47-50 Arnheim, Diotima, and Count Tuzzi

In these three chapters another triangle unfolds, one that includes Arnheim, Diotima, and her increasing uneasy and suspicious husband - Count Tuzzi.

We begin with the narrator's thoughts on the three sources of Arnheim's fame and the sense he conveyed of being a "whole man" in a world of specialists.  First, Arnheim was a "man of stature" who "knew everything.  When "a man who has know had to do well for himself, " the narrator concludes, "there must be something in it. This was the first source of Arnheim's fame." The second involved "the nature of science and scholarship."  It was a world of specialists, yet they admired Arnheim as a generalist, a universal man, which the narrator slyly points out "amounts to the same thing as when men say to each other of a woman that she is a woman's idea of a beauty."

The final source was his success in the realm of economics, among the "seasoned captains of industry." Again, the narrator makes a sly comparison: Arnheim "won influence over them like a beautiful and cultivated wife who regards her husband's everlasting office work as a bore but is useful to the business because everyone admires her."

Here's is the narrator's summary:

He [Arheim] possessed the gift of never being superior in any specific, provable respect but, owing to some fluid, perpetually self-renewing equilibrium, of still coming out on top of every situation. It was probably the fundamental talent of a politician, but Arnheim was also convinced that it was a profound mystery. He called it "the Mystery of the Whole."

* * *

Count Tuzzi is less preoccupied with Arnheim's "mystery" than the political implications of his involvement in the Parallel Campaign. After all Arnheim is a Prussian -- and the Campaign is supposed to be a celebration of Austria. Sitting with her husband and Arnheim as they politely step around the topic, Diotima is presented with:

. . . two contrasting kinds of urbanity, two national- and two life-styles, not without a touch of sexual rivalry. . . place side by side two highbred and distinct forms of life, and a void will come into being between them; they will cancel each other out, with the effect of a quite malicious, bottomless absurdity.

When her husband asks Arnheim what the Prussian court thinks of the campaign, Diotima gives the conversation another turning by declaring that "she intended to achieve something spiritually great with the Parallel Campaign, and would allow only the needs of truly modern minds to influence its leadership."

Once again we drift off into the higher realms of "greatness," and Arnheim allows himself a bit of pessimism: "It is a mark of a time that has lost the inner certainty of healthier times . . . it is hard for something to crystallize as the greatest and most important thing of all." Arnheim brings forth several suggestions regarding areas in which "greatness" might be recognized: religion, science, culture, art.  "But we know the picture art represents today," he immediately adds. "Fragmentation everywhere; extremes without connections. . . . We who live today have a deep sense that there is nothing left for us to do."

Diotima is constantly coming to Arnheim's defense.  Initially, Tuzzin is sanguine about the situation: "He decided as a man not to struggle against the dialectics of a woman but to bide his time and wait for circumstances to prove him right in the end."

However, one night in bed, he turns around in a half-sleep and sees that Diotima "looked at him angrily, expressed defiance, and had been crying." "You toss about so much in your sleep, no one can sleep next to you!" Diotima had said "harshly and distinctly."

At that point Count Tuzzi "realized that something had changed in her."  He goes back to sleep, but awakens on the morning with "the firm resolve to find out all he could about this disturbing person" -- Arnheim.