during the last few months, I had fallen into evil places of thought and
imagination. There had been a time before, as there has been a time
since--as it is with me now--when I worshiped my art with all my
strength as the most beautiful thing on earth; the art of arts--the most
beautiful and perfect development of beauty which mankind has yet
succeeded in attaining to, and when the very fact of its being so and of
my being gifted with some poor power of expressing and interpreting that
beauty was enough for me--gave me a place in the world with which I was
satisfied, and made life understandable to me. At that time this
belief--my natural and normal state--was clouded over; between me and
the goddess of my idolatry had fallen a veil; I wasted my brain tissue
in trying to philosophize--cracked my head, and almost my reason over
the endless, unanswerable question, _Cui bono?_ that question which may
so easily become the destruction of the fool who once allows himself to
be drawn into dallying with it. _Cui bono?_ is a mental Delilah who will
shear the locks of the most arrogant Samson. And into the arms and to
the tender mercies of this Delilah I had given myself. I was in a fair
way of being lost forever in her snares, which she sets for the feet of
men. To what use all this toil? To what use--music? After by dint of
hard twisting my thoughts and coping desperately with problems that I
did not understand, having managed to extract a conviction that there
was use in music--a use to beautify, gladden, and elevate--I began to
ask myself further, "What is it to me whether mankind is elevated or
not? made better or worse? higher or lower?"

Only one who has asked himself that question, as I did, in bitter
earnest, and fairly faced the answer, can know the horror, the
blackness, the emptiness of the abyss into which it gives one a glimpse.
Blackness of darkness--no standpoint, no vantage-ground--it is a horror
of horrors; it haunted me then day and night, and constituted itself not
only my companion but my tyrant.

I was in bad health too. At night, when the joyless day was over, the
work done, the play played out, the smell of the foot-lights and gas and
the dust of the stage dispersed, a deadly weariness used to overcome me;
an utter, tired, miserable apathy; and alone, surrounded by loneliness,
I let my morbid thoughts carry me whither they would. It had gone so far
that I had even begun to say to myself lately:

"Friedhe