ARTISTS AND OLD AGE
301
him, when the younger generation begins to write theses on him for
their doctorates, at home and abroad, analyzing him, classifying him,
cataloguing him-theses in which a comma that he put in thirty years
ago, or a diphthong that he produced one Sunday afternoon after the
first world war, is treated as a fundamental stylistic problem. The
studies in themselves are interesting, the linguistic and stylistic analysis
is
superb, but for the writer under discussion it
is
like watching him–
self being vivisected. Others have seen what he is like, and so now
he himself sees what he is like. For the first time in his life he recog–
nizes himself; up to now he was utterly a stranger to himself, and
he has had to grow old in order to see himself.
And supposing that this writer has at some time in his life uttered
opinions that are later considered impossible, then good care is taken
that these opinions should drag along behind him like the harrow
after a farm-horse, and everyone is delighted to see them continually
hitting him on the heels. Well, that's part of the game-the writer
says to himself- nothing can be done about that.
If
one were to
write nothing but what turned out to be opportune fifteen years later,
presumably one would never write anything at all. One little example
of what I mean, and then I shall leave this writer of ours for some
time. In a conversation, a very serious conversation between three old
men, this writer once wrote the sentence: "To be mistaken and yet
be compelled to go on believing what one's own innermost being tells
one-that is man and his glory begins yonder, beyond victory and
defeat." From our author's point of view this declaration was a sort
of anthropological elegy, a cyphered melancholy; but his critics
thought differently. It shocked them to the core. Here they said was
a blank check for every conceivable political crime. At first the author
did not know what these critics meant, but then he said to himself:
Oh well, in the nineteenth century the natural sciences made an on–
slaught on poetry, Nietzsche was fought by the theologians, today it
is politics that gets mixed up with everything-all right, let's leave it
at that-dim realm of form-combining possibilities. But all this to–
gether, the theoretical and the practical, caused our author to look
into the question of how other old men had fared and what old age
and the process of aging mean for the artist.
First of all, my inquiry is not concerned with the physiology of
