ARTISTS AND OLD AGE
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heard Pablo Sarasate playing his fiddle and Caruso singing at the
Metropolitan Opera House, with the Astors sitting in the diamond
horseshoe. I have watched Bergmann operating, and I stood on parade
before the last Emperor. I began studying by the light of an oil-lamp,
with Haeckel's
Riddles of the Universe
for my forbidden reading. I
have ridden and I have flown, but I have also seen the great sailing–
ships upon the seas that no man had ever yet flown across-but
that's all past and gone- all over now. And today I say it was all
much more heavily charged than one thought at the time; everything
was much more predestined than it seemed. And the oddest thing
of all is that one was much more
in the air
then than one dreamed,
believing as one did in one's autonomy. To take just one example:
there were painters who spent their whole life painting in tones of
silver or of yellow, and another one who always stuck to brown, and
there was a generation that wrote poetry mainly in nouns.
It
wasn't
a literary caprice, it was in the air-in the air of entirely heterogene–
ous dimensions. A short time ago I read the following story about
Clemenceau. He had just engaged a new private secretary and on
the first day he was showing him what the job consisted of. "Some
letters," Clemenceau said, "you will have to draft by yourself. Now
listen: a sentence consists of a noun and a verb.
If
you want to use
an adjective, come and ask me first." Come and ask me first! It's
exactly the same advice that Carl Sternheim gave me when we were
both young. "When you've written something," he said to me, "go
through it again and cross out the adjectives. Your meaning will be
much clearer then." It turned out to be true. Indeed, the leaving out
of explanatory, padding-out adjectives became a sort of compulsion–
neurosis with my generation.
My generation! But of course the next one is here by now, the
young people, the youth of our time! God preserve their imitative
urge for them, and then it wouldn't be long before the whole thing
stops of its own accord. But supposing they were to produce a new
style-evoe!
A new style is a new type of man. Now, though genetics
haven't produced very much that is clear, one thing seems to be cer–
tain: a new generation means a new sort of brain, and a new sort
of brain means a new sort of reality and new neuroses, and the whole
thing is called evolution, and that's the way civilization goes on
spreading.
If
I were to give this younger generation of ours some ad-
