Robert Musil's preoccupation with the state of modern man's soul, which once prompted the noted critic Ernst Blass to dub him, in a rather feeble pun, "ein Entdecker von Neu-Seelland," is evident throughout the entire corpus of his writings. A major recurrent theme in his novels, short stories, essays and plays is the superficiality of twentieth-century man, attributable paradoxically to "zu wenig Verstand in den Fragen der Seele." For centuries, according to Musil, men of science have been envisioning a new humanity, which never materializes because, in their ceaseless effort to create it, they have somehow lost contact with the soul.

Critics have been quick in pointing out the indisputable importance of men like Plato, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzche, and Ernst Mach for Musil's concept of the soul. But one major influence on his earliest attempts to theorize about it has been sadly neglected: the famous Swedish feminist Ellen Key.

In his introduction to the English edition of Ellen Key's best known book Love and Marriage (1911), Havelock Ellis justly called her "one of the chief moral forces of our time." Unfortunately, she is all but forgotten today, but at the turn of the century her lectures in many countries and her writings stirred a controversy over her feminist ideas on social relationships, comparable to that over Susan B. Anthony's in America.

Ellen Key was born in 1849 in the Swedish province of Småland, the descendant of a Scottish Highlander, Colonel M'Key, who had fought bravely under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War. She completed her early education for the most part on the country estate of her father, an avowed radical in the Swedish parliament, under the tutelage of French, German and Swedish educators. From earliest childhood on, she evinced a strong love of nature and of natural things, attributable in part to her Rousseauian education. Her great-grandfather had been an ardent admirer of Rousseau's famous treatise on Education. He gave his son the name of Emile, which was handed down to Ellen's father, another avid disciple of Rousseau.

In 1880, compelled to seek employment after her father lost his wealth as the result of an agricultural crisis, Ellen Key became a teacher in a girl's school. Some years later she was given the Chair of History of Civilization in Sweden at the Popular University of Stockholm, where she remained for twenty years. Nearly all of her books, which concern themselves with the essential questions of life and the soul, were written only after she had reached middle-age. The first volume of her most ambitious work, Lines of Life, appeared in 1903. It was followed a few years later by The Century of the Child and, in 1909, by The Woman's Movement.

It is interesting to note that Ellen Key's fame was not established in Sweden or England, but in Germany. Robert Musil first read her essay "Die Entfaltung der Seele durch Lebenskunst" in the June, 1905 edition of Die neue Rundschau. Some time afterwards he noted in his diary the tremendous impact that this essay had made on his thinking. "Ihre Idee, die Seele zum Gegenstand des Studiums zu machen, war fir mich erlösend," he wrote. A close reading of the essay is extremely elucidating for any study of Musil's views on the soul.

In "Die Entfaltung der Seele durch Lebenskunst" Ellen Key undertook the ambitious task of tracing the historical development of the concept of Lebenskunst, or 'the art of living.' It is not surprising that Musil, who regarded his own literary activities as primarily a vehicle for expounding his theories on the art of living, was fascinated by her astute observations.

The essay begins with a discussion of the efforts of the ancient Greeks at the time of Heraclitus to reconcile art with life. She argues that their government as well as the education of their youth were comprehended by them as a form of creative art and that their own style of living chiseled their personalities according to the lofty ideal of the 'beautiful Good': "Sowohl die Staatsregierung wie die Erziehung der Jugend wurden von den höchststehenden Hellenen als schaffende Kunst aufgefaβt, und ihre eigene Lebensführung meiβelt ihre Persönlichkeiten nach dem Ideal der 'schönen Güte' aus." The Greek ideal of the 'art of living' was to become the model for the Renaissance period and, later, for Goethe. In their striving to form beautiful people through teaching and environment the men of the Renaissance were in essential agreement with the principal tenet of the Platonic philosophers: that the soul through beauty and goodness achieves divinity, for beauty and goodness are the essence of being.

According to Ellen Key, the point de départ of Romanticism was the feeling which its adherents shared with Goethe of the unity between God and nature, life and art. To a far greater degree than Goethe, however, the Romantics were sensitive to the inner unity of souls. For them, the experience of true love represented the highest gradation of the soul: "Sie fühlten, daβ die Liebe—sobald sie sich zur höchsten Sympathie erhoben hat—die höchste Steigerung der Seele ist." Before Romanticism disintegrated into a school of grotesqueness, reaction and obscurantism, it bequeathed to the modern world its own profound feeling and a burning desire for existence in a state of realized beauty, in a 'third kingdom' where love and beauty are worshiped and reason has become the servant of the spirit. The great mistake of the Romantics, Ellen Key thought, was in believing that they could dispense with reason altogether.

The essay contains a number of references to writers in whose works the author finds confirmation for some of her own theories about the soul. Goethe is clearly a favourite. She maintains that concern for 'the art of living' pervades all his works in the conscious striving of his protagonists for something higher: "Er faβte das Leben nie als bloβes Dasein allein auf, sondern als ein Leben, während dessen der Weltverlauf unbewuβt und der Menschengeist zielbewu, jt eine immer hohere Steigerung erreicht." In Schiller's writings she finds appealing the belief that only through an aesthetic education can the lost harmony of the ancient Greeks be recovered. She praises Otto Ludwig for having proven the need to recognize uniformity of human nature as the goal in art, education and social intercourse, and for insisting that beauty, in the profoundest sense of the word, is as essential to the soul as oxygen to the body. Thomas Carlyle also receives mention for having recognized, along with Goethe, that our subconscious is the source of all great powers. More important for the argument, however, are the comments about Carlyle's friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose major preoccupation was the soul, its expansion and exercise of power. His doctrine of self-culture assumes a steadily ascending development in the individual, a truer, more intensified and healthier life through a growing feeling of unity with existence. Self-culture means the simultaneous release of all great potentialities for living, resulting in a heightening of thought, feeling and will.

Having acknowledged varying degrees of indebtedness to others through discussion of their ideas, Miss Key towards the end of the essay expounds her own views on the soul and the art of living. The perceptive reader will notice, however, the strong influence of Nietzsche and Emerson in her arguments. The individual with soul, she claims, feels that all souls are alive in his own and that the greatest thinkers can only explain to him what he has already experienced within himself. The man with soul can only thrive through maintaining his individuality. To conform means to lose touch with his most prized possession: his soul.

Perfection of the soul is defined as a link or connection among all our various capabilities. Wherever one quality dominates, the soul is damaged. Reason is a particularly dangerous quality because of its propensity to make distinctions and to dissect things. Soul is defined as, "das Fluidum, das die Fihigkeiten vereinigt."

Ellen Key believed that not only the body, but also the soul was a product of evolution. In the essay the argues that its present state is the result of millions of years of trial and error. Whenever its development is impeded, both the individual and the race suffer. It is the task of the forerunner of the future to prevent this. And who is this forerunner? According to the feminist author, the future is first seen "in der Dichtung, in der Kunst und in der Frauenseele." She cites the famous Italian actress Eleonora Duse as one whose life reveals the bliss of fullness of soul and its torment. Will the lonely new soul of the future be able to live at all under existing conditions? As a partial response to her own question, she advocates an educational programme for the new soul which will transform human passions into flames of the soul and which will strengthen intellectual powers and aesthetic judgment. The primacy of the soul in our lives must be recognized: "Seelenzustande sind die einzigen, wirklichen, die einzigen iuberall existierenden Werte; Seelenmacht, die einzige, wirklich umgestaltende Macht." To protect the soul, phantasy and feeling must be defended against the enemy, pure reason. In the perfect Lebenskiinstler complete harmony will reign between his inner and outer ego and among all his various powers. All facets of the soul will work together to elevate each other. For such rare individuals this elevation of the soul represents the only form of happiness.

At this juncture in the essay the nexus between the perfection of the soul and the experience of love is established. The individuals is never capable of fulfilling all the conditions for perfection of his soul as completely as when he is in love. Through this experience he enters into what Ellen Key calls the third realm, "das dritte Reich—das Reich der Seele." She believes that it is easier for women to reach this ideal state because their nature is more unified and their emotional life is richer. She envisions a new world order in which sexual differences and huge age gaps will play a much less important role in our lives. She describes it as a society in which "den neuen Menschen, Mannem wie Frauen, Jungen wie Alten, Vereinten wie Einsamen gemeinsam ist, daft das, was sie vom Leben wollen, nur ist, daβ sein Saitenspiel einen immer tieferen, reineren, volleren Ton gewinne—selbst wenn dieser aus einer Violine singt, die aus Splittern zusammengefdgt wurde."

The concluding paragraphs of the essay are an encomium to the soul. The purpose of life, the author proclaims, is life itself. Only when the soul is master in the house of life will the monster called social order sink into oblivion, allowing the soul finally to create its own higher existence.

In the course of perusing this rather lengthy, though by no means exhaustive summary of "Die Entfaltung der Seele durch Lebenskunst," the reader who is conversant with Robert Musil's writings will have recognized numerous interesting similarities between Ellen Key's theories on the soul and his. At the time of its appearance he was twenty-five years old, on the threshold of his literary career. His first major work, Die Verwirrungen des Zdglings Tdrless, appeared the following year, in 1906. In it the eponymous hero announces that his mission in life is "eine Aufgabe der Seele." This task of reestablishing contact with one's lost soul became a central theme in all Musil's subsequent writings. Thomas, the main character in his play Die Schwärmer (1921), serves as the author's propagandist when he analyzes for his brother-in-law Josef the cause of modern man's spiritual crisis:

"Sieh um dich! Unsre Kollegen fliegen, durchbohren Berge, fahren unter Wasser, zucken vor keiner noch so tiefen Neuerung ihrer Systeme zurück. Alles, was sie seit Jahrhunderten machen, ist kuhn als Gleichnis einer ungeheuren, abenteuerlichen neuen Menschlichkeit. Die niemals kommt. Denn ihr habt uber eurem Tun langst die Seele vergessen."

The scope of the paper does not allow a thorough discussion of Musil's concept of the soul. The theme receives its fullest treatment, of course, in his magnum opus Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. In the early pages of the novel the essayist Musil, in one of his frequent interjections as independent conveyer of his thoughts, criticizes the excessive degree of specialization and mechanization in the modern world by describing the average man's vision of Utopia:

Eine solche soziale Zwangsvorstellung ist nun schon seit langem eine Art überamerikanische Stadt, wo alles mit der Stoppuhr in der Hand eilt oder stillsteht. Luft und Erde bilden einen Ameisenbau, von den Stockwerken der Verkehrsstraβen durchzogen. Luftziuge, Erdzuge, Untererdziige, Rohrpostmenschensendungen, Kraftwagenketten rasen horizontal, Schnellaufzuige pumpen vertikal Menschenmassen von einer Verkehrsebene in die andre … Fragen und Antworten klinken ineinander wie Machinenglieder, jeder Mensch hat nur ganz bestimmate Aufgaben, die Berufe sind an bestimmten Orten in Gruppen zusammengezogein, man iβt wahrend der Bewegung, die Vergnigungen sind in andern Stadtteilen zusammengezogen, und wieder anderswo stehen die Tiirme, wo man Frau, Familie, Grammophon und Seele findet.

The chief theoreticians of the soul in the novel are Ulrich and his cousin Ermelinda Tuzzi or, as he calls her, Diotima. Besides the obvious affinities with Plato's and Holderlin's Diotima and her own ideal, Frau von Stein, the character owes much to the influence of Ellen Key's ideas on Musil. At the beginning of the novel Diotima is preoccupied with her plan to unite her concept of spirit with present social conditions. To combat the maladies of this soulless epoch, which suffers from the dominance of logic and psychology, she makes her salon the headquarters for the Parallel Action, which she hopes will restore a lost spiritual depth to society. Diotima's driving ambition is to bring the soul into the spheres of power, to reinstate culture in the present age of civilization. Through her infatuation with the Pressian industrialist Arnheim, she becomes interested in the relationship of love to the soul. Like Ellen Key, she becomes convinced that love and the soul are inextricably bound together, and hopes to use Arnheim as a means to regain access to her soul. She mentions to him the superstitious belief, traceable to Plato's Phaidros, that in a period every thousand years the spirit and reality are united in chosen individuals, allowing them to enter into the kingdom of the soul. She and Arnheim prove to be incapable of bridging the gap between reality and this ideal concept of love.

Of all the characters in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Ulrich is the one who is best equipped to experience the full possibilities of the soul. His year's leave of absence from life is designed to help him to restore the lost harmony between his outer and inner worlds which he has known as a child. By studying the writings of various mystics, he comes to the realization that love and the soul are inseparable. Through the experience of love with his sister Agathe, he, too, attempts to enter into the Thousand Years' Kingdom of the soul. The difference between the two essays lies in the degrees of intensity. While Diotima and Arnheim are satisfied with merely theorizing about it, Ulrich and Agathe's "journey into Paradise" is a bold attempt to realize the kingdom of the soul. Their failure is attributable largely to a civilization which has placed insurmountable impediments in the way of a meaningful relationship between the individual and nature.

Through the above comments the question to what extent Musil made actual use of Ellen Key's theories has partially been answered. It is clear that he shared her views on the ethical mission of the artist. In his "Rede zur Rilke-Feier" (1927) he stated that the poet's mission, as he saw it, was the "Entfaltung der Schopfung und der Moglichkeiten des Geistes." He was also in total sympathy with her stance on the problem of individuality and the need for self-culture. In his essay "Der Anschlu, j an Deutschland" (1919) he draws a distinction between two types of culture; the first he calls 'geistige Kultur,' the second, 'Lebensform, der gute Stil.' The first is the home of original, free thought, the realm of the individual. The second is the realm of conformity. He contends that the second should grow out of the first, but finds that in the twentieth century the two are almost always separated. This rupture is most clearly delineated in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, where attempts by various individuals to combine them result in a maze of conflicting inner beliefs which resolve themselves usually in external conformity and inner chaos. All Musil's individuals, in their quest for self-culture, share a sense of isolation, an unwillingness to accept any clearly defined professional status, a cold, ironic attitude towards society, a burning desire for truth and exactitude, and an unrelenting drive to find a formula for living a rich and full existence.

Ellen Key's assertion in "Die Entfaltung der Seele" that the man who possesses soul must by necessity lack definite qualities in order to realize all his potentialities—"Uberall, wo eine Eigenschaft herrscht, ist weniger Seelenvollheit"—provided Musil with one of the central ideas in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, as the title of the novel indicates. In chapter 61 of Book One he equates the concept of Utopia with possibilities: "Utopien bedeuten ungefdhr so viel wie Moglichkeiten; darin, da,/ eine Moglichkeit nicht Wirklichkeit ist, drückt sich nichts anderes aus, als da,3 die Umstadnde, mit denen sie verflochten ist, sie daran hindern, denn andernfalls waire sie ja nur eine Unmbglichkeit." The utopist's task is to come to grips with reality with its multiplicity of potentialities.

Another important part of Ellen Key's discourse on the soul, which relates directly to Musil's works, is the nexus she finds between man's animal instincts and the soul: "Ja, die Menschen der Seele fihlen sich den Tieren naiher als den Verstandesmenschen, weil sie bei den ersten finden, was sie bei den letzteren vermissen." This idea is echoed again and again in Musil's writings. Torless's involvement with the prostitute Bozena, his homosexual affair with Basini, and his association with his perverse fellow students, Reiting and Beineberg, are all important contributions to his spiritual growth, as he announces to the bewildered faculty caput after his attempted flight from the school. In Tonka, the last and most successful of the three tales in Drei Frauen (1924), a young chemistry student becomes romantically involved with a young woman who has been reared in a sexually promiscuous environment. When she becomes pregnant, he calculates that conception must have occurred during one of his lengthy periods of absence. Besides this, she has contracted a venereal disease, while he is completely healthy. Torn between the almost certain proof of her infidelity, based on scientific statistics, and the slim possibility of some supernatural explanation, he chooses the rational interpretation. Only after her death can he accept her innocence. Through Tonka the young offspring of the age of science and logic becomes aware of the possibility of a new truth outside the empirical world. His inability to trust her completely while she was alive has prevented him from experiencing the same perfection of soul which she possessed. In the two tales of Die Vereinigungen (1911) and in the Moosbrugger episode in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften other salient variations of this important theme are found.

In drawing the reader's attention to various parallels between Ellen Key's concept of the soul and Robert Musil's, it has not been my intention to convey the idea that the latter was in total agreement with everything in "Die Entfaltung der Seele durch Lebenskunst." On the one hand, he was lavish in his praise of it: "Ihre Grundidee—mehr Seele, oder überhaupt Seele—ist ausgezeichnet. Ihre Idee, die Seele zum Gegenstand des Studiums zu machen, war fur mich erlosend." On the other hand, he recognized a number of contradictions in her definition of the soul and her advice on how to nurture it. He criticized her equation of 'fullness of life,' (which means the realization of all its possibilities), with 'harmony,' arguing that the two do not necessarily go hand in hand. Fullness of life, he felt, had to be combined with the simplification of life. Contemporary society was so full of paradoxes and contradictory tendencies that a full, varied existence within the boundaries of its institutions would not bring the individual into closer contact with his soul. Only closer contact with the laws of nature could achieve that. Finally, while he agreed essentially with her polemic against reason in the essay, he felt that she had gone too far in her attack and had shown no awareness of the difficulties associated with it. In spite of these minor objections, Musil was very conscious of the great debt that he owed to this remarkable woman. The important influence that she exerted on him can be observed throughout his writings.