Bruckner's surge of sound has conquered the world, one might say, sentimentality and false pompousness are celebrating triumphs with Bruckner. Bruckner is just as slovenly a composer as Stifter is a slovenly writer, both of them share that Upper Austrian slovenliness. Both of them make so-called devout art which in fact is a public danger, Reger said. Kepler, of course, was quite a lad, Reger said yesterday, but then he was no Upper Austrian but from Württemberg; Adalbert Stifter and Anton Bruckner ultimately only produced literary and musical refuse. Anyone appreciating Bach and Mozart, and Handel and Haydn, he said, must reject people like Bruckner as a matter of course, he need not despise them, but he must reject them. And anyone appreciating Goethe and Kleist and Novalis and Schopenhauer, must reject Stifter but he need not despise Stifter. Whoever loves Goethe cannot at the same time love Stifter, Goethe made things difficult for himself, Stifter always made them too easy for himself. The most despicable thing, Reger said yesterday, is that Stifter, of all people, was a feared school official, moreover a school official in a superior position, and that he wrote in such a slovenly manner as none of his pupils would have been allowed to get away with. One page of Stifter, submitted to Stifter by one of his pupils, would have been totally massacred by Stifter with his red pencil, he said, that is the truth. Once we start reading Stifter with a red pencil there is no end to our correcting mistakes, Reger said. This is not a genius taking up his pen but a woeful incompetent. If ever there was such a concept as tasteless, dull and sentimental and pointless literature, then it applies exactly to what Stifter has written. Stifter's writing is no art, and what he has to say is dishonest in the most revolting fashion. It is not for nothing that Stifter is read mainly in their homes by the wives and widows of officials yawning with boredom at the passage of their day, he said, and by nurses during off-duty hours and by nuns in their convents. A genuinely thinking person cannot read Stifter. I believe that the people who estimate Stifter so highly, so enormously highly, have no idea of Stifter. All our writers nowadays, without exception, speak and write enthusiastically about Stifter and follow him as if he were the literary god of the present age. Either these people are stupid and lack all appreciation of art, or else they do not understand anything about literature, or else, which unfortunately I am bound to believe, they never read Stifter, he said. You must not talk to me about Stifter or Bruckner, he said, certainly not in connection with art or with what I understand by art. The one is a prose blurrer, he said, the other a music blurrer. Poor Upper Austria, he said, really believing that it has produced two of the greatest geniuses, while in fact it has produced only two boundlessly overrated duds, one literary and the other musical. When I consider how the Austrian schoolmistresses and nuns have their Stifter lying on their bedside tables, as an art icon, next to their combs and next to their toe-nail clippers, and I when I consider how the heads of state burst into tears while listening to a Bruckner symphony, I feel quite sick, he said. Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said. But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we should despair. Even though we know that all art ends in gaucherie and in ludicrousness and in the refuse of history, like everything else, we must, with downright self-assurance, believe in high and in the highest art, he said. We realize what it is, a bungled, failed art, but we need not always hold this realization before us, because in that case we should inevitably perish, he said. To return to Stifter once more, he said, there are a large number of writers today who invoke Stifter. These writers invoke an
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