by Robert Musil
“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.
It suddenly occurred to Ulrich that the only way they could get away from the other guests was by retreating to the kitchen. Three batteries of glasses were being filled and trays loaded with cakes. The cook was bustling about with great zeal; Rachel and Soliman were waiting to be loaded up, standing apart and motionless and not whispering to each other as they used to do on such occasions. Little Rachel dropped a curtsy as they came in, Soliman merely saluted with his dark eyes, and Ulrich said: “It’s too stuffy in there; can we get something to drink here?”
He sat down with Agathe on the window seat and put a glass and a plate down for show so that in case anyone should see them it would look as if two old friends of the family were having a private chat. 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 concentrating on unwrapping a piece of candy.
“Which is to say,” Ulrich went on, “that the feeling is neither true nor false. Feeling has remained a private matter! It remains at the mercy of suggestion, fantasy, or persuasion. You and I are no different from those people in there. Do you know what these people want?”
“No. But does it matter?”
“Perhaps it does. They are forming two parties, each of which is as right or as wrong as the other.”
Agathe said she could not help thinking that it was better to believe in human goodness than only in guns and politics, even if the manner of the belief was absurd.
‘What’s he like, this man you met?”
“Oh, that’s impossible to say. He’s good!” his sister answered with a laugh.
“You can no more depend on what looks good to you than on what looks good to Leinsdorf,” Ulrich responded testily.
Both their faces were tense with excitement and laughter; the easy flow of humorous civility blocked deeper countercurrents. Rachel sensed it at the roots of her hair, under her little cap, but she was feeling so miserable herself that her perception was much dimmer than it used to be, like a memory of better days. The lovely curve of her cheeks was a shade hollow, the black blaze of her eyes dulled with discouragement. Had Ulrich been in a mood to compare her beauty with that of his sister, he would have been bound to notice that Rachel’s former dark brilliance had crumbled like a piece of coal that had been run over by a heavy truck. But he had no eyes for her now. She was pregnant, and no one knew it ex
cept Soliman, who showed no understanding of the disastrous reality and responded with nothing but childish romantic schemes.
“For centuries now,” Ulrich went on, “the world has known truth in thinking and accordingly, to a certain degree, rational freedom of thought. But during this same time the emotional life has had neither the strict discipline of truth nor any freedom of movement. For every moral system has, in its time, regulated the feelings, and rigidly too, but only insofar as certain basic principles and feelings were needed for whatever action it favored; the rest was left to individual whim, to the private play of emotions, to the random efforts of art, and to academic debate. So morality has adapted our feelings to the needs of moral systems and meanwhile neglected to develop them, even though it depends on feelings: morality is, after all, the order and integrity of the emotional life.” Here he broke off. He felt Rachel’s fascinated stare on his animated face, even if she could no longer quite muster her former enthusiasm for the concerns of important people.
“I suppose it’s funny how I go on talking about morality even here in the kitchen,” he said in embarrassment.
Agathe was gazing at him intently and thoughtfully. He leaned over closer to his sister and added softly, with a flickering smile: “But it’s only another way of expressing an impassioned state that takes up arms against the whole world!”
Without intending to, he was reenacting their confrontation of the morning, in which he had played the unpleasant role of the lecturing schoolmaster. He could not help it. For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once the imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.
The words twitched in his mouth. He was on the verge of bringing up the neglected difference between the way in which various historical periods have developed the rational mind in their own fashion and the way they have kept the moral imagination static and closed off, also in their own fashion. He was on the verge of talking about this because it results in a line that rises, despite all skepticism, more or less steadily through all of history’s transformations, representing the rational mind and its patterns, and contrasting with a mound of broken shards of feelings, ideas, and potentials of life that were heaped up in layers just the way they were when they came into being, as eternal side issues, and that were always discarded. And also because a further result is that this finally adds up to any number of possibilities for forming an opinion one way or another, as soon as they are extended into the realm of principles; but that there is never a possibility of bringing them together. And because it follows that the various opinions lash out at each other since they have no way of communicating. And because it follows, finally, that the emotional life of mankind slops back and forth like water in an unsteady tub. 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 somehow simply confirmed it, and he wanted to show Agathe where her error lay and how it could be put right, if everyone agreed. Actually, it was only his painful intention to prove that one could not, on the whole, even trust the discoveries of one’s own imagination.
Agathe now said, with a little sigh, as a hard-pressed woman gets in one last, quick defensive move before surrendering:
“So one has to do everything ‘on principle’ is that it?”
And she looked at him, responding to his smile.
But he answered: “Yes, but only on one principle!”
This was something quite different from what he had meant 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 even if it were not a mere flight of fancy, it pointed to the frontiers of thought, which are solitary and treacherous. Agathe’s eyes were like split agate. If at this instant he had said only a little more, or touched her with his hand, something would have happened—something that was gone a moment later, before she even knew what it was. For Ulrich did not want to say any more. He took a knife and a piece of fruit and began to peel. He was happy because the distance that had separated him from his sister shortly before had melted into an immeasurable closeness; but he was also glad that at this moment they were interrupted.
It was the General, who came peering into the kitchen with the sly glance of a patrol leader surprising the enemy encampment. “Please forgive the intrusion,” he called out as he entered, “but as it’s only a tête-à-tête with your brother, dear lady, it can’t be too great a crime!” And turning to Ulrich, he said: “They’re looking for you high and low.”
And Ulrich told the General what he had meant to say to Agathe. But first he asked: “Who are they?”
“I was supposed to bring you to the Minister!” Stumm said reproachfully.
Ulrich waved that aside.
“Well, it’s too late anyway,” the good-natured General said. “The old boy just left. But on my own account, as soon as Madame has chosen some better company than yours, I shall have to interrogate you about what you meant with that ‘religious war’—if you’ll be so kind as to remember your own words.”
“We were just talking about that,” Ulrich said.
“How very interesting!” the General exclaimed. “Your sister is also interested in moral systems?”
“It’s all my brother talks about,” Agathe corrected him, smiling.
“That was virtually the whole agenda this evening!” Stumm sighed. “Leinsdorf, for instance, said only a few minutes ago that morality is just as important as eating. I can’t see it myself.” So saying, he bent with relish over the candies Agathe handed him. It was supposed to be a joke. Agathe said, to comfort him: “Neither can I.”
“An officer and a woman must have morals, but they don’t like to talk about it,” the General went on improvising. “Don’t you agree, dear lady?”
Rachel had brought him a kitchen chair, which she was zealously dusting off with her apron when these words of his stabbed her to the heart; she nearly broke into tears.
Stumm was prompting Ulrich again: “Now then, what’s this about the religious war?” But before Ulrich could say anything, he forestalled him, saying: “Actually, I have the feeling that your cousin is also prowling around looking for you, and I have my military training to thank for finding you first. So I must make the most of my time. Things are not going well in there! It’s supposed to be our fault. And your cousin—how shall I put it? She’s simply let go of the reins. Do you know what they’ve decided?”
“Who decided?”
“A lot of people have already left. Some have stayed and are paying very close attention,” the General described the situation. “There’s no telling who is deciding.”
“In that case it might be better if you told me first what they’ve decided,” Ulrich said.
Stumm von Bordwehr shrugged his shoulders. “All right. But luckily it’s not a resolution in the sense of committee business,” he elucidated. “Since all the responsible people had left in time, thank heaven. So it’s only what you might call a special-interest proposal, a suggestion, or a minority vote. I shall take the line that we have no official knowledge of it. But you’d better tell your secretary to watch the minutes so none of this gets into the record. Do forgive me,” he said to Agathe, “for talking business like this!�
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“But what happened?” she urged him on.
Stumm made a wide, sweeping gesture. “Feuermaul…if you remember the young man we really only invited because—how shall I put it?—because he is an exponent of the spirit of the times, and because we had to invite the opposing exponents anyway. We had hoped that nevertheless, and with the added stimulus of intellectual debate, we’d be able to get down to talking about the things that, unfortunately, really matter. Your brother knows about it, dear lady; the idea was to get the Minister together with Leinsdorf and Arnheim, to see whether Leinsdorf has any objections to… certain patriotic views. And all in all I’m not really dissatisfied.” He turned confidentially to Ulrich. “So far so good. But while this was going on, Feuermaul and the others…” Here Stumm felt obliged to add for Agathe’s benefit: “…that is, the exponent of the view that man is basically a good and peace-loving creature who responds best to kindness, and those who expound approximately the opposite view, that it takes a strong hand and all that to keep order in the world. This Feuermaul got into an argument with these others, and before anyone could stop them they had agreed on a joint proposal!”
“A joint proposal?” Ulrich was incredulous.
“That’s right. Perhaps I seem to be making light of it”—Stumm sounded rather pleased with himself at the unintended comic effect of his story—”but nobody could have predicted anything of the sort. And if I tell you what their resolution was, you won’t believe it! Since I was supposed to visit Moosbrugger this afternoon in a semi-official capacity, the whole Ministry will refuse to believe that I wasn’t the one who put them up to it!”
Here Ulrich burst out laughing, and he interrupted him the same way from time to time as Stumm went on with his story; only Agathe understood why, while his friend commented somewhat huffily each time that he seemed to be wrought up. But what had happened corresponded far too much to the pattern Ulrich had just laid out for his sister for him not to find it hilarious.