Steppenwolf
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?”
I was very glad indeed to do so.
“Like all great spirits, Herr von Goethe, you have clearly recognised
and felt the riddle and the hopelessness of human life, with its
moments of transcendence that sink again to wretchedness, and the
impossibility of rising to one fair peak of feeling except at the cost
of many days’ enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent
longing for the realm of the spirit in eternal and deadly war with the
equally ardent and holy love of the lost innocence of nature, the whole
frightful suspense in vacancy and uncertainty, this condemnation to
the transient that can never be valid, that is ever experimental and
dilettantish; in short, the utter lack of purpose to which the human
state is condemned--to its consuming despair. You have known all this,
yes, and said as much over and over again; yet you gave up your whole
life to preaching its opposite, giving utterance to faith and optimism
and spreading before yourself and others the illusion that our
spiritual strivings mean something and endure. You have lent a deaf
ear to those that plumbed the depths and suppressed the voices that
told the truth of despair, and not in yourself only, but also in Kleist
and Beethoven. Year after year you lived on at Weimar accumulating
knowledge and collecting objects, writing letters and gathering them
in, as though in your old age you had found the real way to discover
the eternal in the momentary, though you could only mummify it, and to
spiritualise nature though you could only hide it with a pretty mask.
This is why we reproach you with insincerity.”
The old big-wig kept his eyes musingly on mine, smiling as before.
Then to my surprise, he asked, “You must have a strong objection, then,
to the _Magic Flute_ of Mozart?”
And before I could protest, he went on:
“The _Magic Flute_ presents life to us as a wondrous song. It
honours our feelings, transient, as they are, as something eternal and
divine. It agrees neither with Herr von Kleist nor with Herr Beethoven.
It preaches optimism and faith.”
“I know, I know,” I cried in a rage. “God knows why you hit of all
things on the _Magic Flute_ that is dearer to me than anything
else in the world. But Mozart did not live to be eighty-two. He did
not make pretensions in his own life to the enduring and the orderly