Steppenwolf
eager and also hardy natures. But just as there are those who at the
least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides,
and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least
shock the notion of suicide. Had we a science with the courage and
authority to concern itself with mankind, instead of with the mechanism
merely of vital phenomena, had we something of the nature of an
anthropology, or a psychology, these matters of fact would be familiar
to every one.
What was said above on the subject of suicides touches obviously
nothing but the surface. It is psychology, and, therefore, partly
physics. Metaphysically considered, the matter has a different and a
much clearer aspect. In this aspect suicides present themselves as
those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals,
those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and
moulding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the
mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly
incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a
profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides
none the less; for they see death and not life as the releaser. They
are ready to cast themselves away in surrender, to be extinguished and
to go back to the beginning.
As every strength may become a weakness (and under some circumstances
must) so, on the contrary, may the typical suicide find a strength and
a support in his apparent weakness. Indeed, he does so more often than
not. The case of Harry, the Steppenwolf, is one of these. As thousands
of his like do, he found consolation and support, and not merely the
melancholy play of youthful fancy, in the idea that the way to death
was open to him at any moment. It is true that with him, as with all
men of his kind, every shock, every pain, every untoward predicament
at once called forth the wish to find an escape in death. By degrees,
however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy
that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through
familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open,
and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it
went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious
pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can
endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to
open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to whom this
thought imparts an uncommon strength.
On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting
against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well
in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a
mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered
by life than to fall by one’s own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid
conscience whose source is much the same as that of the militant
conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority of
suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation.
They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice. The Steppenwolf
was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged in it with many a
change of weapons. Finally, at the age of forty-seven or thereabouts, a
happy and not unhumorous idea came to him from which he often derived
some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the day on which
he might allow himself to take his own life. On this day, according
to his mood, so he agreed with himself, it should be open to him
to employ the emergency exit or not. Let happen to him what might,
illness, poverty, suffering and bitterness, there was a time-limit.
It could not extend beyond these few years, months, days whose number
daily diminished. And in fact he bore much adversity, which previously
would have cost him severer and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps
to the roots of his being, very much more easily. When for any reason
it went particularly badly with him, when peculiar pains and penalties
were added to the desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life,
he could say to his tormentors: “Only wait, two years and I am your
master.” And with this he cherished the thought of the morning of his
fiftieth birthday. Letters of congratulation would arrive, while he,
relying on his razor, took leave of all his pains and closed the door
behind him. Then gout in the joints, depression of spirits, and all
pains of head and body could look for another victim.
* * * * *
It still remains to elucidate the Steppenwolf as an isolated
phenomenon, in his relation, for example, to the bourgeois world, so
that his symptoms may be traced to their source. Let us take as a
starting point, since it offers itself, his relation to the bourgeoisie.
To take his own view of the matter, the Steppenwolf stood entirely
outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor
social ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as
a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed
from the common run of men by the prerogative of talents that had
something of genius in them. Deliberately, he looked down upon the
ordinary man and was proud that he was not one. Nevertheless his
life in many aspects was thoroughly ordinary. He had money in the
bank and supported poor relations. He was dressed respectably and
inconspicuously, even though without particular care. He was glad to
live on good terms with the police and the tax collectors and other
such powers. Besides this, he was secretly and persistently attracted
to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes
with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest
air of order and comfort. It pleased him to set himself outside it,
with his little vices and extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius,
but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the
bourgeoisie had ceased to exist. He was not at ease with violent and
exceptional persons nor with criminals and outlaws, and he took up his
abode always among the middle classes, with whose habits and standards
and atmosphere he stood in a constant relation, even though it might
be one of contrast and revolt. Moreover, he had been brought up in
a provincial and conventional home and many of the notions and much
of the examples of those days had never left him. In theory he had
nothing whatever against the servant class; yet in practice it would
have been beyond him to take a servant quite seriously as his equal.
He was capable of loving the political criminal, the revolutionary or
intellectual seducer, the outlaw of state and society, as his brother,
but as for theft and robbery, murder and rape, he would not have known
how to deplore them otherwise than in a thoroughly bourgeois manner.
In this way he was always recognising and affirming with one half of
himself, in thought and act, what with the other half he fought against
and denied. Brought up, as he was, in a cultivated home in the approved
manner, he never tore part of his soul loose from its conventionalities
even after he had long since individualised himself to a degree beyond
its scope and freed himself from the substance of its ideals and
beliefs.
Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be
found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance.
It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and
opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these
coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is
immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up
wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of
saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely
to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all
his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path
leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to
God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the
flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is between the two, in the
middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never
surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a
martyr nor agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is
not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for
the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be
ready to serve God, but not by giving up the flesh-pots. He is ready
to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world
as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two
extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and
in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life
and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely
except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing
more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the
cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His
harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as
he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant
temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is
consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful
of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted
majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for
responsibility.
It is clear that this weak and anxious being, in whatever numbers he
exists, cannot maintain himself, and that qualities such as his can
play no other rôle in the world than that of a herd of sheep among free
roving wolves. Yet we see that, though in times when commanding natures
are uppermost, the bourgeois goes at once to the wall, he never goes
under; indeed at times he even appears to rule the world. How is this
possible? Neither the great numbers of the herd, nor virtue, nor common
sense, nor organisation could avail to save it from destruction. No
medicine in the world can keep a pulse beating that from the outset was
so weak. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie prospers. Why?
The answer runs: Because of the Steppenwolves. In fact, the vital
force of the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its
normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous “outsiders”
who by virtue of the extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can
embrace. There is always a large number of strong and wild natures who
share the life of the fold. Our Steppenwolf, Harry, is a characteristic
example. He who is developed far beyond the level possible to the
bourgeois, he who knows the bliss of meditation no less than the gloomy
joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who despises law, virtue and common
sense, is nevertheless captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape
it. And so all through the mass of the real bourgeoisie are interposed
numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every
one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the
call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by sentiments
of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense
life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by obligation
and service. For with the bourgeoisie the opposite of the formula for
the great is true: He who is not against me is with me.
If we now pause to test the soul of the Steppenwolf, we find him
distinct from the bourgeois in the higher development of his
individuality--for all extensions of the individuality revolve upon the