Steppenwolf
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.