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

frame of mind; and when the clergyman addressed the company repeatedly

as “dear fellow-Christians,” all the silent faces of these shop-people

and master-bakers and their wives were turned down in embarrassment

and expressed nothing but the wish that this uncomfortable function

might soon be over. When the end came, the two foremost of the

fellow-Christians shook the clergyman’s hand, scraped the moist clay in

which the dead had been laid from their shoes at the next scraper and

without hesitation their faces again showed their natural expression;

and then it was that one of them seemed suddenly familiar. It was, so

it seemed to me, the man who had carried the signboard and thrust the

little book into my hands.

At the moment when I thought I recognised him he stopped and, stooping

down, carefully turned up his black trousers, and then walked away at

a smart pace with his umbrella clipped under his arm. I walked after

him, but when I overtook him and gave him a nod, he did not appear to

recognise me.

“Is there no show to-night?” I asked with an attempt at a wink such

as two conspirators give each other. But it was long ago that such

pantomime was familiar to me. Indeed, living as I did, I had almost

lost the habit of speech, and I felt myself that I only made a silly

grimace.

“Show to-night?” he growled, and looked at me as though he had never

set eyes on me before. “Go to the Black Eagle, man, if that’s what you

want.”

And, in fact, I was no longer certain it was he. I was disappointed and

feeling the disappointment I walked on aimlessly. I had no motives, no

incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I

felt that the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that

life pushed me out and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets

in a rage and everything smelt of moist earth and burial. I swore that

none of these death-vultures should stand at my grave, with cassocks

and fellow-christianly murmurings. Ah, look where I might and think

what I might, there was no cause for rejoicing and nothing beckoned

me. There was nothing to charm me or tempt me. Everything was old,

withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay.

Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and

poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals--and now

this! How had this paralysis of hatred against myself and every one

else, this obstruction of all feeling, this mud-hell of an empty heart

and despair crept over me so softly and so slowly?

Passing by the Library I met a young professor of whom in earlier years

I used occasionally to see a good deal. When I last stayed in the town,

some years before, I had even been several times to his house to talk

oriental mythology, a study in which I was then very much interested.

He came in my direction walking stiffly and with a short-sighted air

and only recognised me at the last moment as I was passing by. In my

lamentable state I was half-thankful for the cordiality with which he

threw himself on me. His pleasure in seeing me became quite lively as

he recalled the talks we had had together and assured me that he owed a

great deal to the stimulus they had given him and that he often thought

of me. He had rarely had such stimulating and productive discussions

with any colleague since. He asked how long I had been in the town

(I lied and said “a few days”) and why I had not looked him up. The

learned man held me with his friendly eye and, though I really found

it all ridiculous, I could not help enjoying these crumbs of warmth

and kindliness, and was lapping them up like a starved dog. Harry,

the Steppenwolf, was moved to a grin. Saliva collected in his parched

throat and against his will he bowed down to sentiment. Yes, zealously

piling lie upon lie, I said that I was only here in passing, for the

purpose of research, and should of course have paid him a visit but

that I had not been feeling very fit. And when he went on to invite me

very heartily to spend the evening with him, I accepted with thanks and

sent my greetings to his wife, until my cheeks fairly ached with the

unaccustomed efforts of all these forced smiles and speeches. And while

I, Harry Haller, stood there in the street, flattered and surprised

and studiously polite and smiling into the good fellow’s kindly,

short-sighted face, there stood the other Harry, too, at my elbow

and grinned likewise. He stood there and grinned as he thought what

a funny, crazy, dishonest fellow I was to show my teeth in rage and

curse the whole world one moment and, the next, to be falling all over

myself in the eagerness of my response to the first amiable greeting

of the first good honest fellow who came my way, to be wallowing

like a suckling-pig in the luxury of a little pleasant feeling and

friendly esteem. Thus stood the two Harrys, neither playing a very

pretty part, over against the worthy professor, mocking one another,

watching one another, and spitting at one another, while as always in

such predicaments, the eternal question presented itself whether all

this was simple stupidity and human frailty, a common depravity, or

whether this sentimental egoism and perversity, this slovenliness and

two-facedness of feeling was merely a personal idiosyncrasy of the

Steppenwolves. And if this nastiness was common to men in general, I

could rebound from it with renewed energy into hatred of all the world,

but if it was a personal frailty, it was good occasion for an orgy of

hatred of myself.

While my two selves were thus locked in conflict, the professor was

almost forgotten; and when the oppressiveness of his presence came

suddenly back to me, I made haste to be relieved of it. I looked after

him for a long while as he disappeared into the distance along the

leafless avenue with the good-natured and slightly comic gait of an

ingenuous idealist. Within me, the battle raged furiously. Mechanically

I bent and unbent my stiffened fingers as though to fight the ravages

of a secret poison, and at the same time had to realise that I had been

nicely framed. Round my neck was the invitation for 8:30, with all

its obligations of politeness, of talking shop and of contemplating

another’s domestic bliss. And so home--in wrath. Once there, I poured

myself out some brandy and water, swallowed some of my gout pills with

it, and, lying on the sofa, tried to read. No sooner had I succeeded

in losing myself for a moment in _Sophia’s Journey from Memel to

Saxony_, a delightful old book of the eighteenth century, than the

invitation came over me of a sudden and reminded me that I was neither

shaved nor dressed. Why, in heaven’s name, had I brought all this on

myself? Well, get up, so I told myself, lather yourself, scrape your

chin till it bleeds, dress and show an amiable disposition towards your

fellow-men. And while I lathered my face, I thought of that sordid

hole in the clay of the cemetery into which some unknown person had

been lowered that day. I thought of the pinched faces of the bored

fellow-Christians and I could not even laugh. There in that sordid hole

in the clay, I thought, to the accompaniment of stupid and insincere

ministrations and the no less stupid and insincere demeanour of the

group of mourners, in the discomforting sight of all the metal crosses

and marble slabs and artificial flowers of wire and glass, ended

not only that unknown man, and, to-morrow or the day after, myself

as well, buried in the soil with a hypocritical show of sorrow--no,

there and so ended everything; all our striving, all our culture, all

our beliefs, all our joy and pleasure in life--already sick and soon

to be buried there too. Our whole civilization was a cemetery where

Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but

the indecipherable names on mouldering stones; and the mourners who

stood round affecting a pretence of sorrow would give much to believe

in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one

heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more.

And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a company

round a grave. As I raged on like this I cut my chin in the usual place

and had to apply a caustic to the wound; and even so there was my clean

collar, scarce put on, to change again, and all this for an invitation

that did not give me the slightest pleasure. And yet a part of me

began play-acting again, calling the professor a sympathetic fellow,

yearning after a little talk and intercourse with my fellow men,

reminding me of the professor’s pretty wife, prompting me to believe

that an evening spent with my pleasant host and hostess would be in

reality positively cheering, helping me to clap some court plaster to

my chin, to put on my clothes and tie my tie well, and gently putting

me, in fact, far from my genuine desire of staying at home. Whereupon

it occurred to me--so it is with every one. Just as I dress and go

out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere

compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with

the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives

and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry

on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs;

and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it

could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed

it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like

me, the critics of their own lives and recognising the stupidity and

shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and

the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a

thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing

their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring

into the void as I do who have left the track. Let no one think that

I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I scorn and

even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of my

personal misery. But now that I have come so far, and standing as I do

on the extreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into

bottomless darkness, I should do wrong and I should lie if I pretended

to myself or to others that that machine still revolved for me and that

I was still obedient to the eternal child’s play of that charming world.

On all this the evening before me afforded a remarkable commentary.

I paused a moment in front of the house and looked up at the windows.

There he lives, I thought, and carries on his labours year by year,

reads and annotates texts, seeks for analogies between western Asiatic

and Indian mythologies, and it satisfies him, because he believes in

the value of it all. He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he

believes in the value of mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he

believes in progress and evolution. He has not been through the war,

nor is he acquainted with the shattering of the foundations of thought

by Einstein (that, thinks he, only concerns the mathematicians). He

sees nothing of the preparations for the next war that are going on

all round him. He hates Jews and Communists. He is a good, unthinking,

happy child, who takes himself seriously; and, in fact, he is much to

be envied. And so, pulling myself together, I entered the house. A maid

in cap and apron opened the door. Warned by some premonition, I noticed

with care where she laid my hat and coat, and was then shown into a

warm and well-lighted room and requested to wait. Instead of saying a

prayer or taking a nap, I followed a wayward impulse and picked up the

first thing I saw. It chanced to be a small picture in a frame that

stood on the round table leaning back on its paste-board support. It

was an engraving and it represented the poet Goethe as an old man full

of character, with a finely chiseled face and a genius’ mane. Neither

the renowned fire of his eyes nor the lonely and tragic expression

beneath the courtly whitewash was lacking. To this the artist had given

special care, and he had succeeded in combining the elemental force of

the old man with a somewhat professional make-up of self-discipline

and righteousness, without prejudice to his profundity; and had made

of him, all in all, a really charming old gentleman, fit to adorn

any drawing room. No doubt this portrait was no worse than others of

its description. It was much the same as all those representations

by careful craftsmen of saviours, apostles, heroes, thinkers and

statesmen. Perhaps I found it exasperating only because of a certain

pretentious virtuosity. In any case, and whatever the cause, this empty

and self-satisfied presentation of the aged Goethe shrieked at me at

once as a fatal discord, exasperated and oppressed as I was already. It

told me that I ought never to have come. Here fine Old Masters and the

Nation’s Great Ones were at home, not Steppenwolves.

If only the master of the house had come in now, I might have had the

luck to find some favourable opportunity for finding my way out. As

it was, his wife came in, and I surrendered to fate though I scented

danger. We shook hands and to the first discord there succeeded nothing

but new ones. The lady complimented me on my looks, though I knew only

too well how sadly the years had aged me since our last meeting. The

clasp of her hand on my gouty fingers had reminded me of it already.

Then she went on to ask after my dear wife, and I had to say that my

wife had left me and that we were divorced. We were glad enough when

the professor came in. He too gave me a hearty welcome and the awkward

comedy came to a beautiful climax. He was holding a newspaper to which

he subscribed, an organ of the militarist and jingoist party, and after

shaking hands he pointed to it and commented on a paragraph about a

namesake of mine--a publicist called Haller, a bad fellow and a rotten

patriot--who had been making fun of the Kaiser and expressing the view

that his own country was no less responsible for the outbreak of war

than the enemy nations. There was a man for you! The editor had given

him his deserts and put him in the pillory. However, when the professor

saw that I was not interested, we passed to other topics, and the

possibility that this horrid fellow might be sitting in front of them

did not even remotely occur to either of them. Yet so it was, I myself

was that horrid fellow. Well, why make a fuss and upset people? I

laughed to myself, but gave up all hope now of a pleasant evening.

I have a clear recollection of the moment when the professor spoke of

Haller as a traitor to his country. It was then that the horrid feeling

of depression and despair which had been mounting in me and growing

stronger and stronger ever since the burial scene condensed to a dreary

dejection. It rose to the pitch of a bodily anguish, arousing within me

a dread and suffocating foreboding. I had the feeling that something

lay in wait for me, that a danger stalked me from behind. Fortunately

the announcement that dinner was on the table supervened. We went into

the dining room, and while I racked my brains again and again for

something harmless to say, I ate more than I was accustomed to do and

felt myself growing more wretched with every moment. Good heavens, I

thought all the while, why do we put ourselves to such exertions? I

felt distinctly that my hosts were not at their ease either and that

their liveliness was forced, whether it was that I had a paralysing

effect on them or because of some other and domestic embarrassment.

There was not a question they put to me that I could answer frankly,

and I was soon fairly entangled in my lies and wrestling with my nausea

at every word. At last, for the sake of changing the subject, I began

to tell them of the funeral which I had witnessed earlier in the day.

But I could not hit the right note. My efforts at humour fell entirely

flat and we were more than ever at odds. Within me the Steppenwolf

bared his teeth in a grin. By the time we had reached dessert, silence

had descended on all three of us.

We went back to the room we had come from to invoke the aid of coffee

and cognac. There, however, my eye fell once more on the magnate of

poetry, although he had been put on a chest of drawers at one side

of the room. Unable to get away from him, I took him once more in my

hands, though warning voices were plainly audible, and proceeded to

attack him. I was as though obsessed by the feeling that the situation

was intolerable and that the time had come either to warm my hosts up,

to carry them off their feet and put them in tune with myself, or else

to bring about a final explosion.

“Let us hope,” said I, “that Goethe did not really look like this.

This conceited air of nobility, the great man ogling the distinguished

company, and beneath the manly exterior what a world of charming

sentimentality! Certainly, there is much to be said against him. I have

a good deal against his venerable pomposity myself. But to represent

him like this--no, that is going too far.”

The lady of the house finished pouring out the coffee with a deeply

wounded expression and then hurriedly left the room; and her husband

explained to me with mingled embarrassment and reproach that the

picture of Goethe belonged to his wife and was one of her dearest

possessions. “And even if, objectively speaking, you are right, though

I don’t agree with you, you need not have been so outspoken.”

“There you are right,” I admitted. “Unfortunately it is a habit, a vice

of mine, always to speak my mind as much as possible, as indeed Goethe

did, too, in his better moments. In this chaste drawing-room Goethe

would certainly never have allowed himself to use an outrageous, a

genuine and unqualified expression. I sincerely beg your wife’s pardon

and your own. Tell her, please, that I am a schizomaniac. And now, if

you will allow me, I will take my leave.”

To this he made objections in spite of his perplexity. He even went

back to the subject of our former discussions and said once more how

interesting and stimulating they had been and how deep an impression my

theories about Mithras and Krishna had made on him at the time. He had

hoped that the present occasion would have been an opportunity to renew

these discussions. I thanked him for speaking as he did. Unfortunately,

my interest in Krishna had vanished and also my pleasure in learned

discussions. Further, I had told him several lies that day. For

example, I had been many months in the town, and not a few days, as I

had said. I lived, however, quite by myself, and was no longer fit for

decent society; for in the first place, I was nearly always in a bad

temper and afflicted with the gout, and in the second place, usually

drunk. Lastly, to make a clean slate, and not to go away, at least, as

a liar, it was my duty to inform him that he had grievously insulted me

that evening. He had endorsed the attitude taken up by a reactionary

paper towards Haller’s opinions; a stupid bull-necked paper, fit for

an officer on half-pay, not for a man of learning. This bad fellow

and rotten patriot, Haller, however, and myself were one and the

same person, and it would be better for our country and the world in

general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood

for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with a blind

obsession for a new war. And so I would bid him good-bye.

With that I got up and took leave of Goethe and of the professor. I

seized my hat and coat from the rack outside and left the house. Loud

in my soul the wolf howled his glee, and between my two selves there

opened an immense field of operations. For it was at once clear to me

that this disagreeable evening had much more significance for me than

for the indignant professor. For him, it was a disillusionment and

a petty outrage. For me, it was a final failure and flight. It was

my leave-taking from the respectable, moral and learned world, and a

complete triumph for the Steppenwolf. I was sent flying and beaten from

the field, bankrupt in my own eyes, dismissed without a shred of credit

or a ray of humour to comfort me. I had taken leave of the world in

which I had once found a home, the world of convention and culture, in

the manner of the man with a weak stomach who has given up pork. In a

rage I went on my way beneath the street lamps, in a rage and sick unto

death. What a hideous day of shame and wretchedness it had been from

morning to night, from the cemetery to the scene with the professor.

For what? And why? Was there any sense in taking up the burden of more

such days as this or of sitting out any more such suppers? There was

not. This very night I would make an end of the comedy, go home and cut

my throat. No more tarrying.

I paced the streets in all directions, driven on by wretchedness.

Naturally it was stupid of me to bespatter the drawing-room ornaments

of the worthy folk, stupid and ill-mannered, but I could not help it;

and even now I could not help it. I could not bear this tame, lying,

well-mannered life any longer. And since it appeared that I could not

bear my loneliness any longer either, since my own company had become

so unspeakably hateful and nauseous, since I struggled for breath in

a vacuum and suffocated in hell, what way out was left me? There was

none. I thought of my father and mother, of the sacred flame of my

youth long extinct, of the thousand joys and labours and aims of my

life. Nothing of them all was left me, not even repentance, nothing

but agony and nausea. Never had the clinging to mere life seemed so

grievous as now.

I rested a moment in a tavern in an outlying part of the town and

drank some brandy and water; then to the streets once more, with the

devil at my heels, up and down the steep and winding streets of the

Old Town, along the avenues, across the station square. The thought of

going somewhere took me into the station. I scanned the time-tables

on the walls; drank some wine and tried to come to my senses. Then

the spectre that I went in dread of came nearer, till I saw it plain.

It was the dread of returning to my room and coming to a halt there,

faced by my despair. There was no escape from this moment though I

walked the streets for hours. Sooner or later I should be at my door,

at the table with my books, on the sofa with the photograph of Erica

above it. Sooner or later the moment would come to take out my razor

and cut my throat. More and more plainly the picture rose before me.

More and more plainly, with a wildly beating heart, I felt the dread

of all dreads, the fear of death. Yes, I was horribly afraid of death.

Although I saw no other way out, although nausea, agony and despair

threatened to engulf me; although life had no allurement and nothing

to give me either of joy or hope, I shuddered all the same with an

unspeakable horror of a gaping wound in a condemned man’s flesh.

I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful spectre. Suppose

that to-day cowardice won a victory over despair, to-morrow and each

succeeding day I would again face despair heightened by self-contempt.

It was merely taking up and throwing down the knife till at last it

was done. Better to-day then. I reasoned with myself as though with

a frightened child. But the child would not listen. It ran away. It

wanted to live. I renewed my fitful wanderings through the town,

making many detours not to return to the house which I had always

in my mind and always deferred. Here and there I came to a stop and

lingered, drinking a glass or two, and then, as if pursued, ran around

in a circle whose centre had the razor as a goal, and meant death.

Sometimes from utter weariness I sat on a bench, on a fountain’s rim,

or a curb-stone and wiped the sweat from my forehead and listened to

the beating of my heart. Then on again in mortal dread and an intense

yearning for life.

Thus it was I found myself late at night in a distant and unfamiliar

part of the town; and there I went into a public house from which there

came the lively sound of dance music. Over the entrance as I went in

I read “The Black Eagle” on the old signboard. Within I found it was

a free night--crowds, smoke, the smell of wine, and the clamour of

voices, with dancing in a room at the back, whence issued the frenzy

of music. I stayed in the nearer room where there were none but simple

folk, some of them poorly dressed, whereas behind in the dance-hall

smart people were also to be seen. Carried forward by the crowd, I

soon found myself near the bar, wedged against a table at which sat a

pale and pretty girl against the wall. She wore a thin dance-frock cut

very low and a withered flower in her hair. She gave me a friendly and

observant look as I came up and with a smile moved to one side to make

room for me.

“May I?” I asked and sat down beside her.

“Of course, you may,” she said. “But who are you?”

“Thanks,” I replied. “I cannot possibly go home, cannot, cannot. I’ll

stay here with you if you’ll let me. No, I can’t go back home.”

She nodded as though to humour me, and as she nodded I observed the

curl that fell from her temple to her ear, and I saw that the withered

flower was a camellia. From within crashed the music and at the buffet

the waitresses hurriedly shouted their orders.

“Well, stay here then,” she said with a voice that comforted me. “Why

can’t you go home?”

“I can’t. There’s something waiting for me there. No, I can’t--it’s too

frightful.”

“Let it wait then and stay here. First wipe your glasses. You can see

nothing like that. Give me your handkerchief. What shall we drink?

Burgundy?”

While she wiped my glasses, I had the first clear impression of her

pale, firm face, with its clear grey eyes and smooth forehead, and the

short, tight curl in front of her ear. Good-naturedly and with a touch

of mockery she began to take me in hand. She ordered the wine, and as

she clinked her glass with mine, her eyes fell on my shoes.

“Good Lord, wherever have you come from? You look as though you had

come from Paris on foot. That’s no state to come to a dance in.”

I answered “yes” and “no,” laughed now and then, and let her talk. I

found her charming, very much to my surprise, for I had always avoided

girls of her kind and regarded them with suspicion. And she treated

me exactly in the way that was best for me at that moment, and so she

has since without an exception. She took me under her wing just as I

needed, and mocked me, too, just as I needed. She ordered me a sandwich

and told me to eat it. She filled my glass and bade me sip it and not

drink too fast. Then she commended my docility.

“That’s fine,” she said to encourage me. “You’re not difficult. I

wouldn’t mind betting it’s a long while since you have had to obey any

one.”

“You’d win the bet. How did you know it?”

“Nothing in that. Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing

like it if you’ve been without it too long. Isn’t it so, you’re glad to

do as I tell you?”

“Very glad. You know everything.”

“You make it easy to. Perhaps, my friend, I could tell you, too, what

it is that’s waiting for you at home and what you dread so much.

But you know that for yourself. We needn’t talk about it, eh? Silly

business! Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure

enough, and he’ll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living

and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough.”

“Oh,” I cried, “if only it were so simple. I’ve bothered myself enough

with life, God knows, and little use it has been to me. To hang

oneself is hard, perhaps. I don’t know. But to live is far, far harder.

God, how hard it is!”

“You’ll see it’s child’s play. We’ve made a start already. You’ve

polished your glasses, eaten something and had a drink. Now we’ll go

and give your shoes and trousers a brush and then you’ll dance a shimmy

with me.”

“Now that shows,” I cried in a fluster, “that I was right! Nothing

could grieve me more than not to be able to carry out any command of

yours, but I can dance no shimmy, nor waltz, nor polka, nor any of the

rest of them. I’ve never danced in my life. Now you can see it isn’t

all as easy as you think.”

Her bright red lips smiled and she firmly shook her waved and shingled

head; and as I looked at her, I thought I could see a resemblance to

Rosa Kreisler, with whom I had been in love as a boy. But she had a

dark complexion and dark hair. I could not tell of whom it was she

reminded me. I knew only that it was of someone in my early youth and

boyhood.

“Wait a bit,” she cried. “So you can’t dance? Not at all? Not even a

one-step? And yet you talk of the trouble you’ve taken to live? You

told a fib there, my boy, and you shouldn’t do that at your age. How

can you say that you’ve taken any trouble to live when you won’t even

dance?”

“But if I can’t--I’ve never learnt!”

She laughed.

“But you learnt reading and writing and arithmetic, I suppose, and

French and Latin and a lot of other things? I don’t mind betting you

were ten or twelve years at school and studied whatever else you could

as well. Perhaps you’ve even got your doctor’s degree and know Chinese

or Spanish. Am I right? Very well then. But you couldn’t find the time

and money for a few dancing lessons! No, indeed!”

“It was my parents,” I said to justify myself. “They let me learn

Latin and Greek and all the rest of it. But they didn’t let me learn

to dance. It wasn’t the thing with us. My parents had never danced

themselves.”

She looked at me quite coldly, with real contempt, and again something

in her face reminded me of my youth.

“So your parents must take the blame then. Did you ask them whether you

might spend the evening at the Black Eagle? Did you? They’re dead a

long while ago, you say? So much for that. And now supposing you were

too obedient to learn to dance when you were young (though I don’t

believe you were such a model child), what have you been doing with

yourself all these years?”

“Well,” I confessed, “I scarcely know myself--studied, played music,

read books, written books, travelled--”

“Fine views of life, you have. You have always done the difficult and

complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learnt. No

time, of course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, I’m not

your mother. But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the

bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit too far.”

“Don’t scold me,” I implored. “It isn’t as if I didn’t know I was mad.”

“Oh, don’t make a song of your sufferings. You are no madman,

Professor. You’re not half mad enough to please me. It seems to me

you’re much too clever in a silly way, just like a professor. Have

another roll. You can tell me some more later.”

She got another roll for me, put a little salt and mustard on it, cut a

piece for herself and told me to eat it. I did all she told me except

dance. It did me a prodigious lot of good to do as I was told and to

have some one sitting by me who asked me things and ordered me about

and scolded me. If the professor or his wife had done so an hour or two

earlier, it would have spared me a lot. But no, it was well as it was.

I should have missed much.

“What’s your name?” she asked suddenly.

“Harry.”

“Harry? A babyish sort of name. And a baby you are, Harry, in spite of

your few grey hairs. You’re a baby and you need some one to look after

you. I’ll say no more of dancing. But look at your hair! Have you no

wife, no sweetheart?”

“I haven’t a wife any longer. We are divorced. A sweetheart, yes, but

she doesn’t live here. I don’t see her very often. We don’t get on very

well.”

She whistled softly.

“You must be difficult if nobody sticks to you. But now tell me what

was up in particular this evening? What sent you chasing round out of

your wits? Down on your luck? Lost at cards?”

This was not easy to explain.

“Well,” I began, “you see, it was really a small matter. I had an

invitation to dinner with a professor--I’m not one myself, by the

way--and really I ought not to have gone. I’ve lost the habit of being

in company and making conversation. I’ve forgotten how it’s done. As

soon as I entered the house I had the feeling something would go wrong,

and when I hung my hat on the peg I thought to myself that perhaps I

should want it sooner than I expected. Well, at the professor’s there

was a picture that stood on the table, a stupid picture. It annoyed

me--”

“What sort of picture? Annoyed you--why?” she broke in.

“Well, it was a picture representing Goethe, the poet Goethe, you know.

But it was not in the least as he really looked. That, of course,

nobody can know exactly. He has been dead a hundred years. However,

some artist of to-day had painted his portrait as he imagined him to

have been and prettified him, and this picture annoyed me. It made me

perfectly sick. I don’t know whether you can understand that.”

“I understand all right. Don’t you worry. Go on.”

“Before this in any case I didn’t see eye to eye with the professor.

Like nearly all professors, he is a great patriot, and during the

war did his bit in the way of deceiving the public, with the best

intentions, of course. I, however, am opposed to war. But that’s all

one. To continue my story, there was not the least need for me to look

at the picture--”

“Certainly not.”

“But in the first place it made me sorry because of Goethe, whom I

love very dearly, and then, besides, I thought--well, I had better say

just how I thought, or felt. There I was, sitting with people as one

of themselves and believing that they thought of Goethe as I did and

had the same picture of him in their minds as I, and there stood that

tasteless, false and sickly affair and they thought it lovely and had

not the least idea that the spirit of that picture and the spirit of

Goethe were exact opposites. They thought the picture splendid, and so

they might for all I cared, but for me it ended, once and for all, any

confidence, any friendship, any feeling of affinity I could have for

these people. In any case, my friendship with them did not amount to

very much. And so I got furious, and sad, too, when I saw that I was

quite alone with no one to understand me. Do you see what I mean?”

“It is very easy to see. And next? Did you throw the picture at them?”

“No, but I was rather insulting and left the house. I wanted to go

home, but--”

“But you’d have found no mummy there to comfort the silly baby or scold

it. I must say, Harry, you make me almost sorry for you. I never knew

such a baby.”

So it seemed to me, I must own. She gave me a glass of wine to drink.

In fact, she was like a mother to me. In a glimpse, though, now and

then I saw how young and beautiful she was.

“And so,” she began again, “Goethe has been dead a hundred years, and

you’re very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head

of what he must have looked like, and you have the right to, I suppose.

But the artist who adores Goethe too, and makes a picture of him, has

no right to do it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else--because

you don’t like it. You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting

and leave the house. If you had sense, you would laugh at the artist

and the professor--laugh and be done with it. If you were out of your

senses, you’d smash the picture in their faces. But as you’re only a

little baby, you run home and want to hang yourself. I’ve understood

your story very well, Harry. It’s a funny story. You make me laugh. But

don’t drink so fast. Burgundy should be sipped. Otherwise you’ll get

hot. But you have to be told everything--like a little child.”

She admonished me with the look of a severe governess of sixty.

“Oh, I know,” I said contentedly. “Only tell me everything.”

“What shall I tell you?”

“Whatever you feel like telling me.”

“Good. Then I’ll tell you something. For an hour I’ve been saying

‘thou’ to you, and you have been saying ‘you’ to me. Always Latin and

Greek, always as complicated as possible. When a girl addresses you

intimately and she isn’t disagreeable to you, then you should address

her in the same way. So now you’ve learnt something. And secondly--for

half an hour I’ve known that you’re called Harry. I know it because I

asked you. But you don’t care to know my name.”

“Oh, but indeed--I’d like to know very much.”

“You’re too late! If we meet again, you can ask me again. To-day I

shan’t tell you. And now I’m going to dance.”

At the first sign she made of getting up, my heart sank like lead. I

dreaded her going and leaving me alone, for then it would all come back

as it was before. In a moment, the old dread and wretchedness took hold

of me like a toothache that has passed off and then comes back of a

sudden and burns like fire. Oh, God, had I forgotten, then, what was

waiting for me? Had anything altered?

“Stop,” I implored, “don’t go. You can dance of course, as much as you

please, but don’t stay away too long. Come back again, come back again.”

She laughed as she got up. I expected that she would have been taller.

She was slender, but not tall. Again I was reminded of some one. Of

whom? I could not make out.

“You’re coming back?”

“I’m coming back, but it may be half an hour or an hour, perhaps. I

want to tell you something. Shut your eyes and sleep for a little.

That’s what you need.”

I made room for her to pass. Her skirt brushed my knees and she

looked, as she went, in a little pocket mirror, lifted her eyebrows,

and powdered her chin; then she disappeared into the dance hall. I

looked round me; strange faces, smoking men, spilt beer on marble-tops,

clatter and clamour everywhere, the dance music in my ear. I was to

sleep, she had said. Ah, my good child, you know a lot about my sleep

that is shyer than a weasel. Sleep in this hurly-burly, sitting at a

table, amidst the clatter of beer-pots! I sipped the wine and, taking

out a cigar, looked round for matches, but as I had after all no

inclination to smoke, I put down the cigar on the table in front of me.

“Shut your eyes,” she had said. God knows where the girl got her voice;

it was so deep and good and maternal. It was good to obey such a voice,

I had found that out already. Obediently I shut my eyes, leant my head

against the wall and heard the roar of a hundred mingled noises surge

around me and smiled at the idea of sleep in such a place. I made up my

mind to go to the door of the dance-hall and from there catch a glimpse

of my beautiful girl as she danced. I made a movement to go, then felt

at last how unutterably tired out I was from my hours of wandering and

remained seated; and, thereupon I fell asleep as I had been told. I

slept greedily, thankfully, and dreamt more lightly and pleasantly than

I had for a long while.

I dreamt that I was waiting in an old-fashioned ante-room. At first

I knew no more than that my audience was with some Excellency or

other. Then it came to me that it was Goethe who was to receive me.

Unfortunately I was not there quite on a personal call. I was a

reporter, and this worried me a great deal and I could not understand

how the devil I had got into such a fix. Besides this, I was upset by a

scorpion that I had seen a moment before trying to climb up my leg. I

had shaken myself free of the black crawling beast, but I did not know

where it had got to next and did not dare make a grab after it.

Also I was not very sure whether I had been announced by a mistake

to Matthisson instead of to Goethe, and him again I mixed up in my

dream with Bürger, for I took him for the author of the poem to Molly.

Moreover I would have liked extremely to meet Molly. I imagined her

wonderful, tender, musical. If only I were not here at the orders of

that cursed newspaper office. My ill-humour over this increased until

by degrees it extended even to Goethe, whom I suddenly treated to all

manner of reflections and reproaches. It was going to be a lively

interview. The scorpion, however, dangerous though he was and hidden

no doubt somewhere within an inch of me, was all the same not so bad

perhaps. Possibly he might even betoken something friendly. It seemed

to me extremely likely that he had something to do with Molly. He might

be a kind of messenger from her--or an heraldic beast, dangerously and

beautifully emblematic of woman and sin. Might not his name perhaps be

Vulpius? But at that moment a flunkey threw open the door. I rose and

went in.

There stood old Goethe, short and very erect, and on his classic

breast, sure enough, was the corpulent star of some Order. Not for

a moment did he relax his commanding attitude, his air of giving

audience, and of controlling the world from that museum of his at

Weimar. Indeed, he had scarcely looked at me before with a nod and a

jerk like an old raven he began pompously: “Now, you young people have,

I believe, very little appreciation of us and our efforts.”

“You are quite right,” said I, chilled by his ministerial glance. “We

young people have, indeed, very little appreciation of you. You are

too pompous for us, Excellency, too vain and pompous, and not outright

enough. That is, no doubt, at the bottom of it--not outright enough.”

The little old man bent his erect head forward, and as his hard

mouth with its official folds relaxed in a little smile and became

enchantingly alive, my heart gave a sudden bound; for all at once the

poem came to my mind--“The dusk with folding wing”--and I remembered

that it was from the lips of this man that the poem came. Indeed, at

this moment I was entirely disarmed and overwhelmed and would have

chosen of all things to kneel before him. But I held myself erect

and heard him say with a smile: “Oh, so you accuse me of not being

outright? What a thing to say! Will you explain yourself a little more

fully?”