never snubbed an honest opinion and was especially interested in new ones. He was worried that the deal for the oil fields might run into opposition in Parliament. He was certain of the unavoidable opposition of the Slavic contingent, and hoped he could count on the pro-German faction to support him. On the Ministry level all seemed to be going well, except for a certain antagonism in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but he did not regard this as particularly significant. Tomorrow he was going to Budapest.
There were plenty of hostile “observers” around him and other leading personages. They were easily spotted in that they always said yes to everything and were unfailingly polite, while the others tended to have different opinions.
Tuzzi was trying to win one of them over by asserting: “What they’re saying doesn’t mean a thing. It never means anything!” His listener, a member of Parliament, believed him. But this did not change his mind, made up before he had come, that something fishy was going on here.
His Grace, on the other hand, spoke up on behalf of the evening’s seriousness by saying to another skeptic: “My dear sir, ever since 1848 even the revolutions have been brought about by nothing more than a lot of talk!”
It would be wrong to regard such differences as no more than acceptable variants on the otherwise usual monotony of life; and yet this error, with all its grave consequences, occurs almost as frequently as the expression “It’s a matter of feeling,” without which our mental economy would be unthinkable. This indispensable phrase divides what must be in life from what can be.
“It sets apart,” Ulrich said to Agathe, “the given order of things from a private, personal preserve. It separates what has been rationalized from what is held to be irrational. As commonly used, it is an admission that we are forced to be humane on major counts, but being humane on minor counts is suspiciously arbitrary. We think life would be a prison if we were not free to choose between wine or water, religion or atheism, but nobody believes in the least that we have any real option in matters of feeling; on the contrary, we draw a line, ambiguous though it may be, between legitimate and illegitimate feelings.”
The feelings between Ulrich and Agathe were of the illegitimate kind, although they did no more than talk about the party as, still arm in arm, they looked in vain for a private corner, while experiencing a wild and unacknowledged joy in being reunited after their estrangement. By contrast, the choice between loving all one’s fellow human beings, or first annihilating some of them, obviously involved doubly legitimate feelings, or it would not have been so eagerly debated in Diotima’s house and in the presence of His Grace, even though it also split the company into two spiteful parties. Ulrich maintained that invention of “a matter of feeling” had rendered the worst possible service to the cause of feeling, and as he undertook to describe to his sister the curious impression this evening’s affair had awakened in him, he soon found himself saying things that unintentionally took up where their talk of the morning had broken off and were apparently intended to justify it.
“I hardly know where to start,” he said, “without boring you. May I tell you what I understand by ‘morality’?”
“Please do,” Agathe said.
“Morality is regulation of conduct within a society, beginning with regulation of its inner impulses, that is, feelings and thoughts.”
“That’s a lot of progress in a few hours!” Agathe replied with a laugh. “This morning you were still saying you didn’t know what morality was!”
“Of course I don’t. That doesn’t stop me from giving you a dozen explanations. The oldest reason for it is that God revealed the order of life to us in all its details… .”
“That would be the best,” Agathe said.
“But the most probable,” Ulrich said emphatically, “is that morality, like every other form of order, arises through force and violence! A group of people that has seized power simply imposes on the rest those rules and principles that will secure their power. Morality thereby tends to favor those who brought it to power. At the same time, it sets an example in so doing. And at the same time reactions set in that cause it to change—this is of course too complicated to be described briefly, and while it by no means happens without thought, but then again not by means of thought, either, but rather empirically, what you get in the end is an infinite network that seems to span everything as independently as God’s firmament. Now, everything relates to this self-contained circle, but this circle relates to nothing. In other words: Everything is moral, but morality itself is not!”
“How charming of morality,” Agathe said. “But do you know that I encountered a good person today?”
The change of subject took Ulrich by surprise, but when Agathe began telling him of 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 too,” he said, “but I’ll tell you why the bad people are here as well, if you’ll let me go on.”
As they talked they gradually edged their way out of the throng and reached the anteroom, and Ulrich had to think where they might turn for refuge: Diotima’s bedroom occurred to him, and also Rachel’s little room, but he did not want to set foot in either of them again, so he and Agathe remained for the time being among the unpeopled coats that were hanging there. Ulrich could not find a way to pick up the thread. “I really ought to start again from the beginning,” he said, with an impatient, helpless gesture. Then suddenly he said:
“You don’t want to know whether you’ve done something good or bad; you’re uneasy because you do both without a solid reason!”
Agathe nodded.
He had taken both her hands in his.
The matte sheen of his sister’s skin, with its fragrance of plants unknown to him, rising before his eyes from the low neckline of her gown, lost for a moment all earthly connection. The motion of the blood pulsed from one hand into the other. A deep moat from some other world seemed to enclose them both in a nowhere world of their own.
He suddenly could not find the ideas to characterize it; he could not even get hold of those that had often served him before: “Let’s not act on the impulse of the moment but act out of the condition that lasts 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 and its constantly changing conditions, but out of the one, immutable happiness.” Such phrases did come to mind, and he might well have used them if it had only been as conversation. But in the direct immediacy with which they were to be applied to this very moment between him and his sister, it was suddenly impossible. It left him helplessly agitated. But Agathe understood him clearly. And she should have been happy that for the first time the shell encasing her “hard brother” had cracked, exposing what was inside, like an egg that has fallen to the floor. To her surprise, however
, her feelings this time were not quite ready to fall into step with his. Between morning and evening lay her curious encounter with Lindner, and although this man had merely aroused her wonder and curiosity, even this tiny grain sufficed to keep the unending mirroring of reclusive love from coming into play.
Ulrich felt it in her hands even before she said anything—and Agathe made no answer.
He guessed that this unexpected self-denial had something to do with the experience he had just had to listen to her describing. Abashed and confused by the rejection of his unanswered feelings, he said, shaking his head:
“It’s annoying how much you seem to expect from the goodness of such a man!”
“I suppose it is,” Agathe admitted.
He looked at her. He realized that this encounter meant more to his sister than the attentions paid to her by other men since she had been under his protection. He even knew this man slightly. Lindner was a public figure of sorts; he was the man who, at the very first session of the Parallel Campaign, had made the brief speech, received with embarrassing silence, hailing the “historical moment” or something similar: awkward, sincere, and pointless… . On impulse Ulrich glanced around, but he did not recall seeing the man tonight, for he had not been asked again, as Ulrich knew. He must have come across him elsewhere from time to time, probably at some learned society, and have read one or another of his publications, for as he concentrated his memory, ultramicroscopic traces of images from the past condensed like a repulsive viscous drop into his verdict: “That dreary ass! The more anyone wants to be taken seriously, the less one can take such a man seriously, any more than Professor Hagauer!” So he said to Agathe.
Agathe met it with silence. She even pressed his hand.
He felt: There is something quite contradictory here, but there’s no stopping it.
At this point people came into the anteroom, and the siblings drew slightly apart.
“Shall I take you back in?” Ulrich asked.
Agathe said no and looked around for an escape.