FRIENDS OF HIS YOUTH
141
the bargain. He had edited a literary periodical, then, in order to
be
able to marry, had taken a job with a theatrical publisher, had
given up the idea after a few weeks, and then, after some time, still
in order to be able to marry, had become the conductor of a theater
orchestra, after six months had realized how utterly impossible this
was, and had become an
art
master, a music critic, a hermit, and
much else besides, until his father and his future father-in-law, in
spite of
all
their broadmindedness, would not put up with it any
longer. Such elderly people were in the habit of saying that he
simply had no will-power; but it might just as well have been said
that he had all his life long only been a many-sided dilettante, and
the remarkable thing was in fact that there had always been experts
in the sphere of music, painting or writing who had expre&>ed en–
thusiastic opinions about his future. In Ulrich's life, by way of
counter-example, although he had achieved one or two things of
undeniable value,
it
had never happened that someone had come up
to
him
and said: "You are the very man I have always been looking
for, the man my friends are in need of!" In Walter's life that had
happened every three months. And even though these people had
not been exactly those whose judgment was most authoritative, still
they had all been people who had some influence, who could make
a useful suggestion, who knew of enterprises already under way and
of jobs to be had, who had friends and knew the ropes, all of which
they put at the disposal of the Walter whom they had discovered and
whose life for this reason ran such a splendidly zigzag course. Some–
thing hovered over him that seemed to mean more than any definite
achievement. Perhaps this was a quite special talent for passing as
a man of great talent. And if that must be considered dilettantism,
then the intellectual life of the German nation is to a large extent
based on dilettantism; for this talent exists in all degrees up to the
level of those who are really very talented-and only there does it
generally seem to be missing.
And Walter even had the talent to see through all this. Although
he was, of course, as ready as anyone else to believe that his successes
were the result of personal merit, his faculty of being so effortlessly
borne upward by every lucky accident had always worried him as
indicating an alarming lack of weight; and every time he changed
his
activities and human relations, it was not simply the result of
