by Robert Musil
At times he longed for embraces and kisses like a boy ready to fling himself passionately at the feet of the coldhearted beloved refusing him, or else he caught himself wanting to burst out sobbing, or hurl a challenge to the world and, finally, carry off the beloved in his arms. Now, we all know that the irresponsible margin of the conscious personality that breeds stories and poems is also the home base of all sorts of childish memories that surface on those rare occasions when the intoxication of fatigue, the release of alcohol, or some other disturbance brings them to light. Arnheim’s bursts of feeling were no more substantial than these phantoms, so that he need not have been upset by them (thereby considerably increasing his original agitation), if these infantile regressions had not forced him to realize that his inner life was swarming with faded moral stereotypes. The stamp of general validity he was always at pains to give to his actions, as a man conscious of living with the eyes of all Europe upon him, suddenly showed itself as having nothing to do with his inner life. This may be quite natural for anything supposed to be valid for everyone, but what troubled him was the implication that if what is generally valid is not the inward truth, then contrariwise the inward man is not generally valid. And so Arnheim now felt haunted at every step not only by the urge to sound some deafening wrong note, or perform some foolishly illegitimate act, but also by the annoying thought that on some irrational level this would be the right thing to do. Ever since he had come to know again the fire that makes the tongue go dry in the mouth, he was overcome with the sense of having lost a path he had always followed, the feeling that the whole ideology of the great man he lived by was only an emergency substitute for something that was missing.
This naturally brought his childhood to mind. In his early portraits he had big, dark, round eyes, like the paintings of the boy Jesus disputing with the doctors in the Temple, and he saw all his governesses and tutors standing around him in a circle, marveling at his precocity, because he had been a clever boy who had always had clever teachers. He had also proved himself to be a warmhearted, sensitive child who would tolerate no unfairness; since his life was far too sheltered to let any unfairness come his way, he made the wrongs of others his own where he came across them, and got himself into fights on their account. This was quite an achievement, considering what obstacles were put in his way to prevent this very thing, so that it never took more than a minute for someone to come rushing up to pry him loose from his opponent. Because such fights lasted just long enough to give him a taste of some painful experience but were always interrupted in time to leave him with the impression of his own unflinching courage, Arnheim still remembered them with self-satisfaction; and this lordly quality of courage that would shrink from nothing passed later into his books and his principles, as becomes a man who needs to tell his contemporaries how to conduct themselves for self-respect and happiness.
This childhood state was still vividly present to his mind, while another condition, of a somewhat later period, that had succeeded and partly transformed it now appeared to be dormant or on the verge of petrifaction—if this is understood as turning not to stone, in the ordinary sense, but to diamonds. It was love, now startled into a new life by his contact with Diotima, and it was characteristic of Arnheim that his first youthful experience of love had nothing to do with women, or indeed any specific persons; this was a rather perplexing business he had never quite resolved for himself, even though in the course of time he had come to learn the most up-to-date explanations for it.
“What he meant was perhaps only the baffling manifestation of something still absent, like those rare expressions that appear on faces with which they have no connection, belonging rather to other, different faces suddenly intuited beyond the horizon of the visible; simple melodies in the midst of mere noise, feelings inside people, feelings he sensed inside himself, in fact, that were not yet real feelings when he tried to capture them in words, but only something inside him reaching outward, its tips already breaking the surface, getting wet, as things sometimes do reach out on fever-bright spring days when their shadows creep beyond them and come to rest so quietly, all flowing in one direction, like reflections in a stream.”
This was how it was expressed, much later on and in other accents, by a poet Arnheim esteemed because to know of this reclusive man who avoided all notoriety made one an insider; not that Arnheim understood him, for he associated such allusions with the talk about the awakening of a new soul that had been in fashion during his youth, or with the then popular pictures of reedy girls, painted with a pair of lips that looked like fleshy flower buds.
At that time, around the year 1887—“good heavens, almost a generation ago!” Arnheim thought—he appeared in photographs as the “new man” of the period, in a high-buttoned black satin waistcoat with a wide, heavy silk cravat deriving from the Biedermeier style but meant to suggest the Baudelairean, with the help of an orchid (the latest thing) in his buttonhole, exerting a malevolent fascination on all who saw Arnheim junior on his way to dine and impress his youthful person on some robust businessmen friends of his father’s. Portraits of young Arnheim at work ran to a slide rule peeping decoratively from the breast pocket of a tweedy English sport jacket, worn quite comically with a towering stiff collar, which nevertheless heightened the effect of the head. That was how Arnheim had looked, and he still could not keep from looking at his image with a certain approval. He had played good tennis when it was still played on lawns, with all the zeal of a passion as yet reserved for the few; surprised his father by openly attending workers’ meetings, after a student year in Zurich where he had become unsuitably acquainted with socialist ideas, which did not prevent him from galloping his horse recklessly through a working-class quarter of town on another day. In short, it had all been a whirl of contradictory but challenging new experiences which gave him the enchanting illusion of having been born at just the right time, an illusion so important to a young man, even though he realizes later on that its value does not lie in its rarity, exactly. As time went on and Arnheim came to think more and more conservatively, he did wonder whether this ever-renewed feeling of being the last word wasn’t part of nature’s wastefulness; but he never gave it up, because he never did like to give up anything that had ever belonged to him, and his collector’s nature had carefully preserved within him all there was at the time. But today it seemed to him, however rounded and various his life appeared to be, that he had been most particularly moved and most lastingly influenced by what had seemed at first the most unreal element of all: precisely that romantically expectant state of mind whispering to him that he belonged not only to the world of bustling activity but to yet another world, suspended inside it, as if holding its breath.
This dreamy expectancy, restored to him in its full original freshness by Diotima’s influence, becalmed all activity and busyness now; the tumult of youthful conflict and hopeful, ever-changing vistas gave way to a daydream in which all words, events, and needs were basically the same deep down, away from their surface differences. At such moments even ambition was hushed; the world was a distant noise beyond the garden wall, as though his soul had overflowed its banks and was truly present to him for the first time. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this was not a philosophy but as physical an experience as seeing the moon, though overwhelmed by daylight, hovering mutely in the morning sky. In such a state of mind even the young Paul Arnheim had calmly dined at select restaurants, dressed with care to attend all the social functions, done everything that had to be done but always, as it were, with no greater or lesser distance from one part of himself to the other than to or from the next person or object; somehow the outer world did not leave off at his skin, and his inner world did not merely shine out through the window of reflection, but both blended into a single undivided state of separateness and presence, as mild, calm, and lofty as a dreamless sleep. Morally it felt like a truly great indifference, a sense of all values being equal; nothing was minor or major: a poem and
a kiss on a woman’s hand were the equal in significance of a scholarly work in several volumes or some great act of statesmanship, and just as everything evil was meaningless, so, basically, everything good had become superfluous in this immersion in the tender primal kinship of all created things. Arnheim behaved quite normally, except that he was doing it in an intangible atmosphere of special significance, behind the tremulous flame of which the inner man stood motionless, watching the outer man eating an apple or being measured for a new suit.
Was it illusion, then, or the shadow of a reality never to be quite understood? The only possible answer is that all religions, at certain stages of their development, have asserted the reality of this shadow, and so have all lovers, all romantics, all those with a hankering for the moon, for springtime, and the blissful dying of the days in early fall. Eventually it fades away, however, it evaporates and dries up, one cannot say which—until one day something else has taken its place and it is instantly forgotten as only unreal experiences, dreams, and illusions are forgotten. Since this primal and cosmic love experience is normally encountered the first time one falls in love, one usually thinks even later in life that one knows just what to make of it, regarding it as part of the foolishness one may indulge in before one is old enough to vote. So this was how it was with him, but since for Arnheim it had never been associated with a woman, it could never quite leave his heart in the usual way, along with her; instead, it was overlaid by impressions received, after completing his schooling, when he entered his father’s business. Since he did nothing by halves, he soon discovered here that the productive and wellbalanced life is a poem greater by far than any hatched out by a poet in his garret, and a different sort of thing altogether.
Now for the first time he showed his talent for being an exemplary character. The poem of life has this advantage over all other poems, that it is set in all capital letters, as it were, no matter what its content may be. Even the youngest trainee in a firm of world rank has the whole world circling around him, with continents peering over his shoulder, so that nothing he does is without significance, while the lone writer in his seclusion has at most flies circling around him no matter how hard he tries to get something done. This is so obvious that many people, from the moment they begin to work in the medium of life itself, regard everything that used to move them before as “mere literature,” meaning that the effect it has is at best weak and muddled, generally contradictory so that it cancels itself out, and anyway not in proportion to the fuss made over it. Arnheim was not quite like that, of course; he neither denied the noble influence of art nor was capable of regarding anything that had once strongly moved him as foolishness or a delusion. When he recognized the superiority of his adult responsibilities over the dreamy outlook of his youth he took steps, guided by his new mature insights, to effect a fusion of both kinds of experience. He did, in fact, what so many, certainly the majority of the professional classes, do after beginning their careers: far from wishing to turn their backs entirely on their former interests, they find themselves for the first time in a serene, mature relationship to the enthusiastic impulses of their younger years. Discovering the great poem of life, knowing their own part in it, restores to them the courage of the dilettante they had lost when they burned their own poems. Working on the poem of their own life, they can at last regard themselves as born experts and set about permeating their daily round with a sense of intellectual responsibility, feeling themselves faced with a thousand small decisions in making it moral and attractive, modeling themselves on their notion of how Goethe led his life and giving everyone to understand that without music, without the beauties of nature and the sight of animals and children at play, and without a good book, life would not be worth having. This soulful middle class is still, among Germans, the leading consumer of the arts and of all literature that is not too heavy; but its members understandably look down upon art and literature, which they once regarded as the ultimate fulfillment, as upon an earlier stage of development, even though it may have been more perfect in its way than what fate allotted to them; or else they regard it much as a manufacturer of sheet metal, say, might regard a sculptor of plaster statues if he were weak enough to see any beauty in that sort of product.
Now Arnheim resembled this cultural middle class as a glorious hothouse double carnation resembles a weedy little pink growing wild at the roadside. He never thought in terms of a cultural revolution or radical innovation, but thought only of the interweaving of the new into the traditional, a taking over, with gentle modifications and a moral reanimation, of the faded privileges of the powers that were. He was no snob, no worshiper of those who outranked him in society. Received at court and on terms with the high nobility and the leading government officialdom, he adjusted himself to this environment not at all as an imitator but only as an amateur of the conservative feudal manner, one who never forgets or seeks to make others forget his patrician, quasi-Goethean-Frankfurt, origins. But with this concession his capacity for resistance was exhausted, and any greater distancing of himself from greatness would have seemed to him untrue to life. He was deeply convinced that the creators of wealth—led by the businessmen who directed life and would be shaping a new era—were destined to take over at some point from the ruling powers, and this gave him a certain quiet arrogance, which had been proved valid enough by the subsequent course of events. But taking money’s claim to power as a given, the question was still how the desired power was to be rightly used. The bank directors’ and industrial magnates’ predecessors had no problem; they were feudal knights who made literal mincemeat of their enemies, leaving the clergy to handle the morals. But while contemporary man has in money, as Arnheim saw it, the surest control of society, a means as tough and precise as the guillotine, it can also be as vulnerable as an arthritic—how painfully the money market limps and aches all over at the slightest draft!—and is most delicately involved with everything it controls. Because he understood this subtle interdependence of all the forms of life, which only the blind arrogance of the ideologue can overlook, Arnheim came to see the regal man of business as the synthesis of change and permanence, power and civility, sensible risktaking and strong-minded reliance on information, but essentially as the symbolic figure of democracy-in-the-making. By the persistent and disciplined honing of his own personality, by his intellectual grasp of the economic and social complexes at hand, and by giving thought to the leadership and structure of the state as a whole, he hoped to help bring the new era to birth, that age where the social forces made unequal by fate and nature would be properly and fruitfully organized and where the ideal would not be shattered by the inevitable limitations of reality, but be purified and strengthened instead. Objectively put, he had brought about the fusion of interests between business and the soul by working out the overall concept of the Business King, and that feeling of love that had once taught him the unity of all things now formed the nucleus of his conviction that culture and all human interests formed a harmonious whole.
It was at about this time, too, that Arnheim began to publish his writings, and in them surfaced the term “soul.” He presumably resorted to it as a device, a flying start, a royal motto, since princes and generals certainly have no souls, and as for financiers, he was the very first to have one. It undoubtedly also played a part in his need to set up defenses that could not be breached by the business mentality of those forming his intimate circle, and more specifically by the imperious nature and greater business sense of his father, beside whom he was beginning to assume the role of the aging crown prince. And it is equally certain that his ambition to master all worthwhile knowledge—a taste for polyhistory so consuming that no single man could have lived up to the goals he set himself—found in the soul a means to rise above all that his intellect could not encompass. In this he was a man of his time, which had recently developed a strong religious bent, not because it had a call to religion but only, it seems, out of an irritable feminine revolt against
money, science, and calculation, to all of which it succumbed with a passion. What was questionable and uncertain, however, was whether Arnheim, in speaking of the soul, believed in it; whether it was real to him, like his stock portfolio. He used the word to express something for which he had no other term. Driven by his need to use it in conversation—Arnheim was a talker who did not easily let anyone else get a word in—and finding that he made an impression, he came to use it more and more in his writings, referring to it as though its existence were as assured as that of one’s own back, even though one never gets to see it. And so he wrote with real fervor of something vague and portentous that is interwoven with the all-too-factual world of business affairs as a profound silence is interwoven with vivid speech. He did not deny the usefulness of knowledge; quite the contrary, he was himself an impressively busy compiler of data, as only a man who has all the resources at his command can be, but once he had proved himself in that arena he would say that above and beyond this level of keenness and precision there was a higher realm of wisdom that was accessible only to the visionary. He spoke of the will by which nation-states and international business giants are founded, so as to let it be understood that with all his greatness he was nothing but an arm that could be moved only by a heart beating somewhere beyond the range of human vision. He held forth on technological advances or moral values in the most down-to-earth fashion, in terms familiar to the man in the street, only to add that such exploitation of nature and man’s spiritual energies amounted to nothing more than a fatal ignorance if the sense was lacking that they were merely the surface ripples of an ocean the immense depths of which were hardly touched by them. He delivered such sentiments in the manner of the regent of an exiled queen who had received her personal instructions and orders the world accordingly.