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fickleness-it was accompanied by great spiritual tribulations, and
he was haunted by a fear of having to move on again, for the sake
of the purity of his spiritual being, before he had taken root just
where the illusion was already becoming apparent. His path through
life was a series of stirring experiences, which gave rise to the heroic
struggle of a soul that would have nothing to do with divided loyal–
ties, never suspecting that
in
this way it was only contributing to its
own division against itself.
For while he was suffering and struggling for the sake of moral–
ity in his intellectual actions, as befits a genius, and was paying the
full price for this talent, which did not quite suffice for greatness,
his destiny had quietly led
him
round in an inner circle back to
nothingness. He had at last reached the place where there was noth–
ing more to obstruct him; the quiet, withdrawn work in his semi–
scholarly job, where he was sheltered from
all
the uncleanliness of
the trafficking that goes on in art, gave him
all
the independence
and time he needed in order to give himself up to listening whole–
heartedly to his inner call; possession of the woman he loved removed
the thorns from his heart; the house "on the brink of solitude," where
they had moved after their marriage, was as though made for cre–
ativeness. But when there was nothing left to be overcome, the un–
expected happened, and the works that the greatness of his convic–
tions had so long promised did not materialize. Walter seemed no
longer able to work. He hid things and destroyed things. He shut
himself up for hours every morning or when he came home in the
afternoon; he went for long walks with his sketch-book shut; but the
little that came out of all this he kept to himself or destroyed. He
had hundreds of different reasons for this. But his views as a whole
were also changing very markedly at this period. He no longer talked
about "contemporary art" and "the art of the future," ideas that
had been associated with him in Clarisse's mind since she was fifteen;
but he would draw a line somewhere-in music stopping at, say,
Bach, in literature at Stifter, in painting at Ingres-and explain that
everything that came later was florid, degenerate, oversophisticated
and on the downward path. And he became increasingly violent in
his assertion that in a time so poisoned at its spiritual roots as the
present an artist of real integrity must abstain from creation alto–
gether. But the treacherous thing was that although such austere
