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Title: Steppenwolf
Author: Hermann Hesse
Translator: Basil Creighton
Release date: March 30, 2025 [eBook #75756]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929
Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEPPENWOLF ***
STEPPENWOLF
BY
HERMANN HESSE
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY
BASIL CREIGHTON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1929,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
This book contains the records left us by a man whom, according to
the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf.
Whether this manuscript needs any introductory remarks may be open to
question. I, however, feel the need of adding a few pages to those of
the Steppenwolf in which I try to record my recollections of him. What
I know of him is little enough. Indeed, of his past life and origins
I know nothing at all. Yet the impression left by his personality has
remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.
Some years ago the Steppenwolf, who was then approaching fifty, called
on my aunt to inquire for a furnished room. He took the attic room on
the top floor and the bedroom next it, returned a day or two later with
two trunks and a big case of books and stayed nine or ten months with
us. He lived by himself very quietly, and but for the fact that our
bedrooms were next door to each other--which occasioned a good many
chance encounters on the stairs and in the passage--we should have
remained practically unacquainted. For he was not a sociable man.
Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced
in anybody. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the
Steppes, a strange, wild, shy--very shy--being from another world
than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on
account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted
this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read
the records he left behind him. Yet, before that, from our occasional
talks and encounters, I became gradually acquainted with him, and I
found that the portrait in his records was in substantial agreement
with the paler and less complete one that our personal acquaintance had
given me.
By chance I was there at the very moment when the Steppenwolf entered
our house for the first time and became my aunt’s lodger. He came at
noon. The table had not been cleared and I still had half an hour
before going back to the office. I have never forgotten the odd and
very conflicting impressions he made on me at this first encounter. He
came through the glazed door, having just rung the bell and my aunt
asked him in the dim light of the hall what he wanted. The Steppenwolf,
however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed
around nervously before he either made any answer or announced his
name.
“Oh, it smells good here,” he said, and at that he smiled and my aunt
smiled too. For my part, I found this manner of introducing himself
ridiculous and was not favourably impressed.
“However,” said he, “I’ve come about the room you have to let.”
I did not get a good look at him until we were all three on our way up
to the top floor. Though not very big, he had the bearing of a big man.
He wore a fashionable and comfortable winter overcoat and he was well,
though carelessly, dressed, clean-shaven, and his cropped head showed
here and there a streak of grey. He carried himself in a way I did not
at all like at first. There was something weary and undecided about it
that did not go with his keen and striking profile nor with the tone of
his voice. Later, I found out that his health was poor and that walking
tired him. With a peculiar smile--at that time equally unpleasant to
me--he contemplated the stairs, the walls, and windows, and the tall
old cupboards on the staircase. All this seemed to please and at the
same time to amuse him. Altogether he gave the impression of having
come out of an alien world, from another continent perhaps. He found it
all very charming and a little odd. I cannot deny that he was polite,
even friendly. He agreed at once and without objection to the terms
for lodging and breakfast and so forth, and yet about the whole man
there was a foreign and, as I chose to think, disagreeable or hostile
atmosphere. He took the room and the bedroom too, listened attentively
and amiably to all he was told about the heating, the water, the
service and the rules of the household, agreed to everything, offered
at once to pay a sum in advance--and yet he seemed at the same time
to be outside it all, to find it comic to be doing as he did and not
to take it seriously. It was as though it were a very odd and new
experience for him, occupied as he was with quite other concerns, to
be renting a room and talking to people in German. Such more or less
was my impression and it would certainly not have been a good one if
it had not been revised and corrected by many small instances. Above
all, his face pleased me from the first, in spite of the foreign air it
had. It was a rather original face and perhaps a sad one, but alert,
thoughtful, strongly marked and highly intellectual. And then, to
reconcile me further, there was his polite and friendly manner, which
though it seemed to cost him some pains, was all the same quite without
pretention; on the contrary, there was something almost touching,
imploring in it. The explanation of it I found later, but it disposed
me at once in his favour.
* * * * *
Before we had done inspecting the rooms and going into the
arrangements, my luncheon hour was up and I had to go back to business.
I took my leave and left him to my aunt. When I got back at night,
she told me that he had taken the rooms and was coming in in a day or
two. The only request he had made was that his arrival should not be
notified to the police, as in his poor state of health he found these
formalities and the standing about in official waiting-rooms more than
he could tolerate. I remember very well how this surprised me and how
I warned my aunt against giving in to his stipulation. This fear of
the police seemed to me to agree only too well with the mysterious and
alien air the man had and struck me as suspicious. I explained to my
aunt that she ought not on any account to put herself in this equivocal
and in any case rather peculiar position for a complete stranger; it
might well turn out to have very unpleasant consequences for her. But
it then came out that my aunt had already granted his request, and,
indeed, had let herself be altogether captivated and charmed by the
strange gentleman. For she never took a lodger with whom she did not
contrive to stand in some human, friendly, and as it were auntlike or,
rather, motherly relation; and many a one has made full use of this
weakness of hers. And thus for the first weeks things went on; I had
many a fault to find with the new lodger, while my aunt every time
warmly took his part.
As I was not at all pleased about this business of neglecting to notify
the police, I wanted at least to know what my aunt had learnt about
him; what sort of family he came of and what his intentions were. And,
of course, she had learnt one thing and another, although he had only
stayed a short while after I left at noon. He had told her that he
thought of spending some months in our town to avail himself of the
libraries and to see its antiquities. I may say it did not please my
aunt that he was only taking the rooms for so short a time, but he had
clearly quite won her heart in spite of his rather peculiar way of
presenting himself. In short, the rooms were let and my objections came
too late.
“Why on earth did he say that it smelt so good here?” I asked.
“I know well enough,” she replied, with her usual insight. “There’s
a smell of cleanliness and good order here, of comfort and
respectability. It was that that pleased him. He looks as if he weren’t
used to that of late and missed it.”
Just so, thought I to myself.
“But,” I said aloud, “if he isn’t used to an orderly and respectable
life, what is going to happen? What will you say if he has filthy
habits and makes dirt everywhere, or comes home drunk at all hours of
the night?”
“We shall see, we shall see,” she said, and laughed; and I left it at
that.
And in the upshot my fears proved groundless. The lodger, though he
certainly did not live a very orderly or rational life, was no worry or
trouble to us. Yet my aunt and I bothered our heads a lot about him,
and I confess I have not by a long way done with him even now. I often
dream of him at night, and the mere existence of such a man, much as I
got to like him, has had a thoroughly disturbing and disquieting effect
on me.
* * * * *
Two days after this the stranger’s luggage--his name was Harry
Haller--was brought in by a porter. He had a very fine leather trunk,
which made a good impression on me, and a big flat cabin-trunk that
showed signs of having travelled far--at least it was plastered with
labels of hotels and travel agencies of various countries, some
overseas.
Then he himself appeared, and the time began during which I gradually
got acquainted with this strange man. At first I did nothing on my side
to encourage it. Although Haller interested me from the moment I saw
him I took no steps for the first two or three weeks to run across him
or to get into conversation with him. On the other hand I confess that
I did, all the same and from the very first, keep him under observation
a little and also went into his room now and again when he was out and
my curiosity drove me to do a little spy-work.
I have already given some account of the Steppenwolf’s outward
appearance. He gave at the very first glance the impression of a
significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was
intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his
features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate
sensibility. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case,
dropped conventionalities and said personal and individual things that
came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his
spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters
of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of
thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who
have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down,
or to appear always in the right.
I remember an instance of this in the last days he was here, if I
can call a mere fleeting glance he gave me an example of what I
mean. It was when a celebrated historian and art critic, a man of
European fame, had announced a lecture in the Aula. I had succeeded
in persuading the Steppenwolf to attend it, though at first he had
little desire to do so. We went together and sat next to each other.
When the lecturer ascended the platform and began his address, many
of his hearers, who had expected a sort of prophet, were disappointed
by his rather spruce and conceited air. And when he proceeded, by
way of introduction, to say a few flattering things to the audience,
thanking them for their attendance in such numbers, the Steppenwolf
threw me a quick look, a look which criticised both the words and
the speaker of them--an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke
volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticise that lecturer,
annihilating the celebrated man with its crushing yet delicate irony.
That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed
utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly
of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual
with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer
and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude
of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture
was announced--no, the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch,
its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the
whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated
intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below
the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our
culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke
eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one
who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: “See
what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!” and at once all renown, all
intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards
the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a
monkey’s trick!
With this I have gone far ahead and, contrary to my actual plan and
intention, already conveyed what Haller essentially meant to me;
whereas my original aim was to uncover his picture by degrees while
telling the course of my gradual acquaintance with him.
Now that I have gone so far ahead it will save time to say a little
more about Haller’s puzzling “strangeness” and to tell in detail how I
gradually guessed and became aware of the causes and meaning of this
strangeness, this extraordinary and frightful loneliness. It will be
better so, for I wish to leave my own personality as far as possible in
the background. I do not want to put down my own confessions, to tell a
story or to write an essay on psychology, but simply as an eye-witness
to contribute something to the picture of the peculiar individual who
left this Steppenwolf manuscript behind him.
At the very first sight of him, when he came into my aunt’s home,
craning his head like a bird and praising the smell of the house, I was
at once astonished by something curious about him; and my first natural
reaction was repugnance. I suspected (and my aunt, who unlike me is the
very reverse of an intellectual person, suspected very much the same
thing)--I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in
some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him
with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in course of time
replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so
long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In
course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction
was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of
gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that Haller
was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings
of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a
boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that
the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for
however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in
his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and
foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he
hated and despised.
And here I cannot refrain from a psychological observation. Although I
know very little of the Steppenwolf’s life, I have all the same good
reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe and very
pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine, that makes
the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and up-bringing.
But in this case the attempt to destroy the personality and to break
the will did not succeed. He was much too strong and hardy, too proud
and spirited. Instead of destroying his personality they succeeded only
in teaching him to hate himself. It was against himself that, innocent
and noble as he was, he directed during his whole life the whole wealth
of his fancy, the whole of his thought; and in so far as he let loose
upon himself every barbed criticism, every anger and hate he could
command, he was, in spite of all, a real Christian and a real martyr.
As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic
and earnest endeavour to love them, to be just to them, to do them no
harm, for the love of his neighbour was as deeply in him as the hatred
of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s
neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate
is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds
the same cruel isolation and despair.
It is now time, however, to put my own thoughts aside and to get
to facts. What I first discovered about Haller, partly through my
espionage, partly from my aunt’s remarks, concerned his way of living.
It was soon obvious that his days were spent with his thoughts and
his books, and that he pursued no practical calling. He lay always
very late in bed. Often he was not up much before noon and went
across from his bedroom to his sitting-room in his dressing-gown.
This sitting-room, a large and comfortable attic room with two
windows, after a few days was not at all the same as when occupied
by other tenants. It filled up; and as time went on it was always
fuller. Pictures were hung on the walls, drawings tacked up--sometimes
illustrations cut out from magazines and often changed. A southern
landscape, photographs of a little German country town, apparently
Haller’s home, hung there, and between them were some brightly painted
water-colours, which, as we discovered later, he had painted himself.
Then there were photographs of a pretty young woman, or--rather--girl.
For a long while a Siamese Buddha hung on the wall, to be replaced
first by Michelangelo’s “Night,” then by a portrait of the Mahatma
Gandhi. Books filled the large book-case and lay everywhere else as
well, on the table, on the pretty old bureau, on the sofa, on the
chairs and all about on the floor, books with notes slipped into them
which were continually changing. The books constantly increased, for
besides bringing whole armfuls back with him from the libraries he
was always getting parcels of them by post. The occupant of this room
might well be a learned man; and to this the all-pervading smell of
cigar-smoke might testify as well as the stumps and ash of cigars all
about the room. A great part of the books, however, were not books
of learning. The majority were works of the poets of all times and
peoples. For a long while there lay about on the sofa where he often
spent whole days all six volumes of a work with the title _Sophia’s
Journey from Memel to Saxony_--a work of the latter part of the
eighteenth century. A complete edition of Goethe and one of Jean
Paul showed signs of wear, also Novalis, while Lessing, Jacobi and
Lichtenberg were in the same condition. A few volumes of Dostoievski
bristled with pencilled slips. On the big table among the books and
papers there was often a vase of flowers. There, too, a paint box,
generally full of dust, reposed among flakes of cigar ash and (to leave
nothing out) sundry bottles of wine. There was a straw-covered bottle
usually containing Italian red wine, which he procured from a little
shop in the neighbourhood; often, too, a bottle of Burgundy as well
as Malaga; and a squat bottle of Cherry brandy was, as I saw, nearly
emptied in a very brief space--after which it disappeared in a corner
of the room, there to collect the dust without further diminution of
its contents. I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried
on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of
intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the
same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a
middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality;
I am also an abstainer and non-smoker, and these bottles in Haller’s
room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.
He was just as irregular and irresponsible about his meal times as he
was about his hours of sleep and work. There were days when he did not
go out at all and had nothing but his coffee in the morning. Sometimes
my aunt found nothing but a banana peel to show that he had dined.
Other days, however, he took his meals in restaurants, sometimes in the
best and most fashionable, sometimes in little out-lying taverns. His
health did not seem good. Besides his limping gait that often made the
stairs fatiguing to him, he seemed to be plagued with other troubles
and he once said to me that it was years since he had had either a
good digestion or sound sleep. I put it down first and last to his
drinking. When, later on, I accompanied him sometimes to his haunts
I often saw with my own eyes how he drank when the mood was on him,
though neither I nor anyone else ever saw him really drunk.
I have never forgotten our first encounter. We knew each other then
only as fellow-lodgers whose rooms were adjoining ones. Then one
evening I came home from business and to my astonishment found Haller
seated on the landing between the first and second floors. He was
sitting on the top step and he moved to one side to let me pass. I
asked him if he was all right and offered to take him up to the top.
Haller looked at me and I could see that I had awoken him from a kind
of trance. Slowly he began to smile his delightful sad smile that has
so often filled my heart with pity. Then he invited me to sit beside
him. I thanked him, but said it was not my custom to sit on the stairs
at other people’s doors.
“Ah, yes,” he said, and smiled the more. “You’re quite right. But wait
a moment, for I really must tell you what it was made me sit here for a
bit.”
He pointed as he spoke to the entrance of the first floor flat, where
a widow lived. In the little space with parquet flooring between the
stairs, the window and the glazed front door there stood a tall
cupboard of mahogany, with some old pewter on it, and in front of
the cupboard on the floor there were two plants, an azalea and an
araucaria, in large pots which stood on low stands. The plants looked
very pretty and were always kept spotlessly neat and clean, as I had
often noticed with pleasure.
“Look at this little vestibule,” Haller went on, “with the araucaria
and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can’t go by without pausing a
moment. At your aunt’s too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and
extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it’s
so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably
clean that it positively glitters. I always have to take a deep breath
of it as I go by; don’t you smell it too? What a fragrance there is
here--the scent of floor polish with a fainter echo of turpentine
blending with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants, of
superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of duty done
and devotion to little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind
that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless
mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s
little habits and tasks.”
“Do not, please, think for a moment,” he went on when I said nothing
in reply, “that I speak with irony. My dear sir, I would not for the
world laugh at the bourgeois life. It is true that I live myself in
another world, and perhaps I could not endure to live a single day in a
house with araucarias. But though I am a shabby old Steppenwolf, still
I’m the son of a mother and my mother too was a middle-class man’s wife
and raised plants and took care to have her house and home as clean and
neat and tidy as ever she could make it. All that is brought back to me
by this breath of turpentine and by the araucaria, and so here I sat me
down then and there; and I look into this quiet little garden of order
and rejoice that such things still are.”
He wanted to get up, but found it difficult; and he did not repulse me
when I offered him a little help. I was silent, but I submitted just
as my aunt had done before me to a certain charm the strange man could
sometimes exercise. We went slowly up the stairs together, and at his
door, the key in his hand, he looked me once more in the eyes in a
friendly way and said: “You’ve come from business? Well, of course,
I know little of all that. I live a bit to one side, on the edge of
things, you see. But you too, I believe, interest yourself in books and
such matters. Your aunt told me one day that you had been through the
Gymnasium and were a good Greek scholar. Now, this morning I came on a
passage in Novalis. May I show it you? It would delight you, I know.”
He took me into his room, which smelt strongly of tobacco, and took
out a book from one of the heaps, turned the leaves and looked for the
passage.
“This is good too, very good,” he said, “listen to this: ‘A man
should be proud of suffering. All suffering is a reminder of our high
estate.’ Fine! Eighty years before Nietzsche. But that is not the
sentence I meant. Wait a moment, here I have it. This: ‘Most men will
not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they
won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And
naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought.
Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business,
he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water
all the same, and one day he will drown.”
He had got hold of me now. I was interested; and I stayed on a short
while with him; and after that we often talked when we met on the
stairs or in the street. On such occasions I always had at first the
feeling that he was being ironical with me. But it was not so. He had
a real respect for me, just as he had for the araucaria. He was so
convinced and conscious of his isolation, his swimming in the water,
his uprootedness, that a glimpse now and then of the orderly daily
round--the punctuality, for example, that kept me to my office hours,
or an expression let fall by a servant or tramway-conductor--acted on
him literally as a stimulus without in the least arousing his scorn. At
first all this seemed to me a ridiculous exaggeration, the affectation
of a gentleman of leisure, a playful sentimentality. But I came to
see more and more that from the empty spaces of his lone wolfishness
he actually really admired and loved our little bourgeois world as
something solid and secure, as the home and peace which must ever
remain far and unattainable, with no road leading from him to them. He
took off his hat to our charwoman, a worthy person, every time he met
her, with genuine respect; and when my aunt had any little occasion to
talk to him, to draw his attention, it might be, to some mending of his
linen or to warn him of a button hanging loose on his coat, he listened
to her with an air of great attention and consequence, as though it
were only with an extreme and desperate effort that he could force his
way through any crack into our little peaceful world and be at home
there if only for an hour.
During that very first conversation, about the araucaria, he called
himself the Steppenwolf, and this too estranged and disturbed me a
little. What an expression! However, custom did not only reconcile me
to it, but soon I never thought of him by any other name; nor could I
to-day hit on a better description of him. A wolf of the Steppes that
had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd,
a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his
savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.
I was able once to observe him for a whole evening. It was at a
Symphony concert, where to my surprise I found him seated near me. He
did not see me. First some Handel was played, noble and lovely music.
But the Steppenwolf sat absorbed in his own thoughts, detached alike
from the music and his surroundings. Unheeding and alone, he sat with
downcast eyes, and a cold but sorrowful expression. After the Handel
came a little Symphony of Friedman Bach and after a few notes I was
astonished to see him begin to smile and give himself up to the music.
He was abstracted--but happily so--and lost in such pleasant dreams,
that for at least ten minutes I paid more attention to him than to the
music. When the piece ended he woke up, and made a movement to go;
but after all he kept his seat and heard the last piece too. It was
_Variations_ by Reger, a composition that many found rather long
and tiresome. The Steppenwolf, too, who at first made up his mind to
listen, wandered again, put his hands into his pockets and sank once
more into his own thoughts, not happily and dreamily as before, but
sadly and finally irritated. His face was once more vacant and grey.
The light in it was quenched and he looked old, ill and discontented.
I saw him again after the concert in the street and walked along behind
him. Wrapped in his cloak he went his way joylessly and wearily in the
direction of our quarter, but stopped in front of a small old-fashioned
inn, and after looking irresolutely at the time, went in. I obeyed a
momentary impulse and followed him; and there he sat at a table in the
backroom of the bar, greeted by hostess and waitress as a well-known
guest. Greeting him, too, I took my seat beside him. We sat there for
an hour, and while I drank two glasses of mineral water, he accounted
for a pint of red wine and then called for another half. I remarked
that I had been to the concert, but he did not follow up this topic. He
read the label on my bottle and asked whether I would not drink some
wine. When I declined his offer and said that I never drank it, the old
helpless expression came over his face.
“You’re quite right there,” he said. “I have practised abstinence
myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find
myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid
constellation.”
And then, when I playfully took up his allusion and remarked how
unlikely it seemed to me that he really believed in astrology, he
promptly resumed the too polite tone which often hurt me and said: “You
are right. Unfortunately, I cannot believe in that science either.”
I took my leave and went. It was very late before he came in, but his
step was as usual, and as always, instead of going straight to bed, he
stayed up an hour longer in his sitting-room, as I from my neighbouring
room could hear plainly enough.
There was another evening which I have not forgotten. My aunt was out
and I was alone in the house, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door
and there stood a young and very pretty woman, whom, as soon as she
asked for Mr. Haller, I recognised from the photograph in his room.
I showed her his door and withdrew. She stayed a short while above,
but soon I heard them both come down stairs and go out, talking and
laughing together very happily. I was much astonished that the hermit
had his love, and one so young and pretty and elegant; and all my
conjectures about him and his life were upset once more. But before an
hour had gone he came back alone and dragged himself wearily upstairs
with his sad and heavy tread. For hours together he paced softly to and
fro in his sitting-room, exactly like a wolf in its cage. The whole
night till close on morning there was light in his room. I know nothing
at all about this occasion, and have only this to add. On one other
occasion I saw him in this lady’s company. It was in one of the streets
of the town. They were arm in arm and he looked very happy; and again I
wondered to see how much charm--what an even child-like expression--his
care-ridden face had sometimes. It explained the young lady to me,
also the predilection my aunt had for him. That day, too, however, he
came back in the evening, sad and wretched as usual. I met him at the
door and under his cloak, as many a time before, he had the bottle of
Italian wine, and he sat with it half the night in his hell upstairs.
It grieved me. What a comfortless, what a forlorn and shiftless life he
led!
And now I have gossiped enough. No more is needed to show that the
Steppenwolf lived a suicidal existence. But all the same I do not
believe that he took his own life when, after paying all he owed but
without a word of warning or farewell, he left our town one day and
vanished. We have not heard from him since and we are still keeping
some letters that came for him after he had left. He left nothing
behind but his manuscript. It was written during the time he was here,
and he left it with a few lines to say that I might do what I liked
with it.
It was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related
in Haller’s manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most
part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention.
They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has
attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences.
The partly fantastic occurrences in Haller’s fiction come presumably
from the later period of his stay here, and I have no doubt that even
they have some basis in real occurrence. At that time our guest did in
fact alter very much in behaviour and in appearance. He was out a great
deal, for whole nights sometimes; and his books lay untouched. On the
rare occasions when I saw him at that time I was very much struck by
his air of vivacity and youth. Sometimes, indeed, he seemed positively
happy. This does not mean that a new and heavy depression did not
follow immediately. All day long he lay in bed. He had no desire for
food. At that time the young lady appeared once more on the scene, and
an extremely violent, I may even say brutal, quarrel occurred which
upset the whole house and for which Haller begged my aunt’s pardon for
days after.
No, I am sure he has not taken his life. He is still alive, and
somewhere wearily goes up and down the stairs of strange houses,
stares somewhere at clean-scoured parquet floors and carefully tended
araucarias, sits for days in libraries and nights in taverns, or lying
on a hired sofa, listens to the world beneath his window and the hum
of human life from which he knows that he is excluded. But he has not
killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to
drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs, and that it
is of this suffering he must die. I think of him often. He has not made
life lighter for me. He had not the gift of fostering strength and joy
in me. Oh, on the contrary! But I am not he, and I live my own life, a
narrow, middle-class life, but a solid one, filled with duties. And so
we can think of him peacefully and affectionately, my aunt and I. She
would have more to say of him than I have, but that lies buried in her
good heart.
* * * * *
And now that we come to these records of Haller’s, these partly
diseased, partly beautiful and thoughtful fantasies, I must confess
that if they had fallen into my hands by chance and if I had not
known their author, I should most certainly have thrown them away in
disgust. But owing to my acquaintance with Haller I have been able,
to some extent, to understand them, and even to appreciate them. I
should hesitate to share them with others if I saw in them nothing but
the pathological fancies of a single and isolated case of a diseased
temperament. But I see something more in them. I see them as a document
of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not
the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times
themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs,
a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless
only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and
richest in gifts.
These records, however much or however little of real life may lie at
the back of them, are not an attempt to disguise or to palliate this
widespread sickness of our times. They are an attempt to present the
sickness itself in its actual manifestation. They mean, literally, a
journey through hell, a sometimes fearful, sometimes courageous journey
through the chaos of a world whose souls dwell in darkness, a journey
undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end to
the other, to give battle to chaos, and to suffer torture to the full.
It was some remembered conversation with Haller that gave me the key
to this interpretation. He said to me once when we were talking of
the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: “These horrors were really
non-existent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of
our present day life as something far more than horrible, far more than
barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its
own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and
ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up
patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering,
to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man
of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate
miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now
there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between
two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all
power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no
simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally
strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills
more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and
misunderstood, thousands suffer to-day.”
I often had to think of these words while reading the records. Haller
belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside
of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate
it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch
of a personal torture, a personal hell.
There, as it seems to me, lies the meaning these records can have for
us, and because of this I decided to publish them. For the rest, I
neither approve nor condemn them. Let every reader do as his conscience
bids him.
HARRY HALLER’S RECORDS
“FOR MADMEN ONLY”
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance
with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or
two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours,
as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the
pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its
kindly warmth. Three times the post had come with undesired letters and
circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found
it convenient to-day to omit the thought exercises. I had been for an
hour’s walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns pencilled
against the sky. That was very delightful. So was the reading of the
old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all,
it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a
day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one
of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the
moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days
of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without
special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days which
put the question quietly of their own accord whether the time has
not come to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have a fatal
accident while shaving.
He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or
those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a
spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture,
or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when,
on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the
world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying,
vulgar, brazen glamour of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of
an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focussed to the last pitch
of the intolerable upon your own sick self--he who has known these
days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like
to-day. Thankfully you sit by the warm stove, thankfully you assure
yourself as you read your morning paper that another day has come and
no war broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no peculiarly
disgusting scandal been unveiled in the worlds of politics or finance.
Thankfully you tune the strings of your mouldering lyre to a moderated,
to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving
and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly muzzy half-and-half
god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom
and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half
god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm
look as like each other as two peas.
There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these
bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is
audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is
that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short
time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation
I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that
cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain
and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these
so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul
that I smash my mouldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the
slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn
in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong
emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless,
flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something,
a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to
pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious
schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one
or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For
what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this
contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved
optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of
mediocrity.
It was in such a mood then that I finished this not intolerable and
very ordinary day as dusk set in. I did not end it in a manner becoming
a rather ailing man and go to bed tempted by a hot water bottle.
Instead I put on my shoes ill-humouredly, discontented and disgusted
with the little work I had done, and went out into the dark and foggy
streets to drink what men according to an old convention call “a glass
of wine,” at the sign of the Steel Helmet.
In this plight then, I went down the steep stairs from my attic-cell
among strangers, those smug and well-brushed stairs of a three-storey
house, let as three flats to highly respectable families. I don’t know
how it comes about, but I, the homeless Steppenwolf, the solitary, the
hater of life’s petty conventions, always take up my quarters in just
such houses as this. It is an old weakness of mine. I live neither
in palatial houses nor in those of the humble poor, but instead and
deliberately in these respectable and wearisome and spotless middle
class homes, which smell of turpentine and soap and where there is
a panic if you bang the door or come in with dirty shoes. The love
of this atmosphere comes, no doubt, from the days of my childhood,
and a secret yearning I have for something homelike drives me, though
with little hope, to follow the same old stupid road. Then again, I
like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly
disorderly existence and this middle-class family-life. I like to
breathe in on the stairs this odour of quiet and order, of cleanliness
and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me
in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the
threshold of my room and leave it suddenly behind; to see, instead,
cigar-ash and wine-bottles among the heaped-up books and there is
nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything--books,
manuscript, thoughts--is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely
men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new
orientation for an age that has lost its bearings.
And now I came to the araucaria. I must tell you that on the first
floor of this house the stairs pass by a little vestibule at the
entrance to a flat which, I am convinced, is even more spotlessly swept
and garnished than the others; for this little vestibule shines with a
super-human housewifery. It is a little temple of order. On the parquet
floor, where it seems desecration to tread, are two elegant stands and
on each a large pot. In the one grows an azalea. In the other a stately
araucaria, a thriving, straight-grown baby-tree, a perfect specimen,
which to the last needle of the topmost twig reflects the pride of
frequent ablutions. Sometimes, when I know that I am unobserved, I use
this place as a temple. I take my seat on a step of the stairs above
the araucaria and, resting awhile with folded hands, I contemplate
this little garden of order and let the touching air it has and its
somewhat ridiculous loneliness move me to the depths of my soul. I
imagine behind this vestibule, in the sacred shadow, one may say, of
the araucaria, a home full of shining mahogany, and a life full of
sound respectability--early rising, attention to duty, restrained but
cheerful family gatherings, Sunday church-going, early to bed.
Affecting lightheartedness, I trod the moist pavements of the narrow
streets. As though in tears and veiled, the lamps glimmered through the
chill gloom and sucked their reflections slowly from the wet ground.
The forgotten years of my youth came back to me. How I used to love the
dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbibed
their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I
strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless
winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and
full of poetry which later I wrote down by candle-light sitting on
the edge of my bed! All that was past now. The cup was emptied and
would never be filled again. Was that a matter for regret? No, I did
not regret the past. My regret was for the present day, for all the
countless hours and days that I lost in mere passivity and that brought
me nothing, not even the shocks of awakening. But, thank God, there
were exceptions. There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that
brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back
again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and
yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences.
It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of
the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped
through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped
all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted
all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very
long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at
night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it
now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading
my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was
blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks
as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more.
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in
verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to
think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished;
and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old
brittle husk. Once it came to me while reading a poet, while pondering
a thought of Descartes, of Pascal; again it shone out and drove its
gold track far into the sky while I was in the presence of my beloved.
Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of
this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness,
with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could I
fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one
of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for
long in either theatre or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper,
seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they
are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the
packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and
variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot
understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for
which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to
me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy
and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in
life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this
music of the cafés, these mass-enjoyments and these Americanised men
who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy.
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast
astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that
is strange and incomprehensible to him.
With these familiar thoughts I went along the wet street through one
of the quietest and oldest quarters of the town. On the opposite side
there stood in the darkness an old stone wall which I always noticed
with pleasure. Old and serene, it stood between a little church and an
old hospital and often during the day I let my eyes rest on its rough
surface. There were few such quiet and peaceful spaces in the centre
of the town where from every square foot some lawyer, or quack, or
doctor, or barber, or chiropodist shouted his name at you. This time,
too, the wall was peaceful, and serene and yet something was altered
in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic
arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether
this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made. It
looked old without a doubt, very old; apparently this closed portal
with its door of blackened wood had opened hundreds of years ago onto
a sleepy convent yard, and did so still, even though the convent was
no longer there. Probably I had seen it a hundred times and simply not
noticed it. Perhaps it had been painted afresh and caught my eye for
that reason. I paused to examine it from where I stood without crossing
over, as the street between was so deep in mud and water. From the
sidewalk where I stood and looked across it seemed to me in the dim
light that a garland, or something gaily coloured, was festooned round
the doorway, and now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a
bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written.
I strained my eyes and at last, in spite of the mud and puddles, went
across, and there over the door I saw a stain showing up faintly on
the grey-green of the wall, and over the stain bright letters dancing
and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once more. So that’s
it, thought I. They’ve disfigured this good old wall with an electric
sign. Meanwhile I deciphered one or two of the letters as they appeared
again for an instant; but they were hard to read even by guess work,
for they came with very irregular spaces between them and very faintly,
and then abruptly vanished. Whoever hoped for any result from a display
like that was not very smart. He was a Steppenwolf, poor fellow. Why
have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the
Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they
so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in
catching several words on end. They were:
MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The
display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its
uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but
no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood
waiting in the mud, but in vain.
Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few coloured
letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front
of me. I read:
FOR MADMEN ONLY!
My feet were wet and I was chilled to the bone. Nevertheless, I stood
waiting. Nothing more. But while I waited, thinking how prettily the
letters had danced in their ghostly fashion over the damp wall and
the black sheen of the asphalt, a fragment of my former thoughts came
suddenly to my mind; the similarity to the track of shining gold which
suddenly vanishes and cannot be found.
I was freezing and walked on following that track in my dreams, longing
too for that doorway to an enchanted theatre, which was for madmen
only. Meanwhile I had reached the Market Place, where there is never a
lack of evening entertainments. At every other step were placards and
posters with their various attractions, Ladies’ Orchestra, Variété,
Cinema, Ball. But none of these were for me. They were for “everybody,”
for those normal persons whom I saw crowding every entrance. In spite
of that my sadness was a little lightened. I had had a greeting from
another world, and a few dancing, coloured letters had played upon my
soul and sounded its secret strings. A glimmer of the golden track had
been visible once again.
I sought out the little ancient tavern where nothing had altered since
my first visit to this town a good twenty-five years before. Even the
landlady was the same as then and many of the patrons who sat there in
those days sat there still at the same places before the same glasses.
There I took refuge. True, it was only a refuge, something like the
one on the stairs opposite the araucaria. Here, too, I found neither
home nor company, nothing but a seat from which to view a stage where
strange people played strange parts. None the less, the quiet of the
place was worth something; no crowds, no music; only a few peaceful
townsfolk at bare wooden tables (no marble, no enamel, no plush, no
brass) and before each his evening glass of good old wine. Perhaps this
company of habitués, all of whom I knew by sight, were all regular
Philistines and had in their Philistine dwellings their altars of the
home dedicated to sheepish idols of contentment; perhaps, too, they
were solitary fellows who had been sidetracked, quiet, thoughtful
topers of bankrupt ideals, lone wolves and poor devils like me. I could
not say. Either homesickness or disappointment, or need of change drew
them there, the married to recover the atmosphere of his bachelor days,
the old official to recall his student years. All of them were silent,
and all were drinkers who would rather, like me, sit before a pint of
Elsasser than listen to a Ladies’ Orchestra. Here I cast anchor, for
an hour, or it might be two. With the first sip of Elsasser I realised
that I had eaten nothing that day since my morning roll.
It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I
read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who
chews and munches another’s words in his mouth, and gives them out
again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole
column of it. And then I devoured a large piece cut from the liver
of a slaughtered calf. Odd indeed! The best was the Elsasser. I am
not fond, for every-day at least, of racy, heady wines that diffuse a
potent charm and have their own particular flavour. What I like the
best is a clean, light, modest country vintage of no special name. One
can carry plenty of it and it has the good and homely flavour of the
land, and of earth and sky and woods. A pint of Elsasser and a piece
of good bread is the best of all meals. By this time, however, I had
already eaten my portion of liver (an unusual indulgence for me, as I
seldom eat meat) and the second pint had been set before me. And this
too was odd: that somewhere in a green valley vines were tended by
good, strong fellows and the wine pressed so that here and there in the
world, far away, a few disappointed, quietly drinking townsfolk and
feckless Steppenwolves could sip a little heart and courage from their
glasses.
For me, at least, the charm worked. As I thought again of that
newspaper article and its jumble of words, a refreshing laughter rose
in me, and suddenly the forgotten melody of those notes of the piano
came back to me again. It soared aloft like a soap-bubble, reflecting
the whole world in miniature on its rainbow surface, and then softly
burst. Could I be altogether lost when that heavenly little melody had
been secretly rooted within me and now put forth its lovely bloom with
all its tender hues? I might be a beast astray, with no sense of its
environment, yet there was some meaning in my foolish life, something
in me gave an answer and was the receiver of those distant calls from
worlds far above. In my brain were stored a thousand pictures:
Giotto’s flock of angels from the blue vaulting of a little church in
Padua, and near them walked Hamlet and the garlanded Ophelia, fair
similitudes of all sadness and misunderstanding in the world, and
there stood Gianozzo, the aeronaut, in his burning balloon and blew a
blast on his horn, Attila carrying his new headgear in his hand, and
the Borobudur reared its soaring sculpture in the air. And though all
these figures lived in a thousand other hearts as well, there were ten
thousand more unknown pictures and tunes there which had no dwelling
place but in me, no eyes to see, no ears to hear them but mine. The
old hospital wall with its grey-green weathering, its cracks and
stains in which a thousand frescoes could be fancied, who responded
to it, who looked into its soul, who loved it, who found the charm of
its colours ever delicately dying away? The old books of the monks,
softly illumined with their miniatures, and the books of the German
poets of two hundred and a hundred years ago whom their own folk have
forgotten, all the thumbed and dampstained volumes, and the works in
print and manuscripts of the old composers, the stout and yellowing
music sheets dreaming their music through a winter sleep--who heard
their spirited, their roguish and yearning tones, who carried through
a world estranged from them a heart full of their spirit and their
charm? Who still remembered that slender cypress on a hill over Gubbio,
that though split and riven by a fall of stone yet held fast to life
and put forth with its last resources a new sparse tuft at top? Who
read by night above the Rhine the cloud-script of the drifting mists?
It was the Steppenwolf. And who over the ruins of his life pursued
its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming
meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret
at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s
presence?
I held my hand over my glass when the landlady wanted to fill it once
more, and got up. I needed no more wine. The golden trail was blazed
and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars. For an
hour I could breathe once more and live and face existence, without the
need to suffer torment, fear or shame.
A cold wind was sifting the fine rain as I went out into the deserted
street. It drove the drops with a patter against the street-lamps where
they glimmered with a glassy sparkle. And now, whither? If I had had
a magic wand at this moment I should have conjured up a small and
charming Louis Seize music-room where a few musicians would have played
me two or three pieces of Handel and Mozart. I was in the very mood for
it, and would have sipped the cool and noble music as gods sip nectar.
Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room,
dreaming by candle light and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How
I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing
the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music
we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night! Once, in
years gone by, I had often known such happiness, but this too time had
taken away. Withered years lay between those days and now.
I loitered as I wended my way homeward; turned up my collar and struck
my stick on the wet pavement. However long I lingered outside I should
find myself all too soon in my top-floor room, my makeshift home,
which I could neither love nor do without; for the time had gone by
when I could spend a wet winter’s night in the open. And now my prayer
was not to let the good mood the evening had given me be spoilt,
neither by the rain, nor by gout, nor by the araucaria; and though
there was no chamber-music to be had nor a lonely friend with his
violin, still that lovely melody was in my head and I could play it
through to myself after a fashion, humming the rhythm of it as I drew
my breath. Reflecting thus, I walked on and on. Yes, even without the
chamber-music and the friend. How foolish to wear oneself out in vain
longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and
with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it
was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of
space in which the stars revolve.
From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively
jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. I stopped a moment.
This kind of music, much as I detested it, had always had a secret
charm for me. It was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable
to all the academic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage
gaiety reached an underworld of instinct and breathed a simple honest
sensuality.
I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw
music, sniffing the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after
it a little too. One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade
and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental
and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly well together and made a
whole. It was the music of decline. There must have been such music
in Rome under the later emperors. Compared with Bach and Mozart and
real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our
art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real
culture. And this music had the merit of a great sincerity. Amiably
and unblushingly negroid, it had the mood of childlike happiness.
There was something of the nigger in it, something of the American,
who with all his strength seems so boyishly fresh and childlike to us
Europeans. Was Europe to become the same? Was it on the way already?
Were we, the old connoisseurs, the reverers of Europe as it used to be,
of genuine music and poetry as once they were, nothing but a pigheaded
minority suffering from a complex neurosis, whom to-morrow would forget
or deride? Was all that we called culture, spirit, soul, all that we
called beautiful and sacred, nothing but a ghost long dead, which only
a few fools like us took for true and living? Had it perhaps indeed
never been true and living? Had all that we poor fools bothered our
heads about never been anything but a phantom?
I was now in the old quarter of the town. The little church stood up
dim and grey and unreal. At once the experience of the evening came
back to me, the mysterious Gothic doorway, the mysterious tablet
above it and the illuminated letters dancing in mockery. How did the
writing run? “Entrance not for Everybody.” And: “For madmen only.” I
scrutinised the old wall opposite in the secret hope that the magic
night might begin again; the writing invite me, the madman; the little
doorway give me admittance. There perhaps lay my desire, and there
perhaps would my music be played.
The dark stone wall looked back at me with composure, shut off in a
deep twilight, sunk in a dream of its own. And there was no gateway
anywhere and no pointed arch; only the dark unbroken masonry. With a
smile I went on, giving it a friendly nod. “Sleep well. I will not
awake you. The time will come when you will be pulled down or plastered
with covetous advertisements. But for the present, there you stand,
beautiful and quiet as ever, and I love you for it.”
From the black mouth of an alley a man appeared with startling
suddenness at my elbow, a lone man going his homeward way with weary
step. He wore a cap and a blue blouse, and above his shoulders he
carried a signboard fixed on a pole, and in front of him an open tray
suspended by straps such as pedlars carry at fairs. He walked on
wearily in front of me without looking round. Otherwise I should have
bidden him a good evening and given him a cigar. I tried to read the
device on his standard--a red signboard on a pole--in the light of the
next lamp; but it swayed to and fro and I could decipher nothing. Then
I called out and asked him to let me read his placard. He stopped and
held his pole a little steadier. Then I could read the dancing reeling
letters:
ANARCHIST EVENING ENTERTAINMENT
MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
“I’ve been looking for you,” I shouted with delight. “What is this
Evening Entertainment? Where is it? When?”
He was already walking on.
“Not for everybody,” he said dully with a sleepy voice. He had had
enough. He was for home, and on he went.
“Stop,” I cried, and ran after him. “What have you got there in your
box? I want to buy something from you.”
Without stopping, the man felt mechanically in his box, pulled out a
little book and held it out to me. I took it quickly and put it in my
pocket. While I felt for the buttons of my coat to get out some money,
he turned in at a doorway, shut the door behind him and disappeared.
His heavy steps rang on a flagged yard, then on wooden stairs; and
then I heard no more. And suddenly I too felt very tired. It came over
me that it must be very late--and high time to go home. I walked
on faster and, following the road to the suburb, I was soon in my
own neighbourhood among the well-kept gardens, where in clean little
apartment houses behind lawn and ivy are the dwellings of officialdom
and people of modest means. Passing the ivy and the grass and the
little fir tree I reached the door of the house, found the keyhole and
the switch, slipped past the glazed doors, and the polished cupboards
and the potted plants and unlocked the door of my room, my little
pretence of a home, where the armchair and the stove, the ink-pot and
the paint-box, Novalis and Dostoievski, awaited me just as do the
mother, or the wife, the children, maids, dogs and cats in the case of
more sensible people.
As I threw off my wet coat I came upon the little book, and took it
out. It was one of those little books wretchedly printed on wretched
paper that are sold at fairs, “Were you born in January?” or “How to be
twenty years younger in a week.”
However, when I settled myself in my armchair and put on my glasses, it
was with great astonishment and a sudden sense of impending fate that I
read the title on the cover of this companion volume to fortune-telling
booklets. “_Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Not for Everybody._”
I read the contents at a sitting with an engrossing interest that
deepened page by page.
TREATISE ON THE STEPPENWOLF
There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two
legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in
reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learnt a good deal of all that
people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow.
What he had not learnt, however, was this: to find contentment in
himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the
bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that
he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes. Clever men
might argue the point whether he truly was a wolf, whether, that is,
he had been changed, before birth perhaps, from a wolf into a human
being, or had been given the soul of a wolf, though born as a human
being; or whether, on the other hand, this belief that he was a wolf
was no more than a fancy or a disease of his. It might, for example,
be possible that in his childhood he was a little wild and disobedient
and disorderly, and that those who brought him up had declared a war of
extinction against the beast in him; and precisely this had given him
the idea and the belief that he was in fact actually a beast with only
a thin covering of the human. On this point one could speak at length
and entertainingly, and indeed write a book about it. The Steppenwolf,
however, would be none the better for it, since for him it was all one
whether the wolf had been bewitched or beaten into him, or whether it
was merely an idea of his own. What others chose to think about it or
what he chose to think himself was no good to him at all. It left the
wolf inside him just the same.
And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This
was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional
one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog
or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any
extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and
the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one
even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to
such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or
the ape in him than to the man. So much for common knowledge. In the
case of Harry, however, it was just the opposite. In him the man and
the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and
deadly enmity. The one existed simply and solely to harm the other,
and when there are two in one blood and in one soul who are at deadly
enmity, then life fares ill. Well, to each his lot, and none is light.
Now with our Steppenwolf it was so that in his conscious life he lived
now as a wolf, now as a man, as indeed the case is with all mixed
beings. But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever
on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he
was man the wolf did just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had
a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a
so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed
and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime
was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his
heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and
now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a female wolf.
Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and
misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt
and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and
enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners
and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched
the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for
him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being.
Thus it was then with the Steppenwolf, and one may well imagine that
Harry did not have an exactly pleasant and happy life of it. This does
not mean, however, that he was unhappy in any extraordinary degree
(although it may have seemed so to himself all the same, inasmuch as
every man takes the sufferings that fall to his share as the greatest).
That cannot be said of any man. Even he who has no wolf in him, may be
none the happier for that. And even the unhappiest life has its sunny
moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone. So
it was, then, with the Steppenwolf too. It cannot be denied that he was
generally very unhappy; and he could make others unhappy also, that is,
when he loved them or they him. For all who got to love him, saw always
only the one side in him. Many loved him as a refined and clever and
interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come
upon the wolf in him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every
sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just
with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal
and belie the wolf. There were those, however, who loved precisely the
wolf in him, the free, the savage, the untamable, the dangerous and
strong, and these found it peculiarly disappointing and deplorable
when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was also a man, and had
hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted to hear Mozart,
to read poetry and to cherish human ideals. Usually these were the
most disappointed and angry of all; and so it was that the Steppenwolf
brought his own dual and divided nature into the destinies of others
besides himself whenever he came into contact with them.
Now, whoever thinks that he knows the Steppenwolf and that he can
imagine to himself his lamentably divided life is nevertheless in
error. He does not know all by a long way. He does not know that, as
there is no rule without an exception and as one sinner may under
certain circumstances be dearer to God than ninety and nine righteous
persons, with Harry too there were now and then exceptions and strokes
of good luck, and that he could breathe and think and feel sometimes as
the wolf, sometimes as the man, clearly and without confusion of the
two; and even on very rare occasions, they made peace and lived for one
another in such fashion that not merely did one keep watch whilst the
other slept but each strengthened and confirmed the other. In the life
of this man, too, as well as in all things else in the world, daily
use and the accepted and common knowledge seemed sometimes to have no
other aim than to be arrested now and again for an instant, and broken
through, in order to yield the place of honour to the exceptional and
miraculous. Now whether these short and occasional hours of happiness
balanced and alleviated the lot of the Steppenwolf in such a fashion
that in the upshot happiness and suffering held the scales even, or
whether perhaps the short but intense happiness of those few hours
outweighed all suffering and left a balance over is again a question
over which idle persons may meditate to their hearts’ content. Even the
wolf brooded often thereover, and those were his idle and unprofitable
days.
In this connection one thing more must be said. There are a good many
people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These
persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and
the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity
for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state
of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the
wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live
at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and
indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so
high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of
it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.
Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise
all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for
an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines
like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and
as a happiness of their own. All these men, whatever their deeds and
works may be, have really no life; that is to say, their lives are not
their own and have no form. They are not heroes, artists or thinkers
in the same way that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers, or
schoolmasters. Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and
torn with pain, terrible and meaningless, unless one is ready to
see its meaning in just those rare experiences, acts, thoughts and
works that shine out above the chaos of such a life. To such men the
desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of
human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the
primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature. To them,
too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not
merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to
immortality.
Men of every kind have their characteristics, their features, their
virtues and vices and their deadly sins. It was part of the sign manual
of the Steppenwolf that he was a night prowler. The morning was a bad
time of day for him. He feared it and it never brought him any good. On
no morning of his life has he ever been in good spirits nor done any
good before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure
for himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and
became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he
productive, active and, sometimes, aglow with joy. With this was bound
up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man
with a deeper and more passionate craving for independence than he. In
his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread,
he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger
his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for money or
an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a
hundred times what in the world’s eyes was his advantage and happiness
in order to safeguard his liberty. No prospect was more hateful and
distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and
conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others. He hated all
kinds of offices, governmental or commercial, as he hated death, and
his worst nightmare was confinement in barracks. He contrived, often
at great sacrifice, to avoid all such predicaments. It was here that
his strength and his virtue rested. On this point he could neither
be bent nor bribed. Here his character was firm and indeflectable.
Only, through this virtue, he was bound the closer to his destiny of
suffering. It happened to him as it does to all; what he strove for
with the deepest and stubbornest instinct of his being fell to his
lot, but more than is good for men. In the beginning his dream and
his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power
is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by
subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He
was ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his
ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and
to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine
impulse bids him seek. But in the midst of the freedom he had attained
Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he
stood alone. The world in an uncanny fashion left him in peace. Other
men concerned him no longer. He was not even concerned about himself.
He began to suffocate slowly in the more and more rarefied atmosphere
of remoteness and solitude. For now it was his wish no longer, nor his
aim, to be alone and independent, but rather his lot and his sentence.
The magic wish had been fulfilled and could not be cancelled, and it
was no good now to open his arms with longing and goodwill to welcome
the bonds of society. People left him alone now. It was not, however,
that he was an object of hatred and repugnance. On the contrary, he had
many friends. A great many people liked him. But it was no more than
sympathy and friendliness. He received invitations, presents, pleasant
letters; but no more. No one came near to him. There was no link left,
and no one could have had any part in his life even had any one wished
it. For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere
in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable
of relationship, an atmosphere again which neither will nor longing
availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.
Another was that he was numbered among the suicides. And here it
must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy
themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a
sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no
necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little
personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their
end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the
suicide by inclination; while on the other hand, of those who are to
be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many,
perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands on themselves. The
“suicide,” and Harry was one, need not necessarily live in a peculiarly
close relationship to death. One may do this without being a suicide.
What is peculiar to the suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly,
is felt to be an extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of
nature; that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary
risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a
crag whence a slight push from without or an instant’s weakness from
within suffices to precipitate him into the void. The line of fate in
the case of these men is marked by the belief they have that suicide
is their most probable manner of death. It might be presumed that such
temperaments, which usually manifest themselves in early youth and
persist through life, show a singular defect of vital force. On the
contrary, among the “suicides” are to be found unusually tenacious and
eager and also hardy natures. But just as there are those who at the
least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides,
and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least
shock the notion of suicide. Had we a science with the courage and
authority to concern itself with mankind, instead of with the mechanism
merely of vital phenomena, had we something of the nature of an
anthropology, or a psychology, these matters of fact would be familiar
to every one.
What was said above on the subject of suicides touches obviously
nothing but the surface. It is psychology, and, therefore, partly
physics. Metaphysically considered, the matter has a different and a
much clearer aspect. In this aspect suicides present themselves as
those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals,
those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and
moulding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the
mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly
incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a
profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides
none the less; for they see death and not life as the releaser. They
are ready to cast themselves away in surrender, to be extinguished and
to go back to the beginning.
As every strength may become a weakness (and under some circumstances
must) so, on the contrary, may the typical suicide find a strength and
a support in his apparent weakness. Indeed, he does so more often than
not. The case of Harry, the Steppenwolf, is one of these. As thousands
of his like do, he found consolation and support, and not merely the
melancholy play of youthful fancy, in the idea that the way to death
was open to him at any moment. It is true that with him, as with all
men of his kind, every shock, every pain, every untoward predicament
at once called forth the wish to find an escape in death. By degrees,
however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy
that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through
familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open,
and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it
went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious
pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can
endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to
open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to whom this
thought imparts an uncommon strength.
On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting
against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well
in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a
mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered
by life than to fall by one’s own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid
conscience whose source is much the same as that of the militant
conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority of
suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation.
They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice. The Steppenwolf
was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged in it with many a
change of weapons. Finally, at the age of forty-seven or thereabouts, a
happy and not unhumorous idea came to him from which he often derived
some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the day on which
he might allow himself to take his own life. On this day, according
to his mood, so he agreed with himself, it should be open to him
to employ the emergency exit or not. Let happen to him what might,
illness, poverty, suffering and bitterness, there was a time-limit.
It could not extend beyond these few years, months, days whose number
daily diminished. And in fact he bore much adversity, which previously
would have cost him severer and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps
to the roots of his being, very much more easily. When for any reason
it went particularly badly with him, when peculiar pains and penalties
were added to the desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life,
he could say to his tormentors: “Only wait, two years and I am your
master.” And with this he cherished the thought of the morning of his
fiftieth birthday. Letters of congratulation would arrive, while he,
relying on his razor, took leave of all his pains and closed the door
behind him. Then gout in the joints, depression of spirits, and all
pains of head and body could look for another victim.
* * * * *
It still remains to elucidate the Steppenwolf as an isolated
phenomenon, in his relation, for example, to the bourgeois world, so
that his symptoms may be traced to their source. Let us take as a
starting point, since it offers itself, his relation to the bourgeoisie.
To take his own view of the matter, the Steppenwolf stood entirely
outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor
social ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as
a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed
from the common run of men by the prerogative of talents that had
something of genius in them. Deliberately, he looked down upon the
ordinary man and was proud that he was not one. Nevertheless his
life in many aspects was thoroughly ordinary. He had money in the
bank and supported poor relations. He was dressed respectably and
inconspicuously, even though without particular care. He was glad to
live on good terms with the police and the tax collectors and other
such powers. Besides this, he was secretly and persistently attracted
to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes
with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest
air of order and comfort. It pleased him to set himself outside it,
with his little vices and extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius,
but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the
bourgeoisie had ceased to exist. He was not at ease with violent and
exceptional persons nor with criminals and outlaws, and he took up his
abode always among the middle classes, with whose habits and standards
and atmosphere he stood in a constant relation, even though it might
be one of contrast and revolt. Moreover, he had been brought up in
a provincial and conventional home and many of the notions and much
of the examples of those days had never left him. In theory he had
nothing whatever against the servant class; yet in practice it would
have been beyond him to take a servant quite seriously as his equal.
He was capable of loving the political criminal, the revolutionary or
intellectual seducer, the outlaw of state and society, as his brother,
but as for theft and robbery, murder and rape, he would not have known
how to deplore them otherwise than in a thoroughly bourgeois manner.
In this way he was always recognising and affirming with one half of
himself, in thought and act, what with the other half he fought against
and denied. Brought up, as he was, in a cultivated home in the approved
manner, he never tore part of his soul loose from its conventionalities
even after he had long since individualised himself to a degree beyond
its scope and freed himself from the substance of its ideals and
beliefs.
Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be
found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance.
It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and
opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these
coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is
immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up
wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of
saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely
to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all
his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path
leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to
God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the
flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is between the two, in the
middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never
surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a
martyr nor agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is
not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for
the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be
ready to serve God, but not by giving up the flesh-pots. He is ready
to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world
as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two
extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and
in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life
and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely
except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing
more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the
cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His
harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as
he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant
temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is
consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful
of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted
majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for
responsibility.
It is clear that this weak and anxious being, in whatever numbers he
exists, cannot maintain himself, and that qualities such as his can
play no other rôle in the world than that of a herd of sheep among free
roving wolves. Yet we see that, though in times when commanding natures
are uppermost, the bourgeois goes at once to the wall, he never goes
under; indeed at times he even appears to rule the world. How is this
possible? Neither the great numbers of the herd, nor virtue, nor common
sense, nor organisation could avail to save it from destruction. No
medicine in the world can keep a pulse beating that from the outset was
so weak. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie prospers. Why?
The answer runs: Because of the Steppenwolves. In fact, the vital
force of the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its
normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous “outsiders”
who by virtue of the extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can
embrace. There is always a large number of strong and wild natures who
share the life of the fold. Our Steppenwolf, Harry, is a characteristic
example. He who is developed far beyond the level possible to the
bourgeois, he who knows the bliss of meditation no less than the gloomy
joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who despises law, virtue and common
sense, is nevertheless captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape
it. And so all through the mass of the real bourgeoisie are interposed
numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every
one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the
call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by sentiments
of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense
life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by obligation
and service. For with the bourgeoisie the opposite of the formula for
the great is true: He who is not against me is with me.
If we now pause to test the soul of the Steppenwolf, we find him
distinct from the bourgeois in the higher development of his
individuality--for all extensions of the individuality revolve upon the
self and tend to destroy it. We see that he had in him a strong impulse
both to the saint and the profligate; and yet he could not, owing
to some weakness or inertia, make the plunge into the untrammelled
realms of space. The parent constellation of the bourgeoisie binds
him with its spell. This is his place in the universe and this his
bondage. Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type.
Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of
the Bourgeois-Earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign
themselves, or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet
belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last
resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives
of these infinitely numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but
they live under an evil star in a quite considerable affliction; and in
this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit. The few who break free
seek their reward in the unconditioned and go down in splendour. They
wear the thorn crown and their number is small. The others, however,
who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps
much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet
a sovereign world, humour. The lone wolves who know no peace, these
victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied
and who can never break through the starry space, who feel themselves
summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere--for them is
reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough and elastic
enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humour. Humour has
always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is
incapable of understanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and
many-faceted ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realisation. Here
it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one
breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the bourgeois, too,
in the same affirmation. Now it is possible to be possessed by God and
to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either
saint or sinner (nor for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as
well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois. Humour alone, that magnificent
discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest
endeavour, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts
as in affliction, humour alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant
achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every
aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the
world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to
stand above it, to have possessions as though “one possessed nothing,”
to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favourite and
often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in
the power of humour alone to make efficacious.
And supposing the Steppenwolf were to succeed, and he has gifts and
resources in plenty, in decocting this magic draught in the sultry
mazes of his hell, his rescue would be assured. Yet there is much
lacking. The possibility, the hope only are there. Whoever loves him
and takes his part may wish him this rescue. It would, it is true, keep
him forever tied to the bourgeois world, but his suffering would be
bearable and productive. His relation to the bourgeois world would lose
its sentimentality both in its love and its hatred, and his bondage to
it would cease to cause him the continual torture of shame.
To attain to this, or, perhaps it may be, to be able at last to dare
the leap into the unknown, a Steppenwolf must once have a good look
at himself. He must look deeply into the chaos of his own soul and
plumb its depths. The riddle of his existence would then be revealed
to him at once in all its changelessness, and it would be impossible
for him ever after to escape first from the hell of the flesh to the
comforts of a sentimental philosophy and then back to the blind orgy
of his wolfishness. Man and wolf would then be compelled to recognise
one another without the masks of false feeling and to look one another
straight in the eye. Then they would either explode and separate
forever, and there would be no more Steppenwolf, or else they would
come to terms in the dawning light of humour.
It is possible that Harry will one day be led to this latter
alternative. It is possible that he will learn one day to know himself.
He may get hold of one of our little mirrors. He may encounter the
Immortals. He may find in one of our magic theatres the very thing that
is needed to free his neglected soul. A thousand such possibilities
await him. His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those
outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magic
possibilities. A mere nothing suffices--and the lightning strikes.
And all this is very well known to the Steppenwolf, even though his
eye may never fall on this fragment of his inner biography. He has
a suspicion of his allotted place in the world, a suspicion of the
Immortals, a suspicion that he may meet himself face to face; and he is
aware of the existence of that mirror in which he has such bitter need
to look and from which he shrinks in such deathly fear.
* * * * *
For the close of our study there is left one last fiction, a
fundamental delusion to make clear. All interpretation, all psychology,
all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of
theories, mythologies and lies; and a self-respecting author should not
omit, at the close of an exposition, to dissipate these lies so far as
may be in his power. If I say “above” or “below,” that is already a
statement that requires explanation, since an above and a below exist
only in thought, only as abstractions. The world itself knows nothing
of above or below.
So too, to come to the point, is the Steppenwolf a fiction. When Harry
feels himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile
and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological
simplification. He is no were-wolf at all, and if we appeared to accept
without scrutiny this lie which he invented for himself and believes
in, and tried to regard him literally as a two-fold being and a
Steppenwolf, and so designated him, it was merely in the hope of being
more easily understood with the assistance of a delusion, which we must
now endeavour to put in its true light.
The division into wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which
Harry tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself is a
very great simplification. It is a forcing of the truth to suit a
plausible, but erroneous, explanation of that contradiction which
this man discovers in himself and which appears to himself to be
the source of his by no means negligible sufferings. Harry finds
in himself a “human being,” that is to say, a world of thoughts and
feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this
he finds within himself also a “wolf,” that is to say, a dark world
of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature.
In spite of this apparently clear division of his being between two
spheres, hostile to one another, he has known happy moments now and
then when the man and the wolf for a short while were reconciled with
one another. Suppose that Harry tried to ascertain in any single moment
of his life, any single act, what part the man had in it and what part
the wolf, he would find himself at once in a dilemma, and his whole
beautiful wolf-theory would go to pieces. For there is not a single
human being, not even the primitive negro, not even the idiot, who
is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum
of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man
as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly
childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not
of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two
poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but
between thousand and thousands.
We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as
Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and
complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary
and primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and
even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees
the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and
artless simplifications--and most of all himself. For it appears to
be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a
unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered,
it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and
looks into his face, and at one moment recognises all the emotions
and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul
and hears the murderer’s voice as his own is at the next moment one
and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of
his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to
death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon
men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that,
as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of
the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of
selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them
under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania
and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth
from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words,
why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident,
when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore,
who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is
already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting
person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is
in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos
of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It
appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for
everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of
his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed
phenomenon. Even the best of us share the delusion.
The delusion rests simply upon a false analogy. As a body everyone
is single, as a soul never. In literature, too, even in its ultimate
achievement, we find this customary concern with apparently whole and
single personalities. Of all literature up to our days the drama has
been the most highly prized by writers and critics, and rightly, since
it offers (or might offer) the greatest possibilities of representing
the ego as a manifold entity, but for the optical illusion which makes
us believe that the characters of the play are one-fold entities by
lodging each one in an undeniable body, singly, separately and once
and for all. An artless æsthetic criticism, then, keeps its highest
praise for this so-called character-drama in which each character makes
his appearance unmistakably as a separate and single entity. Only from
afar and by degrees the suspicion dawns here and there that all this
is perhaps a cheap and superficial æsthetic philosophy; and that we
make a mistake in attributing to our great dramatists those magnificent
conceptions of beauty that come to us from antiquity. These conceptions
are not native to us, but are merely picked up at second hand, and it
is in them, with their common source in the visible body, that the
origin of the fiction of an ego, an individual, is really to be found.
There is no trace of such a notion in the poems of ancient India. The
heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of
individualities in a series incarnations. And in modern times there are
poems, in which, behind the veil of a concern with individuality and
character that is scarcely, indeed, in the author’s mind, the motive
is to present a manifold activity of soul. Whoever wishes to recognise
this must resolve once and for all not to regard the characters of
such a poem as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects
of a higher unity, in my opinion, of the poet’s soul. If “Faust,” is
treated in this way, Faust, Mephistopheles, Wagner and the rest form
a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity
alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true
nature of the soul is revealed. When Faust, in a line immortalised
among schoolmasters and greeted with a shudder of astonishment by the
Philistine, says: “Two souls, alas, inhabit in my breast!” he has
forgotten Mephisto and a whole crowd of other souls that he has in his
breast likewise. The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he bears two souls
(wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably
cramped because of them. The breast and the body are indeed one, but
the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in
number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture
made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough,
and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking
the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many
changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years
to unmask is the same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard
to maintain and strengthen.
If we consider the Steppenwolf from this standpoint it will be clear
to us why he suffered so much under his ludicrous dual personality. He
believes, like Faust, that two souls are far too many for a single
breast and must tear the breast asunder. They are on the contrary far
too few, and Harry does shocking violence to his poor soul when he
endeavours to apprehend it by means of so primitive an image. Although
he is a most cultivated person, he proceeds like a savage that cannot
count further than two. He calls himself part wolf, part man, and
with that he thinks he has come to an end and exhausted the matter.
With the “man” he packs in everything spiritual and sublimated or
even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf all that
is instinctive, savage and chaotic. But things are not so simple in
life as in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic
language; and Harry lies about himself twice over when he employs this
niggardly wolf-theory. He assigns, we fear, whole provinces of his soul
to the “man” which are a long way from being human, and parts of his
being to the wolf that long ago have left the wolf behind.
Like all men Harry believes that he knows very well what man is and
yet does not know at all, although in dreams and other states not
subject to control he often has his suspicions. If only he might not
forget them, but keep them, as far as possible at least, for his own.
Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of
suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal
of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He
is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and
spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God.
His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the
two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute. What is commonly
meant, meanwhile, by the word “man” is never anything more than a
transient agreement, a bourgeois compromise. Certain of the more naked
instincts are excluded and penalised by this concordat; a degree of
human consciousness and culture are won from the beast; and a small
modicum of spirit is not only permitted but even encouraged. The “man”
of this concordat, like every other bourgeois ideal, is a compromise, a
timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of cheating both the
angry primal mother Nature and the troublesome primal father Spirit of
their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone between the
two of them. For this reason the bourgeois to-day burns as heretics and
hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments to-morrow.
That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the
spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that
the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distance
and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom
it is the scaffold to-day and the monument to-morrow--all this the
Steppenwolf, too, suspected. What, however, he calls the “man” in
himself, as opposed to the wolf, is to a great extent nothing else than
this very same average man of the bourgeois convention.
As for the way to true manhood, the way to the immortals, he has, it
is true, an inkling of it and starts upon it now and then for a few
hesitating steps and pays for them with much suffering and many pangs
of loneliness. But as for striving with assurance, in response to that
supreme demand, towards the genuine manhood of the spirit, and going
the one narrow way to immortality, he is deeply afraid of it. He knows
too well that it leads to still greater sufferings, to proscription,
to the last renunciation, perhaps to the scaffold, and even though
the enticement of immortality lies at the journey’s end, he is still
unwilling to suffer all these sufferings and to die all these deaths.
Though the end of manhood is better known to him than to the bourgeois,
still he shuts his eyes. He is resolved to forget that the desperate
clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest
way to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one’s self
naked, and the eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with
them. When he worships his favourites among the immortals, Mozart,
it may be, he regards him always in the long run with the bourgeois
eye. His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as
a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as
the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his
indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under
that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the
bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become
men, that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane.
This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian
two-fold nature within him. He has discovered that the one-fold of the
body is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is
only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony.
He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to
renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf’s life. It may be
presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done
so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in
spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being
of manifold states and strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The
wolf, too, suffers. No, back to nature is a false track that leads
nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry can never turn back again
and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even
the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of
manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls
in his wolf’s breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the
same forgetfulness as the man who sings: “If I could be a child once
more!” He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of
the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has
quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and
complexities and capable of all suffering.
There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From
the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created
thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has
been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back
again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God
leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever
further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Suicide, even, unhappy
Steppenwolf, will not seriously serve your turn. You will find yourself
embarked on the longer and wearier and harder road to human life. You
will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate
your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and
simplifying your soul, you will at last take the whole world into
your soul, cost what it may, before you are through and come to rest.
This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether
consciously or not, in so far as fortune favoured his quest. All births
betoken the parting from the All, the confinement within limitation,
the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return
into the All betokens the lifting of the personality through suffering
till it reaches God, the expansion of the soul until it is able once
more to embrace the All.
We are not dealing here with man as he is known to economics and
statistics, as he is seen thronging the streets by the million, and of
whom no more account can be made than of the sand of the sea or the
spray of its waves. We are not concerned with the few millions less or
more. They are a stock-in-trade, nothing else. No, we are speaking of
man in the highest sense, of the end of the long road to true manhood,
of kingly men, of the immortals. Genius is not so rare as we sometimes
think; nor, certainly, so frequent as may appear from history books or,
indeed, from the newspapers. Harry has, we should say, genius enough
to attempt the quest of true manhood instead of discoursing pitifully
about his stupid Steppenwolf at every difficulty encountered.
It is as much a matter for surprise and sorrow that men of such
possibilities should fall back on Steppenwolves and “Two souls, alas!”
as that they reveal so often that pitiful love for the bourgeoisie. A
man who can understand Buddha and has an intuition of the heaven and
hell of humanity ought not to live in a world ruled by “common sense”
and democracy and bourgeois standards. It is only from cowardice that
he lives in it; and if its dimensions are too cramping for him and
the bourgeois parlour too confined, he lays it at the wolf’s door,
and refuses to see that the wolf is as often as not the best part
of him. All that is wild in himself he calls wolf and considers it
wicked and dangerous and the bugbear of all decent life. He cannot
see, even though he thinks himself an artist and possessed of delicate
perceptions, that a great deal else exists in him besides and behind
the wolf. He cannot see that not all that bites is wolf and that
fox, dragon, tiger, ape and bird of paradise are there also. Yet he
allows this whole world, a garden of Eden in which are manifestations
of beauty and terror, of greatness and meanness, of strength and
tenderness, to be huddled together and shut away by the wolf-legend,
just as is the real man in him by the shams and pretences of a
bourgeois existence.
Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a
thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables.
Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other
distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this
garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting
flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a
loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the
thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either
man or wolf he does not see at all. And consider all that he imputes to
“man”! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean--while to the
wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself its master,
is set down all that is strong and noble.
Now we bid Harry good-bye and leave him to go on his way alone. Were he
already among the immortals--were he already there at the goal to which
his difficult path seems to be taking him, with what amazement he would
look back to all this coming and going, all this indecision and wild
zig-zag trail. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and
joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf.
When I had read to the end it came to my mind that some weeks before
I had written one night a rather peculiar poem, likewise about the
Steppenwolf. I made a search among the snow-drift of papers on my
writing table, found it, and read:
The Wolf trots to and fro,
The world lies deep in snow,
The raven from the birch tree flies,
But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe.
The roe--she is so dear, so sweet--
If such a thing I might surprise
In my embrace, my teeth would meet,
What else is there beneath the skies?
The lovely creature I would so treasure,
And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,
I would drink of her red blood full measure,
Then howl till the night went by.
Even a hare I would not despise;
Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.
Is everything to be denied
That could make life a little bright?
The hair on my brush is getting grey.
The sight is failing from my eyes.
Years ago my dear mate died.
And now I trot and dream of a roe.
I trot and dream of a hare.
I hear the wind of midnight howl.
I cool with the snow my burning jowl,
And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.
So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait
in doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with
the air of a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew
more and yet less of me than I did myself. And both these pictures
of myself, my dispirited and halting poem and the clever study by an
unknown hand, equally afflicted me. Both were right. Both gave the
unvarnished truth about my shiftless existence. Both showed clearly
how unbearable and untenable my situation was. Death was decreed for
this Steppenwolf. He must with his own hand make an end of his detested
existence--unless, molten in the fire of a renewed self-knowledge, he
underwent a change and passed over to a self, new and undisguised.
Alas! this transition was not unknown to me. I had often experienced it
already, and always in times of the utmost despair. On each occasion
of this terribly uprooting experience myself, as it then was, was
shattered to fragments. Each time deep-seated powers had shaken and
destroyed it; each time there had followed the loss of a cherished
and particularly beloved part of my life that was true to me no more.
Once, I had lost my profession and livelihood. I had had to forfeit
the esteem of those who before had touched their caps to me. Next, my
family life fell in ruins over night, when my wife, whose mind was
disordered, drove me from house and home. Love and confidence had
changed of a sudden to hate and deadly enmity and the neighbours saw me
go with pitying scorn. It was then that my solitude had its beginning.
Years of hardship and bitterness went by. I had built up the ideal of a
new life, inspired by the asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a
certain serenity and elevation of life once more, submitting myself to
the practice of abstract thought and to a rule of austere meditation.
But this mould, too, was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted
and noble intent. A whirl of travel drove me afresh over the earth;
fresh sufferings were heaped up, and fresh guilt. And every occasion
when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful
vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and
unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelessness and despair,
such as I had now to pass through once more.
It is true that every time my life was shattered in this way I
had in the end gained something, some increase in liberty and in
spiritual growth and depth, but with it went an increased loneliness,
an increasing chill of severance and estrangement. Looked at with
the bourgeois eye, my life had been a continuous descent from one
shattering to the next that left me more remote at every step from
all that was normal, permissible and healthful. The passing years
had stripped me of my calling, my family, my home. I stood outside
all social circles, alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many, in
unceasing and bitter conflict with public opinion and morality; and
though I lived in a bourgeois setting, I was all the same an utter
stranger to this world in all I thought and felt. Religion, country,
family, state all lost their value and meant nothing to me any more.
The pomposity of the sciences, societies, and arts disgusted me. My
views and tastes and all that I thought, once the shining adornments of
a gifted and sought-after person, had run to seed in neglect and were
looked at askance. Granting that I had in the course of all my painful
transmutations made some invisible and unaccountable gain, I had had
to pay dearly for it; and at every turn my life was harsher, more
difficult, lonely and perilous. In truth, I had little cause to wish to
continue in that way which led on into ever thinner air, like the smoke
in Nietzsche’s harvest song.
Oh, yes, I had experienced all these changes and transmutations that
fate reserves for her difficult children, her ticklish customers.
I knew them only too well. I knew them as well as a zealous but
unsuccessful sportsman knows the stands at a shoot; as an old gambler
on the Exchange knows each stage of speculation, the scoop, the
weakening market, the break and bankruptcy. Was I really to live
through all this again? All this torture, all this pressing need, all
these glimpses into the paltriness and worthlessness of my own self,
the frightful dread lest I succumb, and the fear of death. Wasn’t it
better and simpler to prevent a repetition of so many sufferings and
to quit the stage? Certainly, it was simpler and better. Whatever
the truth of all that was said in the little book on the Steppenwolf
about “suicides,” no one could forbid me the satisfaction of invoking
the aid of a gas-stove or a razor or revolver, and so sparing myself
this repetition of a process whose bitter agony I had had to drink
often enough, surely, and to the dregs. No, in all conscience, there
was no power in the world that could prevail with me to go through
the mortal terror of another encounter with myself, to face another
reorganisation, a new incarnation, when at the end of the road there
was no peace or quiet--but forever destroying the self, in order to
renew the self. Let suicide be as stupid, cowardly, shabby as you
please, call it an infamous and ignominious escape; still, any escape,
even the most ignominious, from this treadmill of suffering was the
only thing to wish for. No stage was left for the noble and heroic
heart. Nothing was left but the simple choice between a slight and
swift pang and an unthinkable, a devouring and endless suffering. I had
played Don Quixote often enough in my difficult, crazed life, had put
honour before comfort, and heroism before reason. There was an end of
it!
Daylight was dawning through the window panes, the leaden, infernal
daylight of a rainy winter’s day, when at last I got to bed. I took
my resolution to bed with me. At the very last, however, on the last
verge of consciousness in the moment of falling asleep, the remarkable
passage in the Steppenwolf pamphlet which deals with the immortals
flashed through me. With it came the enchanting recollection that
several times, the last quite recently, I had felt near enough to the
immortals to share in one measure of old music their cool, bright,
austere and yet smiling wisdom. The memory of it soared, shone out,
then died away; and heavy as a mountain, sleep descended on my brain.
I woke about midday, and at once the situation, as I had disentangled
it, came back to me. There lay the little book on my bed-side table,
and my poem. My resolution, too, was there. After the night’s sleep
it had taken shape and looked at me out of the confusion of my youth
with a calm and friendly greeting. Haste makes no speed. My resolve to
die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had
grown slowly to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose
next breath would bring it to the ground.
I had in my medicine-chest an excellent means of stilling pain--an
unusually strong tincture of laudanum. I indulged very rarely in it
and often refrained from using it for months at a time. I had recourse
to the drug only when physical pain plagued me beyond endurance.
Unfortunately, it was of no use in putting an end to myself. I had
proved this some years before. Once when despair had again got the
better of me I had swallowed a big dose of it--enough to kill six
men, and yet it had not killed me. I fell asleep, it is true, and
lay for several hours completely stupefied; but then to my frightful
disappointment I was half awakened by violent convulsions of the
stomach and fell asleep once more. It was the middle of the next day
when I woke up in earnest in a state of dismal sobriety. My empty brain
was burning and I had almost lost my memory. Apart from a spell of
insomnia and severe pains in the stomach no trace of the poison was
left.
This expedient, then, was no good. But I put my resolution in this way:
the next time I felt that I must have recourse to the opium, I might
allow myself to use big means instead of small, that is, a death of
absolute certainty with a bullet or a razor. Then I could be sure.
As for waiting till my fiftieth birthday, as the little book wittily
prescribed--this seemed to me much too long a delay. There were still
two years till then. Whether it were a year hence or a month, were it
even the following day, the door stood open.
I cannot say that the resolution altered my life very profoundly. It
made me a little more indifferent to my afflictions, a little freer
in the use of opium and wine, a little more inquisitive to know the
limits of endurance, but that was all. The other experiences of that
evening had a stronger after-effect. I read the Steppenwolf treatise
through again many times, now submitting gratefully to an invisible
magician because of his wise conduct of my destiny, now with scorn and
contempt for its futility, and the little understanding it showed of
my actual disposition and predicament. All that was written there of
Steppenwolves and suicides was very good, no doubt, and very clever. It
might do for the species, the type; but it was too wide a mesh to catch
my own individual soul, my unique and unexampled destiny.
What, however, occupied my thoughts more than all else was the
hallucination, or vision, of the church wall. The announcement made
by the dancing illuminated letters promised much that was hinted at
in the treatise, and the voices of that strange world had powerfully
aroused my curiosity. For hours I pondered deeply over them. On
these occasions I was more and more impressed by the warning of that
inscription--“Not for everybody!” and “For madmen only!” Madman, then,
I must certainly be and far from the mould of “everybody” if those
voices reached me and that world spoke to me. In heaven’s name, had I
not long ago been remote from the life of everybody and from normal
thinking and normal existence? Had I not long ago given ample margin
to isolation and madness? All the same, I understood the summons well
enough in my innermost heart. Yes, I understood the invitation to
madness and the jettison of reason and the escape from the clogs of
convention in surrender to the unbridled surge of spirit and fantasy.
One day after I had made one more vain search through streets and
squares for the man with the signboard and prowled several times past
the wall of the invisible door with watchful eye, I met a funeral
procession in St. Martin’s. While I was contemplating the faces of
the mourners who followed the hearse with halting step, I thought to
myself, “Where in this town or in the whole world is the man whose
death would be a loss to me? And where is the man to whom my death
would mean anything?” There was Erica, it is true, but for a long while
we had lived apart. We rarely saw one another without quarreling and at
the moment I did not even know her address. She came to see me now and
then, or I made the journey to her, and since both of us were lonely,
difficult people related somehow to one another in soul, and sickness
of soul, there was a link between us that held in spite of all. But
would she not perhaps breathe more freely if she heard of my death? I
did not know. I did not know either how far my own feeling for her was
to be relied upon. To know anything of such matters one needs to live
in a world of practical possibilities.
Meanwhile, obeying my fancy, I had fallen in at the rear of the funeral
procession and jogged along behind the mourners to the cemetery, an
up-to-date affair all of concrete, and complete with crematorium. The
deceased in question was not however to be cremated. His coffin was set
down before a simple hole in the ground, and I saw the clergyman and
the other vultures and functionaries of a burial establishment going
through their performances, to which they endeavoured to give all the
appearance of great ceremony and sorrow and with such effect that they
outdid themselves and from pure play-acting they got caught in their
own lies and ended by being comic. I saw how their black professional
robes fell in folds, and what pains they took to work up the company
of mourners and to force them to bend the knee before the majesty of
death. It was labour in vain. Nobody wept. The deceased did not appear
to have been indispensable. Nor could any one be talked into a pious
fra
