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was on the spot everywhere; and, what is so important, men of
practical enterprise joined forces with the men of intellectual enter–
prise. Talents developed that had previously been choked or had
taken no part at all in public life. They were as different from each
other as anything well could be, and the contradictions in their aims
were unsurpassable. The Superman was adored, and the Subman was
adored; health and the sun were worshiped, and the delicacy of con–
sumptive girls was worshiped; people were enthusiastic hero-worship–
ers and enthusiastic adherents of the social creed of the Man in
the Street; one had faith and was skeptical, one was naturalistic and
precious, robust and morbid; one dreamed of ancient castles and
shady avenues, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, jewels, hashish, dis–
ease and demonism, but also of prairies, vast horizons, forges and
rolling-mills, naked wrestlers, the uprisings of the slaves of toil, man
and woman in the primeval Garden, and the destruction of society.
Admittedly these were contradictions and very different battle-cries,
but they all breathed the same breath of life.
If
that epoch had been
analyzed, some such nonsense would have come out as a square
circle supposed to be made of wooden iron; but in reality all this
had blended into shimmering significance. This illusion, which found
its embodiment in the magical date of the turn of the century, was
so powerful that it made some hurl themselves enthusiastically upon
the new, as yet untrodden century, while others were having a last
fling in the old one, as in a house that one is moving out of anyway,
without either one or the other party feeling that there was much
difference between the two attitudes.
So one need not overrate that past "activity" if one does not
wish. It only went on, in any case, in that thin, fluctuating layer of
humanity, the intelligentsia, which is unanimously despised these days
by the people with the wear-and-tear-proof views-who have come
to the top again, thank heaven-in spite of all differences among
those views. It had no effect on the masses. But all the same, even
if it did not become an historical event, it was at least an eventlet.
And the two friends, Walter and Ulrich, when
the~
were young, had
just been in time to catch a glimmer of it. Something at that time
passed through the thicket of beliefs, as when many trees bend before
one wind-a sectarian and reformist spirit, the blissful better self
arising and setting forth, a little renascence and reformation such as
