absolute dilettante writer who throughout his life as a writer has done nothing but abuse nature. Stifter can be accused of absolute abuse of nature, Reger said yesterday. He wanted to be a seer as a writer but in actual fact he was a blind man as a writer, Reger said. Everything about Stifter is officious, virginally gawky; Stifter wrote an unbearable provincial raised-finger kind of prose, Reger said, nothing else. Stifter's descriptions of nature are always extolled. Never has nature been so misconstrued as in Stifter's descriptions, nor indeed is it as boring as he makes us believe on his patient pages, Reger said. Stifter is nothing but a literary fuss-pot whose artless pen paralyses nature and hence also the reader, where in reality and in truth nature is vital and eventful. Stifter covered everything with his petit-bourgeois veil and all but stifled it, that is the truth. In reality he cannot describe a tree, nor a song bird, nor a torrential river, that is the truth. He tries to bring something to life for us and only paralyses it, he wants to produce brilliance and only dulls it, that is the truth. Stifter makes nature monotonous and his characters insensitive and insipid, he knows nothing and he invents nothing, and what he describes, because he is solely a describer and nothing else, he describes with boundless naïveté. He has the quality of poor painters, Reger says, who for God knows what reasons have come to fame and who are hanging on the walls everywhere also in this institution, you need only think of Dürer and of those hundreds of mediocre products of which their frames are worth a lot more than they are. All these paintings are admired, but the admirers do not know why, just as Stifter is read and admired without his readers knowing why. The most mysterious thing about Stifter is his fame, Reger said, because his literature is anything but mysterious. As for the so-called great ones, we dissolve them, disintegrate them in time, and reduce them, he said, the great painters, the great musicians, the great writers, because we cannot live with their greatness, because we think, and think everything through to the end, he said. But Stifter was and is not great and therefore he is no example of this process. Stifter is merely an example of an artist being venerated as great for decades, and indeed loved, by a person, in fact by a person addicted to veneration and love, without ever having been great. In the disillusionment we experience upon discovering that the greatness of the one we have venerated and loved is no greatness at all and never was such greatness, but only an imagined greatness and is in fact pettiness, and indeed baseness, we experience the merciless pangs of the deceived. We quite simply pay the price, Reger said, for having lent ourselves to blindly accepting an object, moreover for years and decades and possibly for a lifetime, and even to venerating and loving it, without time and again putting it to the test. If only, let us say, thirty or even twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago, I had put Stifter to the test I should have saved myself this late disappointment. Altogether we should never say this or that person is the thing, and will then remain the thing for all time, we should again and again put all artists to the test, because we keep developing our art scholarship and our artistic taste, that is unquestionable. The only good thing by Stifter are his letters, Reger said, everything else is worthless. But literary scholarship will no doubt continue to concern itself with Stifter for a long time to come, after all it is obsessed by such literary idols as Adalbert Stifter who, even if they do not go down into eternal prose, willlong help these scholars to earn their crust of bread in the most agreeable way. Once or twice I took the trouble of giving various people, very clever and less clever people, very perceptive ones and less perceptive ones, a book by Stifter to read, such as
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