and good taste, and by a good character I mean quite simply an incorruptible character. All these artists as old masters were corruptible and that makes their art so repulsive to me. Everything they have painted and which is hanging here is repulsive to me, I often think, he said yesterday, and yet for decades I have been unable to avoid studying it. That is the most terrible thing, he said yesterday, that I find these old masters most profoundly repulsive and again and again I continue to study them. But they are repellent, that is perfectly clear, he said yesterday. The old masters, as they have now been called for centuries, only stand up to superficial viewing;
if we view them thoroughly they gradually become diminished, and when we have studied them really and truly, and that means as thoroughly as possible for as long as possible, they dissolve, they crumble for us, leaving only a flat taste, in fact most of the time a very bad taste, in our mouths. The greatest and most significant work of art ultimately weighs heavily on our heads, as a huge lump of baseness and lies, rather as an excessively large lump of meat might weigh on our stomachs. We are fascinated by a work of art and ultimately it is ridiculous. If you take the trouble, for once, to read Goethe more intently than usual, you will ultimately find that what you read is ridiculous, no matter what it is, you only have to read it more often than usual, it will inevitably become ridiculous and even the cleverest thing is ultimately a nonsense. Alas, once you read more intently you ruin everything for yourself, everything you read. It makes no difference what you read, in the end it will become ridiculous and in the end it will be worthless. Beware of penetrating into a work of art, he said, you will ruin each and every one for yourself, even those you love most. Do not look at a picture for too long, do not read a book too intently, do not listen to a piece of music with the greatest intensity. You will ruin everything for yourself, and thus the most beautiful and the most useful things in the world. Read what you love but do not penetrate totally, listen to what you love but do not listen to it totally, look at what you love but do not look at it totally. Because I have always looked at everything totally, always listened to everything totally, always read everything totally, or at least always tried to listen to everything totally and to read and view everything totally, I ended up by ultimately making everything abhorrent to me, in this way I made all art and all music and all literature abhorrent to me, he said yesterday. As I have, by the same method, made the whole world abhorrent to me, simply everything. For years I simply made everything abhorrent to me and, what I regret most deeply, made it abhorrent to my wife too. For years, he said, I have only managed to exist by and as a result of this method of making things abhorrent. Now I know that I must not read totally or listen totally or view and contemplate totally if I want to go on living. There is an art in not reading totally and not listening totally and not viewing totally or looking totally, he said. I have not quite mastered that art yet, he said, because my natural inclination is to approach everything totally and to persevere totally and bring it to a conclusion totally, that is, you should know, my real misfortune, he said. For decades I have wanted to do everything totally, that was my misfortune, he said. This highly personal disintegrating mechanism always focused on the total, he said. But then the old masters did not paint for people like me, nor did the great old composers or the great old writers produce their works for people like me, naturally not for people like me, never would any of them have painted or written or composed music for a person like me, he said. The arts are not made for total viewing or for total listening or for total reading, he said. This art is made for the pitiful portion of humanity, for the everyday, for the normal, for, I am bound to say it, the gullible portion, none other. A great piece of architecture, he said, how quickly it is diminished under the scrutiny of an eye such as mine, no matter how famous it may be, and especially if it is famous it sooner or later shrinks to a ridiculous piece of architecture. I have travelled, he said, in order to see great architecture, naturally first to Italy and to Greece and to Spain, but the cathedrals always soon shrank under my eyes to nothing but helpless, and indeed ridiculous, attempts to juxtapose to heaven something like a
second heaven, from one cathedral to the next always an even more magnificent
second heaven, from one temple to the next always something even more magnificent, he said, yet the result has always been something bungled. Naturally I visited the greatest museums, and not only in Europe, and studied what they contained, with the greatest intensity, believe me, and it soon seemed to me as if these museums contained nothing but painted helplessness, painted incompetence, painted failure, the bungled part of the world, everything in these museums is failure and bungling, he said yesterday, no matter what museum you enter and get down to viewing and studying, you study nothing but failure and bungling. Very well, the Prado, he said, surely the most important museum in the world as far as the old masters are concerned, but each time I sit at the Ritz across the street, drinking my tea, I reflect that even the Prado contains only imperfect, unsuccessful, ultimately only ridiculous and dilettantish things. Some artists, he said, at certain times, when they are in vogue, are quite simply inflated to world-rousing monstrosity; then abruptly some incorruptible mind pricks that world-rousing monstrosity and the worldrousing monstrosity bursts and is nothing, just as abruptly, he said. Velazquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe, he said, just as Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities.
That Stifter, he said yesterday, an author I myself had always so enormously revered that it became more like artistic addiction, is just as bad a writer on closer examination as Bruckner, on intensive listening, is a bad if not a lousy composer. Stifter writes in a terrible style, one which grammatically is beneath contempt, and Bruckner has similarly slipped the reins with his chaotically wild, and even in old age, religiously pubertal intoxication of sounds. I have revered Stifter for decades without actually concerning myself with him accurately or radically. When, about a year ago, I did concern myself accurately and radically with Stifter, I could not believe my eyes and ears. Such faulty and bungled German or Austrian, whichever you prefer, I had never before read in my whole intellectual life in an author who is, of all things, famous today for his precise and clear prose. Stifter's prose is anything but precise and it is the least clear I have come across, it is packed with distorted metaphors and faulty and confused ideas, and I really wonder why this provincial dilettante, who at any rate was an inspector of schools in Upper Austria, is today revered to such an extent by writers, and above all by the younger writers, and not by any means by the least known or least noticed ones. I believe that none of these people has ever really read Stifter but they have always only venerated him blindly, that they have always only heard of him but never really read him, like myself. As I was truly reading Stifter a year ago, that
grandmaster of prose writing, as he is called, I felt disgusted with myself for ever having revered this bungler of a writer, or indeed loved him. I had read Stifter in my youth and my memory of him had been based on these reading experiences. I had read Stifter between the ages of twelve and sixteen, at a time when I was totally uncritical. After that I never reexamined Stifter. For very long stretches of his prose Stifter is an unbearable chatterbox, he has an incompetent and, which is most despicable, a slovenly style and he is moreover, in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature. Stifter's prose, which is reputed to be pregnant and precise, is in fact woolly, helpless and irresponsible, and pervaded by a
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