Steppenwolf
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