Steppenwolf
music sheets dreaming their music through a winter sleep--who heard
their spirited, their roguish and yearning tones, who carried through
a world estranged from them a heart full of their spirit and their
charm? Who still remembered that slender cypress on a hill over Gubbio,
that though split and riven by a fall of stone yet held fast to life
and put forth with its last resources a new sparse tuft at top? Who
read by night above the Rhine the cloud-script of the drifting mists?
It was the Steppenwolf. And who over the ruins of his life pursued
its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming
meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret
at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s
presence?
I held my hand over my glass when the landlady wanted to fill it once
more, and got up. I needed no more wine. The golden trail was blazed
and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars. For an
hour I could breathe once more and live and face existence, without the
need to suffer torment, fear or shame.
A cold wind was sifting the fine rain as I went out into the deserted
street. It drove the drops with a patter against the street-lamps where
they glimmered with a glassy sparkle. And now, whither? If I had had
a magic wand at this moment I should have conjured up a small and
charming Louis Seize music-room where a few musicians would have played
me two or three pieces of Handel and Mozart. I was in the very mood for
it, and would have sipped the cool and noble music as gods sip nectar.
Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room,
dreaming by candle light and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How
I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing
the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music
we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night! Once, in
years gone by, I had often known such happiness, but this too time had
taken away. Withered years lay between those days and now.
I loitered as I wended my way homeward; turned up my collar and struck
my stick on the wet pavement. However long I lingered outside I should
find myself all too soon in my top-floor room, my makeshift home,
which I could neither love nor do without; for the time had gone by
when I could spend a wet winter’s night in the open. And now my prayer
was not to let the good mood the evening had given me be spoilt,
neither by the rain, nor by gout, nor by the araucaria; and though
there was no chamber-music to be had nor a lonely friend with his
violin, still that lovely melody was in my head and I could play it
through to myself after a fashion, humming the rhythm of it as I drew
my breath. Reflecting thus, I walked on and on. Yes, even without the
chamber-music and the friend. How foolish to wear oneself out in vain
longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and
with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it
was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of
space in which the stars revolve.
From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively
jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. I stopped a moment.
This kind of music, much as I detested it, had always had a secret
charm for me. It was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable
to all the academic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage
gaiety reached an underworld of instinct and breathed a simple honest
sensuality.
I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw
music, sniffing the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after
it a little too. One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade
and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental
and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly well together and made a
whole. It was the music of decline. There must have been such music
in Rome under the later emperors. Compared with Bach and Mozart and
real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our
art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real
culture. And this music had the merit of a great sincerity. Amiably
and unblushingly negroid, it had the mood of childlike happiness.
There was something of the nigger in it, something of the American,
who with all his strength seems so boyishly fresh and childlike to us
Europeans. Was Europe to become the same? Was it on the way already?
Were we, the old connoisseurs, the reverers of Europe as it used to be,
of genuine music and poetry as once they were, nothing but a pigheaded
minority suffering from a complex neurosis, whom to-morrow would forget
or deride? Was all that we called culture, spirit, soul, all that we
called beautiful and sacred, nothing but a ghost long dead, which only
a few fools like us took for true and living? Had it perhaps indeed
never been true and living? Had all that we poor fools bothered our
heads about never been anything but a phantom?
I was now in the old quarter of the town. The little church stood up
dim and grey and unreal. At once the experience of the evening came
back to me, the mysterious Gothic doorway, the mysterious tablet
above it and the illuminated letters dancing in mockery. How did the
writing run? “Entrance not for Everybody.” And: “For madmen only.” I
scrutinised the old wall opposite in the secret hope that the magic
night might begin again; the writing invite me, the madman; the little
doorway give me admittance. There perhaps lay my desire, and there
perhaps would my music be played.
The dark stone wall looked back at me with composure, shut off in a
deep twilight, sunk in a dream of its own. And there was no gateway
anywhere and no pointed arch; only the dark unbroken masonry. With a
smile I went on, giving it a friendly nod. “Sleep well. I will not
awake you. The time will come when you will be pulled down or plastered
with covetous advertisements. But for the present, there you stand,
beautiful and quiet as ever, and I love you for it.”
From the black mouth of an alley a man appeared with startling
suddenness at my elbow, a lone man going his homeward way with weary
step. He wore a cap and a blue blouse, and above his shoulders he
carried a signboard fixed on a pole, and in front of him an open tray
suspended by straps such as pedlars carry at fairs. He walked on
wearily in front of me without looking round. Otherwise I should have
bidden him a good evening and given him a cigar. I tried to read the
device on his standard--a red signboard on a pole--in the light of the
next lamp; but it swayed to and fro and I could decipher nothing. Then
I called out and asked him to let me read his placard. He stopped and
held his pole a little steadier. Then I could read the dancing reeling
letters:
ANARCHIST EVENING ENTERTAINMENT
MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
“I’ve been looking for you,” I shouted with delight. “What is this
Evening Entertainment? Where is it? When?”
He was already walking on.
“Not for everybody,” he said dully with a sleepy voice. He had had
enough. He was for home, and on he went.
“Stop,” I cried, and ran after him. “What have you got there in your
box? I want to buy something from you.”
Without stopping, the man felt mechanically in his box, pulled out a
little book and held it out to me. I took it quickly and put it in my
pocket. While I felt for the buttons of my coat to get out some money,
he turned in at a doorway, shut the door behind him and disappeared.
His heavy steps rang on a flagged yard, then on wooden stairs; and
then I heard no more. And suddenly I too felt very tired. It came over
me that it must be very late--and high time to go home. I walked
on faster and, following the road to the suburb, I was soon in my
own neighbourhood among the well-kept gardens, where in clean little
apartment houses behind lawn and ivy are the dwellings of officialdom
and people of modest means. Passing the ivy and the grass and the
little fir tree I reached the door of the house, found the keyhole and
the switch, slipped past the glazed doors, and the polished cupboards
and the potted plants and unlocked the door of my room, my little
pretence of a home, where the armchair and the stove, the ink-pot and
the paint-box, Novalis and Dostoievski, awaited me just as do the
mother, or the wife, the children, maids, dogs and cats in the case of
more sensible people.
As I threw off my wet coat I came upon the little book, and took it
out. It was one of those little books wretchedly printed on wretched
paper that are sold at fairs, “Were you born in January?” or “How to be
twenty years younger in a week.”
However, when I settled myself in my armchair and put on my glasses, it
was with great astonishment and a sudden sense of impending fate that I
read the title on the cover of this companion volume to fortune-telling
booklets. “_Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Not for Everybody._”
I read the contents at a sitting with an engrossing interest that
deepened page by page.
TREATISE ON THE STEPPENWOLF
There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two
legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in
reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learnt a good deal of all that
people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow.
What he had not learnt, however, was this: to find contentment in
himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the
bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that
he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes. Clever men
might argue the point whether he truly was a wolf, whether, that is,
he had been changed, before birth perhaps, from a wolf into a human
being, or had been given the soul of a wolf, though born as a human
being; or whether, on the other hand, this belief that he was a wolf
was no more than a fancy or a disease of his. It might, for example,
be possible that in his childhood he was a little wild and disobedient
and disorderly, and that those who brought him up had declared a war of
extinction against the beast in him; and precisely this had given him
the idea and the belief that he was in fact actually a beast with only
a thin covering of the human. On this point one could speak at length
and entertainingly, and indeed write a book about it. The Steppenwolf,
however, would be none the better for it, since for him it was all one
whether the wolf had been bewitched or beaten into him, or whether it
was merely an idea of his own. What others chose to think about it or
what he chose to think himself was no good to him at all. It left the
wolf inside him just the same.
And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This
was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional
one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog
or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any
extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and
the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one
even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to
such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or
the ape in him than to the man. So much for common knowledge. In the
case of Harry, however, it was just the opposite. In him the man and
the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and
deadly enmity. The one existed simply and solely to harm the other,
and when there are two in one blood and in one soul who are at deadly