with
which it punished his descent. And it is but natural that amongst those
very Jews best fitted to take part in affairs, and consequently most
sensitive to the ill-will that barred them from power and success, there
should be aroused, despite all conscious efforts neither to surrender
nor to shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the consequences of the
thing that stamped them in the eyes of the general as individuals of an
inferior sort; to inhibit any spiritual gesture that might arouse
hostility; and to ward off any subjective sense of personal inferiority
by convincing themselves and their fellows that they possessed the
traits generally esteemed.

So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul of Gustav Mahler. In
the place of the united self, there came to exist within him two men.
For while one part of him demanded the free complete expression
necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in the
free flow the hated racial traits would appear. For Mahler would have
been the first to have been repelled by the sound of his own harsh,
haughty, guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have been the
first to turn in contempt from his own gestures. There was in him the
frenetic unconscious desire to rid himself of the thing he had come to
believe inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak in his
proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice of
speaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers;
of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; of
accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving a
power of speech.

And so his work became the doubtful and bastard thing it is, a thing of
lofty and original intentions unrealized, of large powers misapplied, of
great and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringing
into being anything really new, really whole. Of what Mahler might have
achieved had he not been the divided personality, his symphonies, even
as they stand, leave no doubt. If Mahler is not a great man, he is at
least the silhouette of one. The need of expression that drove him to
composition was indubitably mighty. The passion with which he addressed
himself to his labor despite all discouragement and lack of success, the
loftiness and nobleness of the task which he set for himself, the
splendor of the intentions, reveal how fierce a fire burnt in the man.
He was not one of those