by Robert Musil
“Permit me to disagree,” the General said firmly, “but that is the spirit of the times! Nowadays the spirit of the times has two separate currents. His Grace—he’s standing over there with the Minister; I’ve just come from talking with them—His Grace, for instance, says that the call has to go out for action, that’s what the times demand. And in fact people are much less enchanted with the great idea of humanity than they were, say, a hundred years ago. On the other hand, there is of course something to be said for the point of view of loving mankind, but about that His Grace says that those who do not want what is good for them must in certain circumstances be forced to accept it! So His Grace is in favor of the one current, but without turning his back on the other.”
“I don’t quite follow that,” Professor Schwung demurred.
“It’s not easy to follow,” Stumm readily admitted. “Suppose we go back to the point that I see two currents at work in the mind of our period. The one states that man is good by nature, when he is left to himself, as it were—”
“How do you mean good?” Schwung interrupted. “Who can possibly think in such naïve terms nowadays? We’re not living in the world of eighteenth-century idealism!”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” The General sounded rather nettled! “Just think of the pacifists, the vegetarians, the enemies of violence, the back-to-nature people, the anti-intellectuals, the conscientious objectors—I can’t call them all to mind offhand—and all the people who put their faith in mankind, as it were; they all form one big current. But if you prefer,” he added in that obliging way he had that made him so likable, “we can just as easily start out from the opposite point of view. Suppose we start with the fact that people must be regimented because they never do the right thing of their own accord; we might find it easier to agree on that. The masses need a strong hand, they need leaders who can be tough with them and don’t just talk; in a word, they need to be guided by the spirit of action. Human society consists, as it were, of only a small number of volunteers, who also have the necessary training, and of millions without any higher ambitions, who serve only because they must. Isn’t that so, roughly speaking? And because experience has gradually forced us to recognize this fact even here in our campaign, the first current—for what I’ve just been talking about is the second current—the first current, I say, is alarmed at the possibility that the great idea of love and faith in mankind might get lost altogether. Hence there were forces at work, you see, that have sent Feuermaul into our midst to save what can still be saved at the eleventh hour. Which makes it all much easier to understand than we first thought, no?”
“And what’s going to happen then?” Tuzzi wanted to know.
“Nothing, I imagine,” Stumm replied. “We’ve had lots of currents in the campaign by now.”
“But there’s an intolerable contradiction between your two currents,” protested Professor Schwung, who as a jurist could not bear such ambiguity.
“Not if you look at it closely,” Stumm countered. “The one current is of course also in favor of loving mankind, provided you change it first by force. They differ on a technicality, you might say.”
Now Director Fischel spoke up: “As a latecomer to the discussion, I’m afraid I don’t have a complete picture. But if I may say so, it seems to me that respect for humanity is basically on a higher level than its opposite. This evening I’ve heard some incredible sentiments—not representative of this gathering, I’m sure, but still—incredible sentiments about people of different convictions and above all of differing nationalities.” With his chin clean-shaven between muttonchop whiskers and his tilted pince-nez, he looked like an English lord upholding the freedom of humanity and free trade; he did not mention that the disreputable sentiments in question were those of Hans Sepp, his prospective son-in-law, who was in his element in “the second current” of our times.
“Savage sentiments?” the General asked helpfully.
“Extraordinarily savage,” Fischel confirmed.
“Could they have been talking about ‘toughening up’? It’s easy to misconstrue that kind of talk,” Stumm said.
“No, no,” Fischel exclaimed. “Utterly nihilistic, positively revolutionary views! Perhaps you’re out of touch with our rebellious younger generation, Herr Major General. I’m surprised that such people are admitted here at all.”
“Revolutionary views?” Stumm asked, not at all pleased, and smiling in as chilly a manner as his plump face would allow. “I’m afraid I must admit, Herr Direktor, that I’m by no means an out-and-out opponent of revolutionary views. Short of an actual revolution, of course. There’s often a good deal of idealism in that sort of thing. And as for admitting them here, our campaign, which is intended to draw the whole country together, has no right to turn away constructive forces, in whatever mode they may express themselves!”
Leo Fischel was silent. Professor Schwung was not much interested in the views of a dignitary who was outside the ranks of the civilian bureaucracy. Tuzzi had been dreaming: “first current. . . second current.” It reminded him of two similar expressions, “first reservoir . . . second reservoir,” but he could not remember them precisely, or the conversation with Ulrich in which they had come up; yet it stirred in him an incomprehensible jealousy of his wife, which was connected to this harmless General by intangible links he could not begin to disentangle. Awakened to reality by the silence, he wanted to show the representative of the military that he was not to be sidetracked by digressions.
“All in all, General,” he began, “the military party wants—”
“But, my dear Section Chief, there is no military party!” Stumm immediately broke in. “People are always talking about a military party, but by its very nature the military is above party!”
“Let’s say the military hierarchy, then,” Tuzzi replied, chafing at the interruption. “You were saying that what the army needs is not just guns but the spirit to go with them; by what spirit will you be pleased to have your guns loaded?”
“That’s going too far, Section Chief!” Stumm protested. “It all started with my being asked to explain tonight’s gathering to these gentlemen, and I said one really couldn’t explain anything; that’s all I’m taking my stand on! If the spirit of the times really has two such currents as I have described, neither of them favors ‘explanation’; today we favor instinctual energies, dark forces in the blood, and the like. I certainly don’t go along with that, but there’s something in it!”
At these words Fischel began to fume again, finding it immoral for the military to even consider making terms with the anti-Semites in order to get their guns.
“Come now, Herr Director,” Stumm tried to pacify him. “In the first place, a little anti-Semitism more or less hardly matters when people are already so anti to begin with: the Germans anti the Czechs and the Magyars, the Czechs anti the Magyars and the Germans, and so on, everybody against everybody else. Second, if anyone has always been international, it has been the Austrian Army Officers Corps: you need only look at the many Italian, French, Scottish, and Lord knows what other names; we even have an Infantry General von Kohn, he’s a corps commandant in Olmötz!”
“All the same, I’m afraid you’ve bitten off more than you can chew,” Tuzzi broke in on this diversion. “You’re both internationalist and war-minded, but you want to deal with the nationalist movements and the pacifists as well: that’s almost more than a professional diplomat could manage. Conducting military politics with pacifism is the task confronting the greatest diplomatic experts in Europe at this moment!”
“But we’re not at all the ones who are playing politics!” Stumm protested again, in a tone of weary complaint over so much misunderstanding. “His Grace simply wanted to give capital and culture one last chance to join forces—that’s the whole reason for this evening. Of course, if the civilian sector can’t come to some kind of accord, we would find ourselves in a position—”
“In what position? That woul
d be interesting to hear, indeed!” Tuzzi cried, a bit too eager to fan the flame.
“Well, in a difficult position, of course,” Stumm said with caution and modesty.
While the four gentlemen were engaged in this discussion, Ulrich had long since unobtrusively slipped away to find Gerda, giving a wide berth to the group around His Grace and the Minister to avoid a summons from that quarter.
He caught sight of her from some way off, sitting by the wall beside her mother, who was gazing stiffly into the salon. Hans Sepp was standing at her other side, with an uneasy, defiant look. Since her last miserable encounter with Ulrich, Gerda had grown even thinner, looking more barren of feminine charms the closer he came, and yet, by the same measure, more banefully attractive, her head on those slack shoulders standing out against the room. When she caught sight of Ulrich her face flushed scarlet, only to turn paler than ever, and she made an involuntary movement with her upper body like someone with a sharp pain in the heart who is somehow unable to press a hand to the spot. He had a fleeting vision of the scene when, wildly intent on his animal advantage in having aroused her physically, he had abused her confusion. There that body was sitting, visible to him beneath her dress, receiving orders from her humiliated will to hold itself proudly high, but trembling the while. Gerda was not angry at him, he could see, but she wanted to be done with him at all costs. He unobtrusively slowed down, trying to savor this to the full, and this sensuous tarrying seemed in keeping with the relationship between these two people, who could never quite come together. When Ulrich was very close to her, aware of nothing now but the quivering in the uplifted face awaiting him, he felt in passing something weightless, like a shadow or a gust of warmth; and he perceived Bonadea, who had passed by him in silence but hardly without intent, and in all probability had been following him. He bowed to her. The world is beautiful if one takes it as it is: For a second the naïve contrast between the voluptuous and the meager, as expressed in these two women, loomed as large to him as that between pasture and rock at the timberline, and he felt himself stepping down from the Parallel Campaign, even though with a guilty smile. When Gerda saw this smile slowly sinking down toward her outstretched hand, her eyelids quivered.
At this moment Diotima noticed that Arnheim was taking young Feuermaul to meet His Grace and the War Minister, and, skilled tactician that she was, she thwarted all encounters by ordering the servants in with trays of refreshments.
160
A COMPARISON
Such conversations as those just reported went on by the dozen, and they all had something in common, which is not easy to describe but that cannot be passed over if one lacks Privy Councillor Meseritscher’s flair for giving a dazzling account of a party just by making lists: who was there, wearing what, and saying this and that—all those things that are, in fact, considered by many to be the truest narrative art. So Friedel Feuermaul was not really being a miserable toady, which he never was, but merely finding the right word for the time and place when he said of Meseritscher, while standing in front of him: “He’s really the Homer of our era! No, I mean it,” he added, when Meseritscher tried to brush it off. “That epic, imperturbable ‘and’ with which you link all persons and events strikes me as having real greatness!” He had got hold of Meseritscher because the editor of the Parliamentary and Social Gazette had been reluctant to leave without paying his respects to Arnheim; but this still did not get Feuermaul’s name into print “among those present.”
Without going into the finer distinctions between idiots and cretins, suffice it to say that an idiot of a certain degree is not up to forming the concept “parents,” even though he has no trouble with the idea of “father and mother.” This same simple additive, “and,” was Meseritscher’s device for relating social phenomena to one another. Another point about idiots is that in the basic concreteness of their thinking they have something that is generally agreed to appeal to the emotions in a mysterious way; and poets appeal directly to the emotions in very much the same way, insofar as their minds run to palpable realities. And so, when Friedel Feuermaul addressed Meseritscher as a poet, he could just as well—that is, out of the same obscure, hovering feeling, which, in his case, was also tantamount to a sudden illumination—have called him an idiot, in a way that would have had considerable significance for all mankind. For the element common to both is a mental condition that cannot be spanned by far-reaching concepts, or refined by distinctions and abstractions, a mental state of the crudest pattern, expressed most clearly in the way it limits itself to the simplest of coordinating conjunctions, the helplessly additive “and,” which for those of meager mental capacity replaces more intricate relationships; and it may be said that our world, regardless of all its intellectual riches, is in a mental condition akin to idiocy; indeed, there is no avoiding this conclusion if one tries to grasp as a totality what is going on in the world.
Not that those who are the first to propound or who come to share such a view have a monopoly on intelligence! It simply doesn’t depend in the least on the individual, or on the pursuits he is engaged in—and which were indeed being engaged in, with more or with less shrewdness, by all those who had come to Diotima’s on this evening. For when General Stumm von Bordwehr, for instance, during the pause caused by the arrival of refreshments, got into a conversation with His Grace in the course of which he argued in a genially obstinate and respectfully daring tone: “With all due respect, Your Grace, permit me to disagree most strongly; there is more than mere presumption in people who are proud of their race; there is also something appealingly aristocratic!” he knew precisely what he meant by these words, but not so precisely what he conveyed by them, for such civilities are wrapped in an extra something that is like a pair of thick gloves in which one must struggle to pick up a single match out of a full box. And Leo Fischel, who had not budged from Stumm’s side after he noticed that the General was moving impatiently toward His Grace, added:
“People must be judged not by their race but on their merit!”
What His Grace replied was logical; disregarding Director Fischel, who had only just been introduced to him, he answered Stumm:
“What does the middle class need race for? They’ve always been up in arms about a court chamberlain needing sixteen noble ancestors, and now what are they doing themselves? Trying to ape it, and exaggerating it to boot! More than sixteen ancestors is sheer snobbery!” For His Grace was upset, and therefore it was quite logical for him to express himself in this fashion. Man is indisputably endowed with reason; the problem is only how he uses his reason in the company of others.
His Grace was vexed by the intrusion of “national” elements into the Parallel Campaign, although he himself had brought it about. Various political and social considerations had driven him to it; he himself recognized only “the national populace.” His political friends had advised him: “There’s no harm in listening to what they have to say about race and purity and blood—who takes what anyone says seriously anyway?”
“But they’re talking about human beings as if they were beasts!” Count Leinsdorf had objected; he had a Catholic view of human dignity, which prevented him from seeing that the principles of the chicken farm and of horse breeding could be equally well applied to God’s children, even though he was a great landowner. To this his friends had replied: “Come now, you’ve no need to brood about it. And anyhow it’s probably better than their talking about the good of mankind and all that revolutionary drivel from abroad, as they’ve been doing.” His Grace had finally seen the light on this point. But His Grace was also vexed because this fellow Feuermaul, whom he had forced Diotima to invite, was merely bringing fresh confusion into the Parallel Campaign and was a disappointment to him. Baroness Wayden had praised Feuermaul to the skies, and he had finally yielded to her insistence. “You’re quite right,” Leinsdorf had conceded. “The way things are going just now, we can easily be accused of Germanizing. And there may be no harm, as you say, in inviting a p
oet who says that we have to love all mankind. But don’t you see, I can’t really spring that on Frau Tuzzi!” But the Baroness would not give an inch and must have found new and effective arguments, for at the end of their conversation Leinsdorf had promised to make Diotima invite Feuermaul. “Not that I like doing it,” he had said, “but a strong hand does need the right word to get its message across; I must agree with you there. And it’s also true that things have been moving too slowly recently; we haven’t had the right spirit!”
But now he was dissatisfied. His Grace was far from thinking that other people were stupid, even if he did think himself more intelligent than they were, and he could not comprehend why all these intelligent people taken together made such a poor impression on him. Indeed, life as a whole made this impression on him, as though all the intelligence in individuals and in official institutions—among which he was known to count religion and science—somehow added up to a state of total unaccountability. New ideas that one had not heard of before kept popping up, aroused passions, and then vanished again after running their course; people were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that had always been Count Leinsdorf’s image of a lunatic, although he had hitherto had little occasion to think about it. Glumly he stood here now, in the midst of the men surrounding him, and reflected that the whole idea of the Parallel Campaign had been to bring out the truth behind all this, and he found himself unable to formulate some vague idea about faith that was there in his mind; all he could feel was something as pleasantly soothing as the shade of a high wall—a church wall, presumably.