For a long time now, perhaps since the very start of her artistic career, Josephine has been fighting to be excused from all work on account of her singing; she should be relieved from the burden of earning her daily bread and anything else involved in the struggle for existence, and the slack should, presumably, be taken up by the people as a whole. A hasty enthusiast—and there have been some—might conclude that this demand is inherently justified, owing to its strangeness and the mental state needed to conceive it. But our people draw other conclusions and quietly refuse her. Nor do they bother much to refute the arguments on which it is based. Josephine argues, for example, that the strain of work is bad for her voice, that the strain of work cannot, needless to say, remotely compare to the strain of singing, but it does render it impossible to rest sufficiently after singing and recuperate for further singing, so she must exhaust herself entirely and within these confines never perform at her peak. The people listen to her arguments and pay no attention. This people, so easily moved, will sometimes not be moved at all. Their refusal is sometimes so severe that Josephine is taken aback; she appears to comply, does her proper share of work, and sings as well as she can, but this only lasts awhile. Then with renewed strength—her strength for this purpose seems inexhaustible—she takes up the fight again.
Now it is clear that what Josephine is really aiming for is not literally what she demands. She is reasonable, she does not shy from work—shirking is quite unknown among us anyway—and even if her petition were granted, her life would go on as before; her work would not impede her singing, nor would her singing improve; what she is aiming for is an unambiguous public recognition of her art that would last forever and far surpass any known precedent. But while everything else seems to be within her grasp, this persistently eludes her. Perhaps she should have taken a different tack from the beginning, perhaps she understands her mistake by now, but she cannot back down; any retreat would be tantamount to self-betrayal; now she must stand or fall by her demand.
If, as she contends, she truly had enemies, they could be greatly amused, without having to lift a finger, by the spectacle of this battle. But she has no enemies, and even if she does meet with criticism here and there, no one is amused by this battle of hers for the mere fact that in this circumstance the people exhibit a cold, judicial manner that is rarely seen otherwise. And even if one approves of it in this case, the mere thought that such an attitude might be adopted toward oneself dispels any pleasure. What is important here is not the people’s refusal of Josephine’s demand or the demand itself but the fact that the people are capable of presenting such a stony, impenetrable front to one of their own, and it is all the more impenetrable because this particular citizen is in every other sense treated with fatherly—actually more than fatherly—with deferential concern.
Imagine that instead of an entire people there were one individual: One might suppose that this man had been giving in to Josephine but at the same time desperately wishing to put an end to all this indulgence; that he had been superhuman in the concessions he granted, firm in the belief that there would be a natural limit to them; yes, that he had conceded more than was necessary for the sole purpose of hastening the process, to spoil Josephine and push her to ask for more and more until she did reach this ultimate demand, at which point he could, being prepared well in advance, reply with a final, curt refusal. Now this is absolutely not how things stand, the people have no need of such guile; besides, their admiration of Josephine is sincere and deeply rooted, and Josephine’s demand is so outrageous that any simple child could have told her the foreseeable outcome. However, it may be that considerations such as these do enter into Josephine’s thinking on the matter and so add a further sting of bitterness to the pain of refusal.