The Sleepwalkers (64 page)

As the share certificates were to be issued immediately on payment, and the high rate of 4 per cent. was a grave deterrent, Huguenau was not greatly afraid of the local subscribers taking advantage of the deferred payment; but even if they did, some means or other would easily enough be found of tiding over the emergency. Nor was he worried by the question of how he himself was to get together the deferred payments
of his legendary industrial group—the first instalment did not fall due for another half-year, at the beginning of 1919, that was to say, and it was a long time until then, and lots of things might happen; the war conditions created a great deal of confusion, perhaps peace might have come by then, perhaps the paper itself might have brought in the sum required, in which case it would of course be necessary to conceal those gains by the creation of imaginary losses and thus wipe them off, perhaps Esch would be dead by that time—one would find some way of getting over the difficulty and coming out on top.

But now came the most difficult point in the negotiations. For Esch insisted on his 18,000 marks, while Huguenau maintained that first of all 10 per cent., that was 2000 marks, had to be deducted on account of the shares retained by Esch, but that in addition the rebate had to be doubled in consideration of the increased capital put into the business, thus making in all 4000 marks; so that Esch, even accepting his own valuation, would have only 14,000 coming to him; but even that was still far too much; he, Huguenau, as a middleman, had to be unbiassed, and he would never be able to get such a price as that out of his group, delighted as he would be to do so for Esch and his charming wife’s sake; no, that would be simply impossible, for he must have a serious proposal to lay before his clients, and he had no wish to be laughed out of court; in this matter he was not in the least a partisan, but quite objective, and as an impartial judge he could offer 10,000 marks for the remaining 90 per cent. of the business, but not a penny more.

No, Esch shouted, he wanted his eighteen thousand.

“How can anyone be so hard of hearing?” Huguenau turned to Frau Esch, “I’ve just proved to him that according to his own valuation all that he can ask is fourteen thousand.”

Frau Esch sighed.

Finally they agreed on 12,000 marks and on the following clause:

Perhaps Esch might not still have given in, even though Huguenau adroitly diverted the dispute to the subordinate concession of the interest payable to Esch, intending only after a hotly contested sham fight to allow the 4 per cent. to be wrung from him; no, Esch might not even then have given in, had not the prospect of such complicated book-keeping so dazzled and enchanted him that it never entered his head that the outstanding instalments—and he had not the slightest idea that their payment presupposed nothing less than a miracle—might never be settled, or that the difference between the 12,000 marks and the 20,000 marks might flow, in spite of all those book-keeping prospects which so allured him, into Huguenau’s fraudulently open pockets. To tell the truth, Huguenau thought just as little of such sordid matters, so unconscious was he that once the payments were made by the local subscribers the
Kur-Trier Herald
became
via facti
a pure gift to him; he fought with all sincerity for the interests of his hypothetical clients and said at last in an exhausted tone: “Ouf, well, as far as I’m concerned, let us make it 12,000 marks and 4 per cent. as you say, to settle the matter for good. I’ll take the responsibility on my own shoulders … but I must get something out of it too.…”

Esch had to agree to the limitation of his editorial powers out of consideration for the industrial group; his book-keeping powers represented a sort of compensation.

With this projected conversion of the business into a company compelled to audit its accounts, Huguenau’s house of cards of course would fall to pieces. But Huguenau did not worry his head about such trifles; for him the whole thing was a perfectly legitimate piece of business, and the only item that struck him as verging on sharp-practice was the one giving him a present of free quarters with his breakfast thrown in, but he was elated at bringing it off. Esch, on the other hand, was grieved because the contract had not run to ten clauses. They thought for a while and then they found the tenth:

So in an astonishingly short time—it was the 14th of May—Huguenau was able to report that the purchase had been smoothly settled. The local subscribers did not hesitate to pay up their full capital investment of 6600 marks; of this 4000 was allotted to Herr Esch in accordance with the terms of the contract; as a prudent and solid business man Herr Huguenau allocated 1600 marks for working expenses, while as for the remaining 1000, he embellished it with the title of floating capital and employed it for his own uses. The interim share certificates were issued to the shareholders, and in a few days it was duly announced that from the first of June the paper would appear under its new editorship and in a new make-up. Huguenau had managed to induce the Major to inaugurate the new era with a leading article, and the festal number was also embellished partly with patriotic, partly with political-economical, but in greater part with patriotic-economical pronouncements from the pens of the local subscribers.

But to celebrate the new epoch Huguenau installed himself in the two rooms prepared for him in Esch’s house.

The style of an epoch, it is certain, affects not merely the artist; it penetrates all contemporary activities, and crystallizes itself not only in works of art but in all the values which make up the culture of the age, and of which works of art constitute only an insignificant part; yet one is fairly at a loss when confronted by the concrete question: in how far is the style of an age incarnated in the average man, in a business man, for example, of the type of Wilhelm Huguenau? Has the man who deals in pipes of wine or textiles anything in common with the feeling for style that is evident in the shops built by Messel, or Peter Behrens’s turbine power-houses? His private taste will certainly run to pinnacled villas and rooms cluttered with knick-knacks, and even if it should not, he remains a member of the public, which, however it may comport itself, is separated by a great gulf from the artist.

Yet when one regards more closely a man such as Huguenau, one sees that the gulf between him and the artist does not affect the real point at issue. One may certainly assume that in epochs which had a supreme feeling for style the lack of understanding between the artist and his contemporaries was less strongly marked than it is to-day, that for instance a new picture by Dürer in the Sebaldus Church excited general joy and admiration among even the Huguenaus of the time; for there is plenty of evidence that at that period the artist and his public were bound together in a very different kind of community, and that the painter understood the clothier and the saddler at least as profoundly as they enjoyed looking at his pictures. Of course this cannot be verified, and it may be, too, that many revolutionary spirits received but little recognition from their contemporaries; perhaps that was the case with Grünewald. But such exceptions are not particularly relevant, and in any case whether an understanding between the artist and his contemporaries ruled in the Middle Ages or not becomes a matter of indifference in face of the fact that misunderstanding and understanding alike are just as truly expressions of the legendary “Time Spirit” as a work of art in itself or any other contemporary activity.

But if this be so, then it is also a matter of indifference what direction is taken by the architectural or other taste of a business agent of
Huguenau’s type, and the fact that Huguenau had a certain æsthetic pleasure in machinery is likewise without importance; the sole question of any moment is whether his ordinary actions, his ordinary thoughts, were influenced by the same laws that in another sphere produced a style devoid of ornament, or evolved the theory of relativity, or led up to the philosophical conclusions of neo-Kantianism,—in other words, whether even the thought of an epoch is not a vehicle for its style, governed by that same style which attains visible and palpable expression in works of art; which amounts to the assertion that truth, the ultimate product of thought, is equally a vehicle for the style of the epoch in which it has been discovered and in which it is valid, precisely like all the other values of that epoch.

And indeed it cannot be otherwise. For it is not merely that, seen from a certain standpoint, truth is just a value among other values; truth also governs all the actions of mankind, which are, one may say, steeped in truth: whatever a man does is plausible to him at every moment, he justifies it to himself with reasons which in his eyes represent the truth, he proves it to himself logically, and—at least in the very moment of action—his actions are always justifiable. If his actions, then, are dominated by the style of his age, so must his thoughts be; we need not decide (from the practical or epistemological standpoint) whether the act has preceded the thought or the thought the act, the motion of life the motion of reason, the
sum
the
cogito
, or the
cogito
the
sum
—all we can take into account is the rational logic of thought, for the irrational logic of action, in which style is embodied, can be perceived only in the finished product, in the result.

But with this extremely intimate connection between the substance of logical thought and the positive and negative values which action embodies, the scheme of thought which governs a man like Huguenau and compels him to act in one particular way, which determines his business methods for him and makes him draft contracts from a certain standpoint—that is to say, all the inner logic of a man like Huguenau—is given its own place in the whole logical framework of the epoch, and brought into essential relation with whatever logic permeates the productive spirit of the epoch and its visible style. And even although that rational thought, that rational logic, may be nothing but a thin and as it were one-dimensional thread which has to be wound round and round the multiplicity of dimensions presented by life, nevertheless that thought, projected in the abstraction
of logical space, is an abbreviated expression of life’s multiplicity and prevailing style, much in the same way as ornament is an abbreviated spatial expression of the visible style-product,—a projected abbreviation of all the works that embody style.

Huguenau is a man who acts with singleness of purpose. He organizes his day with singleness of purpose, he carries on his business affairs with his eye singly on his purpose, he evolves and concludes his contracts with his eye singly on his purpose. Behind all his purposefulness there lies a logic that is completely stripped of ornament, and the fact that this logic should demand the elimination of all ornament does not seem a too daring conclusion to draw; indeed it actually appears as good and just as every other necessary conclusion. And yet this elimination of all ornament involves nothingness, involves death, and a monstrous dissolution is concealed behind it in which our age is crumbling away.

The rebel must not be confused with the criminal, though society may often stigmatize the rebel as a criminal, and though the criminal may sometimes pose as a rebel to dignify his actions. The rebel stands alone: the most faithful son of that society which is the target of his hostility and rejection, he sees in the world he combats a totality of living relationships whose threads have merely been tangled in confusion by some diabolical wickedness, and it is his chosen task to disentangle them and order them according to his own better ideas. Thus did Luther make his protest against the Pope, and so Esch might with justice be called a rebel.

This is by no means, however, a sufficient cause to asperse Huguenau, on the other hand, as a criminal. That would be not only to slander him, but also to do him grievous injustice. From the military standpoint a deserter is of course a criminal, and undoubtedly there are convinced militarists who loathe the deserter with the same intensity as, let us say, a farmer loathes a chicken thief, and like the farmer they will recognize nothing less than the death penalty as a just punishment for such a transgressor. Nevertheless there is here a principal and objective distinction: the essence of a crime lies in the fact that it can be repeated; and the fact that it can be repeated characterizes it as nothing else than a social profession. Criminalism is directed only in a very loose sense against the
existing social order, even when its battle against law and order assumes American forms; to the thief and the coiner the slogans of communism cannot mean very much, and the burglar who goes about his work of nights on noiseless rubber soles is a handworker like any other handworker, he is conservative like all handworkers, and even the profession of the murderer, who with his knife between his teeth climbs up the unaccommodating wall, is not directed against the whole community, but is simply a private affair which he has to settle with his victim. There is no attempt to upset the existing regime. Proposals for the improvement or amelioration of the penal laws have never emanated from the criminal classes, closely as these things may concern them above all others. If it had been left to the criminals, we should still be hanging thieves and coiners on the gallows, and we should not even have got to the point of distinguishing murder from manslaughter, in spite of the fact that criminals usually show a fine feeling for the nuances of their professional exploits, and are delighted when the penal code adapts itself to their fine-drawn distinctions and exactions; but the very fact that they demand a corresponding distinction of penalties, the gallows for one crime, the wheel and the red-hot brand for another, the cat-o’-nine tails or the stocks for a third,—this simple and clumsy desire for recognition, in reality nothing but the groping aspiration of uneducated men who cannot express themselves properly, and who awkwardly, in symbol as it were, demand something that represents only a small fraction of what their hearts are set on, though they scarcely know what it is; this very fact betrays the goal of their aspiration: which is that the border-land they live in, that border-land on the frontier of a world full of good ordinances, should be admitted into that greater, that good, that almost beloved order which they do not want to alter; and if criminals can conceive of such an admittance and acknowledgment only within a framework of regulated and severe penalties, yet that proves them to be aspiring and social by nature, men who are moved simply by the desire to avoid frontier friction, to go about their vocation in peace and quiet, and to accommodate themselves more and more uncomplainingly, inconspicuously and sensitively to their calling, whose point of reference is the whole structure of society and the existing order.