Steppenwolf
teacher, and I shall be a better one than your ideal love ever was, you
may be sure of that! It’s high time you slept with a pretty girl again,
Steppenwolf.”
“Hermine,” I cried in torment, “you have only to look at me, I am an
old man!”
“You’re a child. You were too lazy to learn to dance till it was
nearly too late, and in the same way you were too lazy to learn to
love. As for ideal and tragic love, that, I don’t doubt, you can do
marvellously--and all honour to you. Now you will learn to love a
little in an ordinary human way. We have made a start. You will soon
be fit to go to a ball, but you must know the Boston first, and we’ll
begin on that to-morrow. I’ll come at three. How did you like the
music, by the way?”
“Very much indeed.”
“Well, there’s another step forward, you see. Up to now you couldn’t
stand all this dance and jazz music. It was too superficial and
frivolous for you. Now you have seen that there’s no need to take
it seriously and that it can all the same be very agreeable and
delightful. And, by the way, the whole orchestra would be nothing
without Pablo. He conducts it and puts fire into it.”
* * * * *
Just as the gramophone contaminated the æsthetic and intellectual
atmosphere of my study and just as the American dances broke in as
strangers and disturbers, yes, and as destroyers, into my carefully
tended garden of music, so, too, from all sides there broke in new and
dreaded and disintegrating influences upon my life that, till now, had
been so sharply marked off and so deeply secluded. The Steppenwolf
treatise, and Hermine too, were right in their doctrine of the thousand
souls. Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old
ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw
as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had
been. The few capacities and pursuits in which I had happened to be
strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of
myself as a person who was in fact nothing more than a most refined
and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and as such I
had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities,
instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label
of Steppenwolf.
Meanwhile, though cured of an illusion, I found this disintegration of
the personality by no means a pleasant and amusing adventure. On the
contrary, it was often exceedingly painful, often almost intolerable.
Often the sound of the gramophone was truly fiendish to my ears in the
midst of surroundings where everything was tuned to so very different a
key. And many a time, when I danced my one-step in a stylish restaurant
among pleasure seekers and elegant rakes, I felt that I was a traitor
to all that I was bound to hold most sacred. Had Hermine left me for
one week alone I should have fled at once from this wearisome and
laughable trafficking with the world of pleasure. Hermine, however, was
always there. Though I might not see her every day, I was all the same
continually under her eye, guided, guarded and counselled--besides, she
read all my mad thoughts of rebellion and escape in my face, and smiled
at them.
As the destruction of all that I had called my personality went on,
I began to understand, too, why it was that I had feared death so
horribly in spite of all my despair. I began to perceive that this
ignoble horror in the face of death was a part of my old conventional
and lying existence. The late Herr Haller, gifted writer, student
of Mozart and Goethe, author of essays upon the metaphysics of art,
upon genius and tragedy and humanity, the melancholy hermit in a cell
encumbered with books, was given over bit by bit to self-criticism
and at every point was found wanting. This gifted and interesting
Herr Haller had, to be sure, preached reason and humanity and had
protested against the barbarity of the war; but he had not let himself
be stood against a wall and shot, as the proper consequence of his way
of thinking would have been. He had found some way of accommodating
himself; one, of course, that was outwardly reputable and noble, but
still a compromise and no more. He was, further, opposed to the power
of capital and yet he had industrial securities lying at his bank
and spent the interest from them without a pang of conscience. And
so it was all through. Harry Haller had, to be sure, rigged himself
out finely as an idealist and contemner of the world, as a melancholy
hermit and growling prophet. At bottom, however, he was a bourgeois
who took exception to a life like Hermine’s and fretted himself over
the nights thrown away in a restaurant and the money squandered there,
and had them on his conscience. Instead of longing to be freed and
completed, he longed, on the contrary, most earnestly to get back
to those happy times when his intellectual trifling had been his
diversion and brought him fame. Just so those newspaper readers--whom
he despised and scorned--longed to get back to the ideal time before
the war, because it was so much more comfortable than taking a lesson
from those who had gone through it. Oh, the devil, he made one sick,
this Herr Haller! And yet I clung to him all the same, or to the mask
of him that was already falling away, clung to his coquetting with the
spiritual, to his bourgeois horror of the disorderly and accidental (to
which death, too, belonged) and compared the new Harry--the somewhat
timid and ludicrous dilettante of the dance rooms--scornfully and
enviously with the old one in whose ideal and lying portrait he had
since discovered all those fatal characteristics which had upset
him that night so grievously in the professor’s print of Goethe. He
himself, the old Harry, had been just such a bourgeoise idealisation of
Goethe, a spiritual champion whose all-too-noble gaze shone with the
unction of elevated thought and humanity, until he was almost overcome
by his own nobleness of mind! The devil! Now, at last, this fine
picture stood badly in need of repairs! The ideal Herr Haller had been
lamentably dismantled! He looked like a dignitary who had fallen among
thieves--with his tattered breeches--and he would have shown sense if
he had studied now the rôle that his rags appointed him instead of
wearing them with an air of respectability and carrying on a whining
pretence to lost repute.
I was constantly finding myself in the company of Pablo, the musician,
and my estimate of him had to be revised if only because Hermine liked
him so much and was so eager for his company. Pablo had left on me
the impression of a pretty nonentity, a little beau, and somewhat
empty at that, as happy as a child for whom there are no problems,
whose joy it is to dribble into his toy trumpet and who is kept quiet
with praises and chocolate. Pablo, however, was not interested in my
opinions. They were as indifferent to him as my musical theories. He
listened with friendly courtesy, smiling as he always did; but he
refrained all the same from any actual reply. On the other hand, in
spite of this, it seemed that I had aroused his interest. It was clear
that he put himself out to please me and to show me goodwill. Once
when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill-humour, over one of
these fruitless attempts at conversation he looked in my face with a
troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it,
he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuff-box. It would do me
good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch.
The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and
more cheerful. No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. Hermine told
me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through
secret channels. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a
master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling
pain, for inducing sleep, for begetting beautiful dreams, lively
spirits and the passion of love.
One day I met him in the street near the quay and he turned at once to
accompany me. This time I succeeded at last in making him talk.
“Herr Pablo,” I said to him as he played with his slender ebony and
silver walking-stick, “you are a friend of Hermine’s and that is why
I take an interest in you. But I can’t say you make it easy to get on
with you. Several times I have attempted to talk about music with you.
It would have interested me to know your thoughts and opinions, whether
they contradicted mine or not, but you have disdained to make me even
the barest reply.”
He gave me a most amiable smile and this time a reply was accorded me.
“Well,” he said with equanimity, “you see, in my opinion there is no
point at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What
reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were
perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a
professor, and I don’t believe that, as regards music, there is the
least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on
having good taste and education and all that.”
“Indeed. Then what does it depend on?”
“On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as
possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is
the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and
Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them not a
soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouth-piece
and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will
give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood.
That’s the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance-hall at
the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how eyes
sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. _That_ is why one
makes music.”
“Very good, Herr Pablo. But there is not only sensual music. There
is spiritual also. Besides the music that is actually played at the
moment, there is the immortal music that lives on even when it is not
actually being played. It can happen to a man to lie alone in bed and
to call to mind a melody from the _Magic Flute_ or the _Matthew
Passion_, and then there is music without anybody blowing into a
flute or passing a bow across a fiddle.”
“Certainly, Herr Haller. _Yearning_ and _Valencia_ are
recalled every night by many a lonely dreamer. Even the poorest
typist in her office has the latest one-step in her head and taps her
keys in time to it. You are right. I don’t grudge all those lonely
persons their mute music, whether it’s _Yearning_ or the _Magic
Flute_ or _Valencia_. But where do they get their lonely and
mute music from? They get it from us, the musicians. It must first have
been played and heard, it must have got into the blood, before any one
at home in his room can think of it and dream of it.”
“Granted,” I said coolly, “all the same it won’t do to put Mozart and
the latest fox-trot on the same level. And it is not one and the same
thing whether you play people divine and eternal music or cheap stuff
of the day that is forgotten to-morrow.”
When Pablo observed from my tone that I was getting heated, he at once
put on his most amiable expression and touching my arm caressingly he
gave an unbelievable softness to his voice.
“Ah, my dear sir, you may be perfectly right with your levels. I have
nothing to say to your putting Mozart and Haydn and _Valencia_ on
what levels you please. It is all one to me. It is not for me to decide
about levels. I shall never be asked about them. Mozart, perhaps, will
still be played in a hundred years and _Valencia_ in two will be
played no more--we can well leave that, I think, in God’s hands. God is