VIENNA LETTER
EVERY large city has its double aspect: one can consider it either as a unit of society or as a unit of isolation. Indeed, the background of isolation for the modern man is just as wholly the large city as the virgin forests were the background of isolation for men of the Middle Ages.
Vienna—and like Paris it has a marked social character—has always, again like Paris, possessed great and noteworthy recluses. The social character was never more emphasized than around 1813, when the sovereigns and diplomats of Europe, the loveliest women, and the best singers and virtuosos assembled for a general rejoicing over Europe's emancipation from the oppressive genius who had been transferred recently to the inhospitable island of Elba. But to us a hundred years later, the busy Vienna of those days is first of all the background of a morose and titanic seclusion; aside from all this turmoil Beethoven moved with a heavy tread, living in some suburb like a grey old lion in his den, changing his quarters twenty-nine times in twenty years, and finally, when he had been hunted up and found, remaining as distant and as unattainable as ever.
But, also in the later part of the nineteenth century and in our own times we have known such recluses; they will never cease to exist or, in a certain sense, to be the true connoisseurs of this city; they live on the outskirts—a short walk from a district of vineyards and meadows—but never in the villas or cottages which have made certain spots of the beautiful city to the west and south into something trivial and generally European; but they live in quiet, unpretentious lanes on the periphery, where the houses date mostly from the middle of the nineteenth century and are inhabited by petty officials, professors, manual labourers of the better class, and owners of small manufacturing establishments: inconspicuous existences in inconspicuous houses. Among these inconspicuous existences there has always been a sprinkling of remarkable individuals, intellectuals of very distinguished rank; but they have no points of contact with the transient intellectuals of the press, the theatre, and
