FRIENDS OF HIS YOUTH
145
Walter and he had been young in that now vanished time,
shortly after the turn of the century, when a great many people
were imagining that the century too was young.
The century that had then just gone to its grave had not exactly
distinguished itself in its second half. It had been clever
in
technical
and commercial matters and
in
research, but outside these focal points
of its energy it had been quiet and treacherous as a swamp. It had
painted like the Old Masters, written like Goethe and Schiller, and
built its houses in the Gothic or Renaissance style. Insistence on the
Ideal dominated
all
manifestations of life, like the headquarters of
a police force. But by virtue of that secret law that will not permit
man any kind of imitation without his getting an exaggeration along
with it, everything was at that time done with a correctness of crafts–
manship such as the admired prototypes could never have achieved
and the traces of which can still be seen
in
the streets and museums
even today. And-it mayor may not be relevant-the women of
that time, who were as chaste as they were shy, had to wear clothes
covering them from their ears down to the ground, but at the same
time had to display a swelling bosom and a voluptuous posterior.
For the rest, there are all sorts of reasons why there is no past era
one knows so little about as the three to five decades that lie between
one's own twentieth year and one's father's twentieth year. It may
therefore be useful to be reminded that
in
bad epochs the most
frightful buildings and poems are made according to principles ex–
actly as beautiful as in the best epochs; that all the people who take
part
in
destroying the achievements of a previous good period do
so with the feeling that they are improving on them; and that the
bloodless young people of such a time think exactly as much of their
young blood as the new people of all other times do.
And each time it is like a miracle when, after such an epoch
of shallow sloping plains, suddenly there comes a slight rise in the
spiritual ground, as happened then. Out of the oil-smooth spirit of
the two last decades of the nineteenth century, suddenly, throughout
Europe,
there rose
.a
kindling fever. Nobody knew exactly what was
on the way; nobody was able to say whether it was to be a new art,
a New
Man,
a new morality or perhaps a reshuffling of society.
So
everyone made of it what he liked. But people were standing up on
all
sides to fight against the old way of life. Suddenly the right man
