For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews to civil rights, it had made them feel as never before the old hatred and malediction and exclusion. The walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jew from feeling the full force of the disability under which he labored, insomuch as they had repressed in him all desire to mingle in the life of the country in which he found himself. But in exciting his gregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the public life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that of Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all its terrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt 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.