And it is no coincidence that along with this last lighting-up of each particular object there awakens as well a desire to invoke a moral, an admonition, a blessing, a principle, that would conjure a powerful charm on this unreckoned multitude of things that emerge one last time on the brink of the final descent. That is why, together with the poetry that begins to stir at the time of testamentary contemplation, the spirit of philosophy too is awakened, and not surprisingly it is almost always an old and dusty philosophy that we haul out again after having forgotten it fifty years ago. Ulrich suddenly understood that neither of these two old men could possibly have given in. “Let life do as it will, as long as principles remain intact!” is a very sensible need if one knows that in a few months or years one will have been outlived by one’s principles. And the two principles that were still contending with each other in the old privy councilor were plain to see: his romanticism, his youth, and his sense of poetry called for a fine, sweeping gesture and a noble utterance; his philosophy, on the other hand, demanded that he embody the imperviousness of the law of reason to sudden incursions of feeling and sentimental lapses of the kind his dead enemy had laid in his path like a snare. For the past two days Schwung had been thinking: Well, he’s dead now, and there’s nothing to stand in the way of the Schwungian view of diminished responsibility; and so his feelings had flowed toward his old friend in great surging billows, and he had worked out his scene of farewell like a carefully organized plan of mobilization that needs only a signal to be carried out. But a drop of wormwood had fallen into that plan, and its effect was clarifying. Schwung had begun with a mighty surge, but now he felt like someone who comes to his senses in the middle of a poem and the last lines won’t come. So there they were, face-to-face, white stubble beard and white beard stubbles, each with his jaws implacably clenched.

“So what will he do?” Ulrich wondered, keenly intent on the scene before him. In the end Privy Councilor Schwung’s happy certainty that ¶318 of the Penal Code would now be adopted in accordance with his proposals prevailed over his wrath, and being freed from resentment, he would almost have liked to intone that old song, “I once had a comrade / You will find no better / The drum called to battle / He walked at my side,” so as to give vent to his now entirely benevolent and undivided feelings. And since he could not do that, he turned to Ulrich and said: “Believe me, young son of my friend, it is the moral crisis that leads the way; social decadence follows after!” Then he turned to Agathe and continued: “It was the mark of greatness in your father that he was always ready to support an idealistic view struggling to prevail in the foundations of the legal code.” Then he seized one of Agathe’s hands and one of Ulrich’s, shook them, and exclaimed: “Your father attached far too much importance to minor differences of opinion, which are sometimes unavoidable in long years of collaboration. I was always convinced that he had to do this in order to protect his delicate sense of justice from the barbs of reproach. Many professors will take leave of him tomorrow, but the like of him will not be found among them.”