Steppenwolf
self and tend to destroy it. We see that he had in him a strong impulse
both to the saint and the profligate; and yet he could not, owing
to some weakness or inertia, make the plunge into the untrammelled
realms of space. The parent constellation of the bourgeoisie binds
him with its spell. This is his place in the universe and this his
bondage. Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type.
Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of
the Bourgeois-Earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign
themselves, or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet
belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last
resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives
of these infinitely numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but
they live under an evil star in a quite considerable affliction; and in
this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit. The few who break free
seek their reward in the unconditioned and go down in splendour. They
wear the thorn crown and their number is small. The others, however,
who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps
much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet
a sovereign world, humour. The lone wolves who know no peace, these
victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied
and who can never break through the starry space, who feel themselves
summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere--for them is
reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough and elastic
enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humour. Humour has
always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is
incapable of understanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and
many-faceted ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realisation. Here
it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one
breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the bourgeois, too,
in the same affirmation. Now it is possible to be possessed by God and
to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either
saint or sinner (nor for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as
well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois. Humour alone, that magnificent
discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest
endeavour, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts
as in affliction, humour alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant
achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every
aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the
world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to
stand above it, to have possessions as though “one possessed nothing,”
to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favourite and
often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in
the power of humour alone to make efficacious.
And supposing the Steppenwolf were to succeed, and he has gifts and
resources in plenty, in decocting this magic draught in the sultry
mazes of his hell, his rescue would be assured. Yet there is much
lacking. The possibility, the hope only are there. Whoever loves him
and takes his part may wish him this rescue. It would, it is true, keep
him forever tied to the bourgeois world, but his suffering would be
bearable and productive. His relation to the bourgeois world would lose
its sentimentality both in its love and its hatred, and his bondage to
it would cease to cause him the continual torture of shame.
To attain to this, or, perhaps it may be, to be able at last to dare
the leap into the unknown, a Steppenwolf must once have a good look
at himself. He must look deeply into the chaos of his own soul and
plumb its depths. The riddle of his existence would then be revealed
to him at once in all its changelessness, and it would be impossible
for him ever after to escape first from the hell of the flesh to the
comforts of a sentimental philosophy and then back to the blind orgy
of his wolfishness. Man and wolf would then be compelled to recognise
one another without the masks of false feeling and to look one another
straight in the eye. Then they would either explode and separate
forever, and there would be no more Steppenwolf, or else they would
come to terms in the dawning light of humour.
It is possible that Harry will one day be led to this latter
alternative. It is possible that he will learn one day to know himself.
He may get hold of one of our little mirrors. He may encounter the
Immortals. He may find in one of our magic theatres the very thing that
is needed to free his neglected soul. A thousand such possibilities
await him. His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those
outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magic
possibilities. A mere nothing suffices--and the lightning strikes.
And all this is very well known to the Steppenwolf, even though his
eye may never fall on this fragment of his inner biography. He has
a suspicion of his allotted place in the world, a suspicion of the
Immortals, a suspicion that he may meet himself face to face; and he is
aware of the existence of that mirror in which he has such bitter need
to look and from which he shrinks in such deathly fear.
* * * * *
For the close of our study there is left one last fiction, a
fundamental delusion to make clear. All interpretation, all psychology,
all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of
theories, mythologies and lies; and a self-respecting author should not
omit, at the close of an exposition, to dissipate these lies so far as
may be in his power. If I say “above” or “below,” that is already a
statement that requires explanation, since an above and a below exist
only in thought, only as abstractions. The world itself knows nothing
of above or below.
So too, to come to the point, is the Steppenwolf a fiction. When Harry
feels himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile
and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological
simplification. He is no were-wolf at all, and if we appeared to accept
without scrutiny this lie which he invented for himself and believes
in, and tried to regard him literally as a two-fold being and a
Steppenwolf, and so designated him, it was merely in the hope of being
more easily understood with the assistance of a delusion, which we must
now endeavour to put in its true light.
The division into wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which
Harry tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself is a
very great simplification. It is a forcing of the truth to suit a
plausible, but erroneous, explanation of that contradiction which
this man discovers in himself and which appears to himself to be
the source of his by no means negligible sufferings. Harry finds
in himself a “human being,” that is to say, a world of thoughts and
feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this
he finds within himself also a “wolf,” that is to say, a dark world
of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature.
In spite of this apparently clear division of his being between two
spheres, hostile to one another, he has known happy moments now and
then when the man and the wolf for a short while were reconciled with
one another. Suppose that Harry tried to ascertain in any single moment
of his life, any single act, what part the man had in it and what part
the wolf, he would find himself at once in a dilemma, and his whole
beautiful wolf-theory would go to pieces. For there is not a single
human being, not even the primitive negro, not even the idiot, who
is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum
of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man
as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly
childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not
of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two
poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but
between thousand and thousands.
We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as
Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and
complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary
and primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and
even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees
the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and
artless simplifications--and most of all himself. For it appears to
be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a
unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered,
it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and
looks into his face, and at one moment recognises all the emotions
and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul
and hears the murderer’s voice as his own is at the next moment one
and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of
his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to
death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon
men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that,
as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of
the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of
selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them
under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania
and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth
from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words,
why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident,
when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore,
who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is
already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting
person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is
in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos
of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It
appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for
everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of
his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed
phenomenon. Even the best of us share the delusion.
The delusion rests simply upon a false analogy. As a body everyone
is single, as a soul never. In literature, too, even in its ultimate
achievement, we find this customary concern with apparently whole and
single personalities. Of all literature up to our days the drama has
been the most highly prized by writers and critics, and rightly, since
it offers (or might offer) the greatest possibilities of representing
the ego as a manifold entity, but for the optical illusion which makes
us believe that the characters of the play are one-fold entities by
lodging each one in an undeniable body, singly, separately and once
and for all. An artless æsthetic criticism, then, keeps its highest
praise for this so-called character-drama in which each character makes
his appearance unmistakably as a separate and single entity. Only from
afar and by degrees the suspicion dawns here and there that all this
is perhaps a cheap and superficial æsthetic philosophy; and that we
make a mistake in attributing to our great dramatists those magnificent
conceptions of beauty that come to us from antiquity. These conceptions
are not native to us, but are merely picked up at second hand, and it
is in them, with their common source in the visible body, that the