second heaven, from one cathedral to the next always an even more magnificent second heaven, from one temple to the next always something even more magnificent, he said, yet the result has always been something bungled. Naturally I visited the greatest museums, and not only in Europe, and studied what they contained, with the greatest intensity, believe me, and it soon seemed to me as if these museums contained nothing but painted helplessness, painted incompetence, painted failure, the bungled part of the world, everything in these museums is failure and bungling, he said yesterday, no matter what museum you enter and get down to viewing and studying, you study nothing but failure and bungling. Very well, the Prado, he said, surely the most important museum in the world as far as the old masters are concerned, but each time I sit at the Ritz across the street, drinking my tea, I reflect that even the Prado contains only imperfect, unsuccessful, ultimately only ridiculous and dilettantish things. Some artists, he said, at certain times, when they are in vogue, are quite simply inflated to world-rousing monstrosity; then abruptly some incorruptible mind pricks that world-rousing monstrosity and the worldrousing monstrosity bursts and is nothing, just as abruptly, he said. Velazquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe, he said, just as Pascal, Voltaire, all of them such inflated monstrosities. That Stifter, he said yesterday, an author I myself had always so enormously revered that it became more like artistic addiction, is just as bad a writer on closer examination as Bruckner, on intensive listening, is a bad if not a lousy composer. Stifter writes in a terrible style, one which grammatically is beneath contempt, and Bruckner has similarly slipped the reins with his chaotically wild, and even in old age, religiously pubertal intoxication of sounds. I have revered Stifter for decades without actually concerning myself with him accurately or radically. When, about a year ago, I did concern myself accurately and radically with Stifter, I could not believe my eyes and ears. Such faulty and bungled German or Austrian, whichever you prefer, I had never before read in my whole intellectual life in an author who is, of all things, famous today for his precise and clear prose. Stifter's prose is anything but precise and it is the least clear I have come across, it is packed with distorted metaphors and faulty and confused ideas, and I really wonder why this provincial dilettante, who at any rate was an inspector of schools in Upper Austria, is today revered to such an extent by writers, and above all by the younger writers, and not by any means by the least known or least noticed ones. I believe that none of these people has ever really read Stifter but they have always only venerated him blindly, that they have always only heard of him but never really read him, like myself. As I was truly reading Stifter a year ago, that grandmaster of prose writing, as he is called, I felt disgusted with myself for ever having revered this bungler of a writer, or indeed loved him. I had read Stifter in my youth and my memory of him had been based on these reading experiences. I had read Stifter between the ages of twelve and sixteen, at a time when I was totally uncritical. After that I never reexamined Stifter. For very long stretches of his prose Stifter is an unbearable chatterbox, he has an incompetent and, which is most despicable, a slovenly style and he is moreover, in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature. Stifter's prose, which is reputed to be pregnant and precise, is in fact woolly, helpless and irresponsible, and pervaded by a petit-bourgeois sentimentality and a petit-bourgeois gaucherie that turns one's stomach at the reading of Witiko or The Papers of My Great-grandfather. The Papers of My Great-grandfather, in particular, is, from the very first few lines, an attempt to present a recklessly spun-out, sentimental and boring prose full of internal and external mistakes as a work of art, when it is nothing but a petitbourgeois concoction from Linz. But then it would be quite inconceivable that a petit-bourgeois provincial dump like Linz, which has, since the days of Kepler, remained a provincial hole veritably crying out to high heaven, which has an opera house where they cannot sing, a theatre where they cannot act, painters who cannot paint and writers who cannot write, should suddenly give birth to a genius — and Stifter is universally described as one. Stifter is no genius, Stifter is a philistine living a cramped life and a musty petit bourgeois and schoolmaster writing in a cramped style, who did not even meet the minimum requirements of the language, let alone was able to produce works of art, Reger said. All in all, he said, Stifter is one of the greatest disappointments of my artistic life. Every third or at least every fourth sentence of Stifter's is wrong, every other or every third metaphor is a failure, and Stifter's mind generally, at least in his literary writings, is a mediocre mind. Stifter in fact is one of the most unimaginative writers who ever wrote anything and one of the most antipoetical and unpoetical ones to boot. But readers and literary scholars have always been taken in by that man Stifter. The fact that the man, towards the end of his life, killed himself changes nothing about his absolute mediocrity. I do not know any writer in the world who is such a dilettante and a bungler, and moreover so blinkered and narrow-minded as Stifter, and so world-famous at the same time. Things are much the same with Anton Bruckner, Reger said; with his perverse fear of God and his obsession with Catholicism he left Upper Austria for Vienna and totally surrendered himself to the emperor and to God. Bruckner was no genius either. His music is confused and just as unclear and bungled as Stifter's prose. But whereas Stifter today, strictly speaking, is only the dead paper of German literary scholars, Bruckner is moving everyone to tears. 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