Benda could have sketched Daniel's face in the darkness: the round
forehead, the little nose, pointed and mulish, the rigidly pinched lips,
the angular musician's chin, and the deep dimples in his cheeks.
His ignorance of the musician was complete. Like all scholars, he
nurtured an ingrained distrust when it came to the supernatural
influence of art. For the great musical compositions which, in the
course of time and as a result of the homage of succeeding generations,
had come to be regarded as exemplary and incontestable, he had a feeling
of reverence. For the creations of his contemporaries he had no ear.
That it was hard to understand and appreciate, he knew. That it was
bitter not to be understood or appreciated, he had experienced. That the
discipline associated with all intellectual work demands its tribute in
the form of sacrificial renunciation needed no proof in his case.
The musician was something new to him. How did he regard him? As a blind
man whose soul was on fire. As a drunken man who made the impression of
repulsive sobriety on other men. As an obsessed individual who was
living an excruciatingly lonely life and was unaware of it. As an
unpolished peasant with the nerves of a degenerate.
The scientist wished to find the established and formulated law in the
musician--a task that could lead only to despair. The friend surveyed
the life of his friend; he allowed the personalities of many young men
whom he had met in life to pass before his mind's eye. He looked for the
criteria of common interests; he sought a law, even here. He sat in the
dusk, and read from the works of the philosopher Mainlaender. Then he
laid the book to one side, and said to himself: "The youth of to-day are
lacerating, devastating themselves.... It is a fearful age. Measure,
proportion, and balance are gone. Every model becomes a caricature. The
individual is absolutely dependent upon himself. The flame is without
container, and threatens to burn the hand that would check it."
In Daniel he had found his brother in fate. Music became his brother in
torture. On seeing his friend lacerated and devastated, he saw twitch
from the eye of Gorgo herself the profoundest of wisdom. But he did not
lay bare his own heart.
One night, after unending conversation had brought them both to
silence--like ships which, tossed about by the winds, at last drift into
the harbour--Benda, taking up with an angry, exasperated remark by
Daniel as it echoed back from the other shore of this silence, said: "We
must not be vain. We dare not usurp a privilege which has no other basis
than our inner task. We must never stand before our own picture. It
seems to me that an artist should be of exalted modesty, and that
without this modesty he is nothing but a more or less remarkable lout."
Daniel looked up at once. Benda's big teeth were visible under his bushy
moustache. He had a habit of pulling his lips apart whenever he was
searching for a really incisive word.
Benda continued: "The great majority of what you call talent is
ignominious. Talent is a feather duster. All that comes from the finger
tips is evil. The man who has a distinct goal and is willing to suffer
in order to reach it, that man we can use. And otherwise--how beautiful
it all is after all! Heaven is above us, the earth is beneath us, and in
between stands immortal man."
Daniel got up, and seized Benda's hand. There was nothing more
vanquishing than Benda's handshake. His good strong right became a vise
in which he shook a man's hand until it became limp, a perfectly
delightful benevolence radiating from his eyes in the meanwhile.