148
PARTISAN REVIEW
quered Clarisse and in time driven all rivals from the field. Because
with him everything turned into ethical emotion, he could speak con–
vincingly of the immorality of ornament, of the hygiene of simple
shapes, and of the beery fumes of Wagnerian music, as was in keep–
ing with the new artistic taste; and even his future father-in-law, who
had a painter's brain like an outspread peacock's tail, had been in–
timidated by it. So it was beyond all doubt that Walter could look
back on successes.
Nevertheless, these days, as soon as he got home, his mind full
of impressions and plans, which were perhaps as ripe and new as
never before, a discouraging change would take place in him. He
only needed to put a canvas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the
table, and it was the signal for a terrible flight from
his
heart. His
head remained clear and the plan in it floated as it were in a very
transparent, clear atmosphere, indeed the plan split, dividing into
two or more plans that might have fought for supremacy; but it
was as though there had been a cutting of the communications lead–
ing from the mind to the first movements necessary for the execution
of any of them. Walter could not bring himself to the point of lifting
so much as a finger. He simply did not get up from wherever he
happened to be sitting, and the task that he had set himself slipped
between
his
thoughts like snow melting as it falls. He did not know
where the time went, but before he was aware of it, it was evening;
and since after several such experiences he brought the fear of them
home with him, whole rows of weeks began to slide and pass away
as in a confused half-sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness
in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter melancholy,
and his incapacity became a pain that often had its seat behind his
forehead, like a bleeding from the nose, from the moment when he
wanted to make up his mind to do something. Walter was easily
frightened, and the manifestations that he observed in himself not
only hampered him
in
his work but also caused him very great
anxiety, for they were apparently so independent of his will that
they often impressed him as being the beginnings of intellectual de–
terioration.
But while his condition had become steadily worse in the course
of the last year, he had also found wonderful help in a thought that
he had never before valued highly enough. This thought was none
other than that Europe, in which he was forced to live, was irre-
