BUDDENBROOKS
Never had he dreamed that music was so essentially foreign to his family as now it seemed. His grandfather had enjoyed playing the flute, and he himself always listened with pleasure to melodies that possessed a graceful charm, a lively swing, or a tender melancholy. But if he happened to express his liking for any such composition, Gerda would be sure to shrug her shoulders and say with a pitying smile, “How can you, my friend? A thing like that, without any musical value whatever!”
He hated this “musical value.” It was a phrase which had no meaning for him save a certain chilling arrogance. It drove him on, in Hanno’s presence, to self-assertion. More than once he remonstrated angrily, “This constant harping on musical values, my dear, strikes me as rather tasteless and opinionated.” To which she rejoined: “Thomas, once for all, you will never understand anything about music as an art, and, intelligent as you are, you will never see that it is more than an after-dinner pleasure and a feast for the ears. In every other field you have a perception of the banal—in music not. But it is the test of musical comprehension. What pleases you in music? A sort of insipid optimism, which, if you met with it in literature, would make you throw down the book with an angry or sarcastic comment. Easy gratification of each unformed wish, prompt satisfaction before the will is even roused—that is what pretty music is like—and it is like nothing else in the world. It is mere flabby idealism.”
He understood her; that is, he understood what she said. But he could not follow her: could not comprehend why melodies which touched or stirred him were cheap and worthless, while compositions which left him cold and bewildered possessed the highest musical value. He stood before a temple from whose threshold Gerda sternly waved him back—and he watched while she and the child vanished within.
He betrayed none of his grief over this estrangement,
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