by Colin Wilson
This experience can be called the ultimately valid core of romanticism, stripped of its externals of stagey scenery and soft music. It has become a type of religious affirmation. Unfortunately, there can be no doubt about the difficulty of separating it from the stage scenery: the overblown language, the Hoffmannesque atmosphere. Only a few pages later, Haller admits that a part of his new ‘life of the senses’ is smoking opium; and there is bisexuality too. (Pablo suggests a sexual orgy for three: himself, Harry and Maria; and Maria and Hermine have Lesbian relations.)
The book culminates with a dream fantasy of a fancy-dress ball in which Harry feels the barriers between himself and other people break down, ceases to feel his separateness. He kills (or dreams he kills) Hermine, and at last finds his way to the Magic Theatre, where he sees his past in retrospect and relives innocent dreams. After this scene, he has achieved the affirmation he could not make earlier in the book:
I would sample its tortures once more and shudder once more at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more but often, the hell of my inner being. One day I would be a better hand at the game....18
Steppenwolf ends in the same romantic dream-haze that we have noted in the previous two novels; but in this case its effect is less irritating because the reader has already, as it were, granted Haller latitude to tell what lies he chooses. Nevertheless, it is not these last scenes that impress themselves on the mind (as it should be, since they are the climax of the novel); it is the pages of self-analysis, when there is no action taking place at all. Unlike his great contemporary, Thomas Mann, Hesse has no power to bring people to life; but his ideas are far more alive than Mann’s, perhaps because Mann is always the detached spectator, while Hesse is always a thinly disguised participant in his novels. The consequence is that Hesse’s novels of ideas have a vitality that can only be compared to Dostoevsky; the ideas are a passion; he writes in the grip of a need to solve his own life’s problems by seeing them on paper.
In Steppenwolf he has gone a long way towards finally resolving them. In the final dream scene, Haller glimpses the words: Tat Tvam Asi—That Thou Art— [Ghandogya Upanishad, VI, ii, 3] the formula from the Upanishads that denotes that in the heart of his own being man discovers the godhead. Intuitively, Harry knows this. The path that leads from the Outsider’s miseries to this still-centre is a path of discipline, asceticism and complete detachment. He shows himself aware of it in the ‘Treatise on the Steppenwolf’, but he admits that it is too hard a saying for him. By the end of the novel it would seem that he has found some of the necessary courage to face it.
Steppenwolf is Hesse’s last major study of the Outsider. The two remaining novels call for less detailed analysis.
Narziss und Goldmund is another study in the two ways: asceticism versus the world. Many critics consider it the best of Hesse’s novels; certainly it is a fine result of a quarter of a century’s novel-craft. Narziss is the young monk whose ‘way’ will be the way of service to the Church. When the boy Goldmund comes to the monastery-school as a pupil, they are instantly attracted to one another as the two most alive beings in the cloister. But Goldmund is no monk; he must follow the path of Siddhartha and Steppenwolf: ‘Instead of narrowing your world... you will have at last to take the whole world into your soul....’ On the day when Goldmund leaves the cloister to go into the world to ‘seek himself’, Narziss has begun the series of fasts and vigils that will carry him towards ascetic world-renunciation.
The rest of the book, three-quarters of it, is concerned with Goldmund: his love affairs (many of them!), wanderings, hardships; he becomes a sculptor whose works are a Michel-angelesque affirmation of life; he wanders through the plague and sees universal death. The climax of his wanderings occurs when he sees a painting on the wall of a deserted church— a dance of death of a type to be found in many medieval manuscripts, with skeletons dressed as priests, merchants, beggars, lovers, and death carrying all away. He leaves it with the knowledge: In the midst of life we are in death; and turns his feet homeward, towards Narziss.
Narziss is now Abbot of the cloister, and is gaining political influence: a St. Bernard or Father Joseph of Paris. Goldmund reaches him, after a love affair which almost costs him his neck, and enters the cloister again, not as a monk, but as a lay-brother. There he spends his days carving sculptures of saints and gargoyles for the monastery; there he eventually dies, leaving behind him the sculptures that reach out towards the permanence that his life lacked, an ‘unknown medieval craftsman’. He has not found self-realization, but, paradoxically, Narziss finds it for him; looking at the statues, he knows that Goldmund, without being aware of it, has discovered the image of the permanent and spiritual.
Hesse’s last major work to date, which began to appear in 1937, and was finally published in 1945, is his finest achievement. The cloying element of romanticism has disappeared almost entirely; the novel has a chastity of style and form that is a new thing in Hesse.
The Bead Game [or Magister Ludi] is set at some date in the future when the state supports an aristocratic hierarchy of intellectuals, the Castalian order. The purpose of this order is to preserve the ideals of intellect and spirit in a world of political upheavals and squabbling statesmen (the sort of function that was served by the Church in the Middle Ages). It is, in fact, the logical outcome of the Renaissance humanist ideals. It substitutes for ritualistic worship of God a ritualistic worship of knowledge called the bead game. This game, Castalia’s highest form of activity, makes use of all the arts and sciences, and co-ordinates and blends them so that the total result is a sort of High Mass performed by a number of university professors.
The novel purports to be the biography of a high-priest of this bead game, Joseph Knecht (Knecht means serf; the hero embodies the ideal of service). Knecht, with the temperament of a Narziss, becomes Magister Ludi, the highest position in Castalia. But there is something subtly unsatisfactory about the fife of this intellectual hierarchy; there is, for instance, their certainty that no other way of life can give such full satisfaction to man’s highest needs, while Knecht can see quite clearly that it very easily gives way to intellectual sloth, smugness and self-esteem. (This is the same situation that Martin Luther found, in the Catholic Church of his day.) After writing a long letter, in which he warns the order that it is dying of emotional anaemia, Knecht resigns his post and goes into ‘the world’.
In the last chapter, the ex-Magister, now the tutor of a Goldmund-like boy, watches his pupil pay homage to the sun in the morning:
… drawing mountains, water and sky to his heart with outstretched arms, he knelt down and seemed to pay homage to the earth-mother and the wisp of mountain lake, offering as a ceremonious sacrifice to the powers his youth, freedom, and the life instinct that burned within him.19
Knecht realizes, watching the boy, that his pupil has revealed himself ‘new and alien and completely his peer’. This is what Castalia knew nothing of; this is what his own life had lacked, When his pupil dives into the lake, Knecht follows him, fired, like Ibsen’s Master Builder, by youth and life. The cold and the effort overcome him, and he drowns.
Still, in this last work (to date) Hesse has not drawn a clear and final conclusion from his analysis. The young Tito has revealed himself as ‘completely his peer’. At the last, Hesse cannot choose between Narziss and Goldmund. We can see in retrospect why both were failures. Goldmund merely lived; he failed to ‘take the whole world into his soul’, although, through art he came closer to it than Sinclair or Siddhartha. Knecht merely thought; he tried, through the bead game, to take the whole world of knowledge into his soul. His ideal of service was right, but it was service to the wrong cause, as he realizes when he sees Tito performing a different sort of service in the dawn.
Considered as a whole, Hesse’s achievement can hardly be matched in modern literature; it is the continually rising trajectory of an idea, the fundamental religious idea of how to ‘live more abundantly’. Hesse has little imagination i
n the sense that Shakespeare or Tolstoy can be said to have imagination, but his ideas have a vitality that more than makes up for it. Before all, he is a novelist who used the novel to explore the problem: What should we do with our lives? The man who is interested to know how he should live instead of merely taking life as it comes, is automatically an Outsider. In Steppenwolf, Hesse solves the Outsider’s problem to this extent: his wretchedness is the result of his incorrigible tendency to compromise, to prefer temperate, civilized, bourgeois regions. His salvation lies in extremes—of heat or cold, spirit or nature.
The problem then advances to the stage: which? In Narziss und Goldmund the hero chooses nature, but does not come anywhere near to self-realization. In The Bead Game, the hero chooses spirit, and he dies with a consciousness of failure too. Perhaps Hesse’s failure lies in the fact that he is not sure of what he means by self-realization. Steppenwolf speaks of a sudden ecstasy, a ‘timeless moment’:
Between two or three notes of the piano, the door opened suddenly to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work,... I affirmed all things and to all things I gave up my heart. [Italics mine.]20
But that is only for a quarter of an hour; Hesse nowhere speaks of the possibility of a discipline that should make all life a succession of such moments. No doubt if he were a good Christian, he would not expect anything so unreasonable; he would be contented to strive towards the Godly life and leave the rest to God. Being a romantic, Hesse refuses to accept any such half-measure; he has a deep sense of the injustice of human beings having to live on such a lukewarm level of everyday triviality; he feels that there should be a way of living with the intensity of the artist’s creative ecstasy all the time. We may dismiss this as romantic wishful-thinking, but it deserves note as being one of the consistent ideals of the Outsider. In the next chapter we shall study men who could hardly be accused of being romantics, who actually made a determined effort to find such a way of living by going out and looking for it.
In the light of Hesse’s contribution, the implications of the Outsiders of the first two chapters are altogether clearer. Their problem is the unreality of their lives. They become acutely conscious of it when it begins to pain them, but they are not sure of the source of the pain. The ordinary world loses its values, as it does for a man who has been ill for a very long time. Life takes on the quality of a nightmare, or a cinema sheet when the screen goes blank. These men who had been projecting their hopes and desires into what was passing on the screen suddenly realize they are in a cinema. They ask: Who are we? What are we doing here? With the delusion of the screen identity gone, the causality of its events suddenly broken, they are confronted with a terrifying freedom. In Sartre’s phrase, they are ‘condemned to be free’. Completely new bearings are demanded; a new analysis of this real world of the cinema has to be undertaken. In the shadow world on the screen, every problem had an answer; this may not be true of the world in the cinema. The fact that the screen world has proved to be a delusion arouses the disturbing possibility that the cinema world may be unreal too. ‘When we dream that we dream, we are beginning to wake up,’ Novalis says. Chuang Tzu had once said that he had dreamed he was a butterfly, and now wasn’t sure if he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
These problems follow in the wake of the Barbusse Outsider; whenever they appear, they signalize the presence of an Outsider. If we accept that they are ultimate problems of existence, to which there can be no answer, then we must regard the Outsider as the harbinger of the unanswerable problem. Before we commit ourselves to any conclusion, however, there are a great many more attempts at an answer at which we shall look.
***
Before leaving the romantic Outsider, there is another novelist whose treatment of the theme can be conveniently examined here. Henry James is a uniquely great novelist whose works deserve in this connexion several chapters to themselves; even more than Hesse he treated his work as a laboratory in which to investigate human life. Such a detailed analysis is impossible here, but we can trace the development of his treatment from novel to novel. James thought of himself as ‘an incorrigible Outsider’, and one penetrating English critic has likened him to Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott, seeing life always through a magic mirror; perhaps Barbusse’s ‘hole in the wall’ would be as good a simile.
From the beginning James’s work dealt with the problem, What should we do with our lives? (The phrase is the property of H. G. Wells.) His favourite heroes and heroines are young people who, like Hesse’s, ‘confront life’ with the questions, How must it be lived to bring the greatest self-realization?
Roderick Hudson, the hero of the first important novel, is a young sculptor who is frustrated and bored in the small-town home environment; a generous patron takes him to Rome and releases him from the necessity of drudging in an office for a living. Roderick promptly gets himself embroiled in an unhappy love affair and gradually loses his idealism and his talent. James has shown Roderick’s immense expectation of life petering out as soon as he flings himself into the business of living it.
In Portrait of a Lady the heroine is a young woman who, again, confronts life with the question-mark. Her social success in English society leads a very eligible English Lord to propose to her; she refuses him because she feels that life is far too full of exciting possibilities to narrow it down so soon. Later, the possibilities resolve themselves in a love-marriage that is a failure, with the same prospect of future unfulfilment as in Roderick Hudson. She too is ‘defeated by life’, by her own inability to live at a constant intensity.
James is something of a defeatist where the Outsider’s problems are concerned. Much later in his life he returned to the problem of self-realization. He put into the mouth of Lambert Strether, the middle-aged hero of The Ambassadors, a speech that begins: ‘Live, live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.’ But Strether’s own attempt to ‘take the world into his soul’ is miserably unsuccessful. He comes to Europe from a small American town to drag back with him a young American who likes Europe far too much to go home. Once in Paris, he is so overwhelmed by realization of what he has missed in his own narrow life that he advises the young man not to go back on any account, and announces his own intention of staying on. His course of ‘self-realization’ ends by scuttling the security he has left behind him in America and committing him to a very uncertain future. At this point James leaves him.
Finally, the idea behind the novel, Wings of the Dove, of a young woman ‘in love with life’ who yet knows she has only six months to live, is calculated to set the problem in a light where it could hardly fail of some solution. Yet what actually happens is that Milly Theale is betrayed by her best friend and her lover, and dies in the knowledge that she has been defeated by life as well as by death. ‘At the last she hated death; she would have done anything to live.’ The problem of self-realization, the Outsider’s problem, is left unsolved. It would seem that James’s contribution to it could be summarized in Elroy Flecker’s ‘The dead know only one thing: It is better to be alive’.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ATTEMPT TO GAIN CONTROL
The outsider problem is essentially a living problem; to write about it in terms of literature is to falsify it. Up to this point, analysis of writers has been necessary, for the writer’s business is self-expression, and they have helped us towards clear and scientific definition of the Outsider’s problems. But these men, Barbusse, Sartre, Hemingway, even Hesse, were not deeply and permanently concerned with the Outsider; the measure of their unconcern lies in the fact that they passed on to other subjects. The writer has an instinct that makes him select the material that will make the best show on paper, and when that has failed or been carried to a limit from which he finds it difficult to go forward, he selects a new approach. This can be seen by referring to the development of any of these writers of the previous chapters: Sartre passing from Roquentin to Communism; Hemingway from Corporal Krebs to t
he big-jawed, hard-fisted heroes of the later books; Barbusse from L’Enfer to Le Feu and so on to Communism. Unless a writer has unusual sincerity and unusual persistence, this is almost certain to happen to him (Mr. Eliot is the only example I can call to mind among modern writers whose development has been a consistent, unswerving line). The reason is simple: beyond a certain point, the Outsider’s problems will not submit to mere thought; they must be lived. Very few writers treat writing (as Mr. Eliot does) as an instrument for living, not as an aim in itself.
This conclusion is not intended as a criticism of the writers I have just spoken of. A writer’s conscience is his own business. We must accept what they have given us and be grateful enough to get it. But it means that, in order to pursue the Outsider’s problems further, we must turn to men who were more concerned with living than with writing.
The three men we are to consider in this chapter had one unfortunate feature in common; they all believed, like Barbusse’s hero, that ‘they had nothing and they deserved nothing’. This is not a belief that puts a man at the best advantage for wrestling with a living problem. All three ended tragically; that is to say, all three wasted themselves and their possible development. Looking back on them, looking at a canvas by Van Gogh, or at the manuscript letters of T. E. Lawrence, or at Nijinsky’s L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune in the British Museum, we can feel the full poignancy of the fact that these men did not understand themselves, and consequently wasted their powers. If they had known themselves as well as we can know them, their lives need not have been tragic. The Outsider’s first business is self-knowledge.