THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS

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"Enders, in an important work entitled The Nature of Living Things, believe that there is proof that the gene groups have been disturbed and that, under the influence of forces that are still mysterious, a new race of men is appearing, endowed with superior intellectual powers. This is, of course, a subject to be approached with caution. The genetician Lewis Terman, however, after thirty years study of infant prodigies, has reached the following conclusions: Most infant prodigies used in the past to lose their faculties on becoming adult. It would seem today that they tend to become a superior kind of adult, gifted with an intelligence that has nothing in common with that of ordinary human beings. They are thirty times as active as a normal man of talent. Their 'success index' is multiplied by twenty-five. Their health is perfect, as well as their sentimental and sexual balance. Finally, they escape the psycho-somatic diseases, notably cancer. Is this certain? One thing is certain, and that is that we are now witnessing a progressive acceleration throughout the world of the mental faculties, and this is true also of the physical. The phenomenon is so evident that another American scientist, Dr. Sydney Pressey, of the University of Ohio, has just drawn up a plan for the instruction of precocious children capable, in his opinion, of producing 300,000 superior intelligences a year.

Does this point to a mutation of the human species? Shall we see a new race of beings who resemble us outwardly, but yet are different? This is the formidable problem we must now examine. What is certain is that we are witnessing the birth of a myth: that of the Mutant. That this myth should arise in our technical and scientific civilization must have some significance and dynamic value.

Before tackling this subject, it should be noted that this access of intelligence that has been observed among children carries with it the simple, practical and reasonable notion of a progressive improvement in the human race brought about by techniques.

Modern sporting techniques have shown that Man possesses physical resources that are far from being exhausted. The experi- ments now being carried out on the behaviour of the human body in interplanetary rockets have proved the existence of formidable powers of resistance. The survivors from the concentration camps have learned to what extremes it is possible to go to preserve life, and have discovered sources of strength in the interaction of psychic and physical forces. Finally, as regards the intelligence, the imminent discovery of mental techniques and chemical products capable of stimulating the memory and reducing to zero the strain of memorizing, opens up some extraordinary perspectives. The principles of science are not inaccessible to a normal intelligence. If school-children and students could be relieved of the enormous effort of memory they have to make, it will become quite possible to teach the structure of the nucleus and the periodical table of the elements to elementary pupils, and to explain the relativity and quantum theories to undergraduates. Moreover, when the principles of science are widely diffused in all countries and there are fifty or a / Page 293 / hundred times as many research workers, the multiplication of new ideas, their mutual fecundation, and multiple points of contact will produce the Same effect as an increase in the number of geniuses. Even greater, because genius is often unstable and anti-social. It is probable, too, that a new science, the general theory of information, will soon make it possible to express quantitatively the ideas we are now expounding qualitatively. By distributing equitably among men the knowledge mankind already possesses, and by encouraging them to exchange their knowledge so as to produce new combinations, we shall increase the intellectual potential of human society no less rapidly and surely than by multiplying the number of geniuses. This vision must be borne in mind along with the other more fantastic one of the Mutant.

Our friend Charles-Noel Martin, in a sensational communication, has revealed the accumulated effects of atomic explosions. The effects of the radiation generated in the course of the tests increase in geometrical proportion. Thus the human race is in danger of being exposed to unfavourable mutations. Moreover, for the last fifty years radium has been used all over the world without any serious precautions being taken. X-rays and certain radio-active chemical products are exploited in a great many industries. How, and to what extent does this radiation affect modem man? We know nothing about the system of mutations. Could there not also be favourable mutations? Speaking at an atomic conference at Geneva, Sir Ernest Rock Carling, a Home Office pathologist, declared: 'It is also to be hoped that, in a limited proportion of cases, these mutations will have a favourable effect and produce a child of genius. At the risk of shocking this distinguished company, I affirm that the mutation that will give us an Aristotle, a Leonardo da Vinci, a Newton, a Pasteur or an Einstein will largely compensate for the ninety-nine others which will have much less fortunate effects.'

First, a word as to the theory of mutations.

At the end of the last century, A. Weisman and Hugo de Vries instilled new life into the old ideas about evolution. The atom was then fashionable, and its effects were beginning to make themselves felt in physics. They discovered the 'atom of heredity', and localized it in the chromosomes. The new science of genetics thus created brought to light again the work done in the second half of the nineteenth century by the Czech monk, Gregor Mendel.

Today it appears to be an established fact that heredity is transformed by the genes. These are strongly protected against their outside environment. It seems, however, that atomic radiations, cosmic rays and certain violent poisons such as colchicine are able to attack them or cause the number of chromosomes to be doubled. It has been observed that the frequence of the mutations is proportional to the intensity of the radio-activity.

Now, today, the radio-activity in the world is thirty-five times / Page 294 / higher than it was at the beginning of the century. Exact examples of selection in bacteria operating through genetic mutation under the action of antibiotics have been furnished in 1943 by Luria and Debruck, and in 1945 by Demerec. These studies show that mutation-selection is operating just as Darwin had imagined. The adversaries of the Lamarck-Mitchurine-Lyssenko theory as to the inheritance of acquired characteristics would therefore seem to be right. But can one generalize from bacteria to plants, animals or man? This is no longer doubted.

Are there any genetic mutations in man that can be controlled?

Yes. A case in point, as to which there appears to be no doubt, is the following: quoted from the archives of the Hospital for Sick Children in London: Dr. Louis Wolf, the Director of this hospital, estimates that thirty phenyl-cetonic mutants are bom in England every year. These mutants possess genes which do not produce in the blood certain ferments that are normally found there. A phenyl-cetonic mutant is incapable of dissociating phenile-alamine. This inability renders the child vulnerable to epilepsy and eczema, turns his hair ash-grey, and renders an adult liable to mental disorders. A certain phenyl-cetonic race of men, distinct from. normal human beings, is therefore living amongst us. . . . This is an example of an unfavourable mutation; but must one refuse to believe in the possibility of a favourable mutation? Some mutants could have in their blood substances capable of improving their physical equilibrium and raising their intelligence-coefficient to a level higher than our own. Their blood might contain natural tranquillizing agents which protect them from the psychic shocks of social life and anxiety complexes. In this way they would form a race different from ordinary humans and superior to them. Psychiatrists and doctors try to find out what makes things go wrong. How are they to act when things go exceptionally well?

Mutations are of various kinds. Cellular mutation, which does not attack the genes and has no effect on heredity, is known to us in its unfavourable forms: cancer and leukaemia are cellular mutations. To what extent could there be cellular mutations, generalized throughout the organism which would be beneficial? The mystics speak of the apparition of a 'new flesh', a 'transfiguration'.

We are also beginning to know something about unfavourable genetic mutations (e.g. the phenyl-cetonic cases). Could there not, here too, be beneficial mutations? Here again we must distinguish between two aspects of the phenomenon, or rather two interpretations.

(1) This mutation, this apparition of another race could be due to chance. Radio-activity, among other causes, could induce a modification of the genes in certain individuals. The protein in the gene, if slightly affected, would no longer, for example, produce certain acids which cause us to feel anxiety. We should see another species of Man - a race of tranquil men who would not know fear or have any negative sensations. Men who would go tranquilly to / Page 295 / war, and kill without anxiety and have no complexes in their pleasures - a sort of robot devoid of any internal emotions. It may well be that we are witnessing now the coming of this race.

(2) Genetic mutation is not, it would seem, due to chance, but directed in some way, perhaps towards a spiritual regeneration of humanity - a bridge, as it were, between a lower and a higher level of consciousness. The effects of radio-activity may be ordained as a means of improving the race. The modifications we mentioned just now are merely a slight indication of the profound changes that humanity may be destined to undergo in the future. The protein of the gene may be structurally affected so that we should see the birth of a race whose intelligence would be completely transformed - a race of beings capable of mastering time and space and of extending the domain of the intellect beyond Infinity. Between these two conceptions there is as much difference as there is between hardened steel and steel subtely transformed into a magnetic band.

The second conception (above) which is responsible for a modem myth which science-fiction has adopted, is curiously reflected in various manifestations of contemporary spirituality. In the Satanic camp we have seen how Hitler believed in the existence of Superior Beings, and heard him reveal his secret: 'The mutation of the human race has begun; there are already super-men.'

Representing the new Hindu school of thought, the master of the Pondicherry Ashram, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, founded his philosophy and his commentaries on the sacred texts on the certitude that the upward evolution of humanity would be accomplished by means of mutations. And Teilhard de Chardin, representing a Catholicism open to scientific speculation affirmed that he believed in 'a force capable of impelling us towards some form of super-humanity' ('Ultra-Humain').

Andre Breton, the Father of Surrealism, a pilgrim on the road of strangeness, sensitive to every transient current of disquieting ideas, spectator rather than creator, but a hyper-lucid observer of the most extreme adventures of the modem mind, wrote as follows in 1942: 'Man is not, perhaps, the centre, the principal protagonist of the Universe. It is permissible to believe that there are beings above him in the animal scale whose behaviour is as different from his as his own is from that of whales or butterflies. There is no reason why there should not be beings altogether outside his field of sensory perception, thanks to some form of camouflage possibly of the kind adopted by mimetic animals. There is no doubt that this idea opens up a vast field for speculation, despite the fact that it tends to reduce man's interpretation, of his own universe to a modest scale, not unlike that of an ant in an anthill which a child has trampled on. When we think of catastrophes such as a cyclone, where Man can only be either a victim or a spectator, or war, about which notoriously inadequate opinions have been expressed, it should be possible in the course of an extensive study of a rigorously inductive nature, to succeed in giving a plausible picture of the structure and complexion / Page 296 / of such hypothetical beings which haunt our imagination and fill us with obscure apprehensions.

'In this, I must point out, my thought is not far removed from that of Novalis who wrote: "We are really living inside an animal whose parasites we are. What we are, our constitution, depends on this animal, and vice-versa." I also find myself in agreement with William James, who asked: "Who knows but that we may occupy in Nature as small a place by the side of beings of whom we know nothing as the cats and dogs who live beside us in our houses ?" Scientists themselves would not contradict this point of view: "All round us there may be beings, built on the same model as ourselves, but different - men, for example, whose albumins may be straight".*

'A new myth? Should we try to persuade these beings that they are nothing but a mirage, or give them an opportunity to reveal themselves ?'

Are there really beings among us who resemble us externally, but whose behaviour is as far removed from ours as 'that of whales or butterflies'? Common sense answers that, if so, we should be aware of it, and that if such beings were living among us, we should certainly see them.

We know of a writer, John W. Campbell, who more or less demolished this common-sense argument in an editorial in the review Astounding Science Fiction in 1941. This is the gist of what he wrote:

No one goes to see his doctor to tell him that his health is magnificent. No one would go to a psychiatrist to inform him that life is an easy and delicious game, or visit a psycho-analyst to declare that he is not suffering from any complex. Unfavourable mutations can be detected. But what about the favourable ones?

Ah, but - objects common sense - the superior mutants would be revealed by their prodigious intellectual activities.

Not at all, replies Campbell. A man of genius, of the same species as ourselves- an Einstein, for example - publishes the fruits of his researches. He attracts attention. This often causes him a lot of trouble in the form of open hostility, incomprehension, threats and perhaps exile. Einstein at the end of his life declared: 'If I had known, I should have been a plumber.' Above Einstein's level, the mutant is clever enough to conceal himself. He keeps his discoveries for himself. He lives as discreetly as possible, and only tries to remain in contact with other intelligences like his own. A few hours of work each week are enough to ensure the necessities of life; the rest of his life he spends in activities of which we can have no conception.

An attractive hypothesis, but one that it is impossible to check in the light of science as it is today. No anatomic examination can tell us anything about intelligence. Anatole France had an abnormally light brain. Moreover, there is no reason why a mutant should

* Emile Duclaux, former Director of the Pasteur Institute.

/ Page 297 / be the subject of an autopsy, except in the case of an accident; in which case, how would it be possible to detect a mutation affecting the cells of the brain? It is not, therefore, completely mad to admit the possible existence of Superior Beings in our midst. If mutations are governed by chance alone, some of them are probably favourable. If they are governed by an organized natural force, or correspond to a living man's will to better himself, as Sri Aurobindo, for example, believed, then there must be many more. Our successors may be here already.

There is every reason to believe that they are exactly like us, or rather that we have no means of distinguishing them. Some science-fiction writers naturally imagine that mutants have some anatomical peculiarities. Van Vogt, in his celebrated In Pursuit of the Sians imagines they have a special kind of hair: a sort of antennae used in telepathic communications; and he makes this the basis of a fine but terrible story about hunting down Superior Beings, modelled on the persecution of the Jews. Storytellers, however, sometimes add to. Nature to simplify the problems.

If telepathy exists, it is probaoly not transmitted by waves, and has no need of antennae. If we believe in a controlled evolution it is reasonable to suppose that the mutant, to ensure his own protection, is able to camouflage himself to perfection. In the animal kingdom it is a commonplace that the predatory species are deceived by their prey disguising themselves as dead leaves, twigs, even excrement, with an astonishing perfection. Some succulents are even cunning enough to imitate the colour of other uneatable species.

As Andre Breton said, when imagining the presence among us of 'Great Transparent Beings', it is possible that they escape our observation 'thanks to some form of camouflage of the kind adopted by mimetic animals'.

'The New Man is living amongst us! He is there! What more do you want? I will tell you a secret: I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel! I was afraid in his presence!' Thus spake a trembling Hitler.

Another example: Maupassant, in an access of terror, and madness, in blood and sweat wrote in precipitate haste one of the most disturbing texts in the whole of French literature: Le Horia:

'Now I know, I can guess the truth. Man's dominion is a thing of the past! He has come, the being who was an object of fear to primitive races, whom anxious priests tried to exorcize, whom sorcerers called up at midnight without ever yet seeing him in visible form, to whom the temporary lords of creation attributed in imagination the shape monstrous or attractive, of gnomes, spirits, fairies or goblins. After the vulgar ideas inspired by prehistoric fears, scientific research has clarified the outlines of Man's pre- sentiment. Mesmer guessed it, and in the last ten years doctors have discovered the exact nature of this being's power before its manifestation. They have experimented with this weapon of the / Page 298 / new lord of the world, the imposition of a dominant will on the human soul, which thus becomes its slave. To this power they have given the name of magnetism, hypnotism, suggestion, and what not. I have seen them playing with it like silly children playing with fire. Woe to us! Woe to mankind! He has come. . . what is his name? . . . yes, he is shouting it and I can't hear. . . say it again! . . . Le Horla, I've got it at last. . . Le Horla . . . that's his name. . . . Le Horla has come !'*

In his interpretation of this vision of horror and wonder, Mau- passant, true to the age he lived in, endowed the mutant with hypnotic powers. Modem science-fiction literature, nearer to the work of Rhine, Soal, MacConnel than to that of Charcot, tends to endow the mutants with para-psychological powers: telepathy, or telekinesis. Other writers go further and show us the Superior Being floating in the air or going through walls; but this is pure fantasy, an agreeable echo of the archetype of all fairy-stories. Just as the island of the mutants, or the galaxy of the mutants correspond to the old dream of the Islands of the Blest, so do paranormal powers correspond to the archetype of the Greek gods. But from the standpoint of reality, it is obvious that all these powers would be completely useless to beings living in a modem civilization. Why have telepathy when the radio exists? Why telekinesis, when you have the aeroplane. If the mutant exists as we are tempted to believe, he has powers greater than any that we can imagine. Powers that an ordinary man seldom uses: he is gifted with intelligence.

Our actions are irrational, and intelligence plays only a very small part in our decisions. One can imagine the Ultra-Human, representing a new stage of life on this planet, as a rational being, no longer merely a reasoning one, and as being endowed with a permanent objective intelligence, only taking decisions after having examined lucidly and thoroughly all the information at its disposal. A being whose nervous system is immune to any negative impulses. A being with a cold and swiftly calculating brain, equipped with a completely infallible memory. If the mutant exists it is likely to have a physical resemblance to a human being, but to be different in all other respects owing to the fact that it controls its intelligence and uses it unceasingly.

This seems a simple enough vision. Nevertheless, it is more fantastic than anything in science-fiction literature. The biologists are beginning to understand the chemical modifications which would have to precede the creation of this new species. Experiments with tranquillizing drugs, lysergic acid and its by-products have shown that very feeble traces of certain organic compounds still unknown to us would be enough to protect us against the excessive permeability of our nervous system, and enable us in this way to exercise on all occasions an objective intelligence. Since there are phenyl-cetonic mutants in existence whose chemical

* Extract from Le Horla, a short story by Guy de Maupassant. Penguin Edition; translated by H. N. P. Sloman.

/ Page 299 / composition is less well adapted to life than our own, it is legitimate to suppose that there are mutants whose chemical composition is better adapted than ours to life in this world in process of transformation. It is these mutants, whose glands would spontaneously secrete tranquillizers and substances capable of stimulating the activity of the brain, who would be the forerunners of the new species destined to replace Man. Their place of residence would not be some mysterious island or forbidden planet. Life has been able in the past to produce creatures adapted to dwell in the depths of the ocean or in the rarefied atmosphere of the highest mountains. It is also capable of creating the 'Ultra-Human' whose ideal habitation would be the Metropolis, 'the Earth of smoking factories, and teeming multitudes, the Earth that vibrates with a hundred new kinds of radiation. . . .'

Life is never perfectly adapted, but it tends towards perfect adaptation. Why should it relax this tension since the creation of Man? Why should it not prepare the way for something better than Man, through Man? And it may be that this Man-after-Man is already bom. 'Life,' says Dr. Loren Eiseley, 'is a great dreamy river which flows through every opening, changing and adapting itself as it advances.' Its apparent stability is an illusion engendered by the brevity of our own life. Just as we do not see the hands of a clock going round, so do we fail to see one form of life flowing into another.

The object of this book is to reveal facts and suggest hypotheses, but not in any way to promote any particular belief. We do not claim to know any mutants. Nevertheless, if we accept the idea that the perfect mutant is perfectly camouflaged, we can accept the idea that Nature sometimes fails in her efforts to improve creation and puts into circulation some imperfect mutants who, unlike the others, are visible.

In such mutants you tnay find a combination of exceptional mental qualities and physical defects, as, for example, in the case of a great many lightning calculators. The greatest specialist in this field, Professor Robert Tocquet, has stated his views as follows: 'Many calculators were at first thought to be backward children. The Belgian prodigy Oscar Verhaeghe at the age of seventeen expressed himself like a two-year-old baby. Zerah Colburn, moreover, showed symptoms of degeneration: he had an extra finger on each hand. Another lightning calculator, Prolongeau, was bom without arms or legs. Mondeux was subject to hysteria. . . . Oscar Verhaeghe, bom on 16th April, 1862, at Bousval in Belgium to parents of humble origin, belongs to the group of calculators whose intelligence is far below average. The raising to different powers of numbers consisting of the same figures was one of his specialities. Thus, he could find the square of 888,888,888,888,888 in 40 seconds, and raise 9,999,999 to the fifth power in 60 seconds, the resulting numbers running to 35 figures. . . .'*

* New York Herald Tribune, 23rd November, 1959.

/ Page 300 / Degenerates, or imperfect mutants?

Here, now, is perhaps an example of a perfect mutant: Leonard Euler. who was in contact with Roger Boscovitch (whose story we related in the preceding chapter).*

Leonard Euler (1707-83) is generally considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. But this qualification is too narrow to convey the supra-human qualities of his mind. He could skim through the most complex treatise in a few minutes, and could recite from memory all the books he had ever handled since he had learned to read. He had a thorough and complete knowledge of physics, chemistry, zoology, botany, geology, medicine, history and Greek and Latin literature. In all these fields he was without a rival among his contemporaries. He had the power of isolating himself completely at will from the outside world, and of following a train of thought in any circumstances whatever. He lost his sight in 1766, but this did not affect him. One of his pupils has recorded that during a discussion relating to calculations involving 17 decimal places, there was some disagreement with regard to the fifteenth place. Euler then, with his eyes closed, performed the whole calculation again in a fraction of a second. He saw relation- ships and connections which had escaped the notice of other cultivated and intelligent beings throughout the ages. Thus, he discovered in the poetry of Vergil new and revolutionary mathematical ideas. He was a simple and modest man, and all his contemporaries agree that his one desire was to remain unnoticed. Euler and Boscovitch lived at a time when men of learning were honoured, and ran no risk of being imprisoned for their political opinions, or of being forced by governments to manufacture arms. If they had lived in our century, perhaps they would have taken steps to camouflage themselves completely. Maybe there are Eulers and Boscovitchs among us today.

Intelligent and rational mutants, endowed with an infallible memory, a constantly lucid intelligence are perhaps working beside us disguised as country schoolmasters or insurance agents.

Do these mutants form an invisible society? No human being lives alone. He can only develop himself within a society. The human society we know has shown only too well its hostility towards an objective intelligence or a free imagination: Giordano Bruno burnt, Einstein exiled, Oppenheimer kept under observation. If there are indeed mutants answering to our description, there is every reason to believe that they are working and communicating with one another in a society superimposed on our own, which no doubt extends all over the world. That they communicate by means of superior psychic powers, such as telepathy, seems to us a childish hypothesis. Nearer to reality, and consequently more fantastic, is the hypothesis that they are using normal human methods of communication to convey messages and information for their exclusive use.

* The diary of the father of the science of astronautics. Ziolkovsky. was published in U.S.S.R. in 1959. In it he states that he borrowed most of his ideas from the work of Boscovitch.

/ Page 301 / The general theory of information and semantics proves fairly conclusively that it is possible to draw up texts which have a double, triple or quadruple meaning. There are Chinese texts in which seven meanings are enclosed one within the other. One of the heroes in Van Vogt's In Pursuit of the Slans discovers the existence of other mutants by reading the newspapers and deciphering apparently inoffensive articles. A similar network of communication in our own Press and literature, etc., is quite conceivable. The New York Herald Tribune published on 15th March, 1958, an analysis from its London correspondent of a series of advertisements appearing in the Personal column of The Times. These messages had attracted the attention of professional cryptographers and the police in various countries, because they obviously had a hidden meaning. But this meaning was never deciphered. There are, no doubt, other still less decipherable means of communication. Who knows but that some fourth-rate novel, or some technical textbook, or some apparently obscure philosophical work is not a secret vehicle for complex studies and messages acldressed to higher intelligences, as different from our own as we are from the great apes.

Louis de Broglie, in an article in Nouvelles Litteraires on 2nd March, 1950, entitled 'What is Life ?', wrote as follows:

'We must never forget how limited our knowledge must always be, and in what unexpected ways it is likely to develop. If our human civilization endures, the physics of the future a few centuries hence could well be as different from the physics of today as the latter is from the physics of Aristotle. The greatly extended range of knowledge to which we shall have access by then will perhaps enable us to incorporate in a general synthesis, in which each will have its place, the whole body of physical and biological phenomena. If human thought, which by that time may have had its powers extended by some biological mutation, can one day rise to those heights, it will then perceive in its true perspective, something of which, no doubt, we have no idea at present, namely, the unity of the phenomena which we distinguish with the help of adjectives such as "physico-chemical", "biological" or even "psychic".'

And what if this mutation has already taken place? One of the greatest French biologists, Morand, the inventor of the tranquil- lizers, admits that mutants have made their appearance all through the history of humanity.*

'These mutants, among others, were called Mahomet, Confucius, Jesus Christ. . . .' Many more exist, perhaps. It is by no means inconceivable that, in the present evolutionary period, the mutants think it would be useless to offer themselves as an example, or to preach some new form of religion. There are better things to do at present than to appeal to the individual. Again, they may think, that it is both desirable and necessary that our humanity should

* P. Morand and H. Laborit: Les Destins de la Vie et de I'Homme. Ed. Masson, Paris, 1959.

/ Page 302 / move towards collectivization. Finally, it may well be that they think it a good thing that we should be suffering now the pains of childbirth, and would even welcome some great catastrophe which might hasten a better understanding of the spiritual tragedy represented in its totality by the phenomenon of Man. So that they may act more efficiently and so as to obtain a clearer view of the current that is perhaps sweeping us all upwards to some form of the Ultra-Human to which they have access, it is perhaps necessary for them to remain hidden, and to keep their coexistence with us secret while, despite appearances and thanks, perhaps, to their presence, a new soul is being forged for the new world which we long for with all our heart.

We have arrived now at the frontiers of the imaginary. It is time to stop. We only want to suggest as many not unreasonable hypotheses as possible. Many of them, no doubt, will have to be rejected. But if some of them have opened doors to research that have hitherto been hidden, we shall not have laboured in vain; we shall not have exposed ourselves uselessly to ridicule. 'The secret of life can be discovered. If I had an opportunity to do this, I should not allow myself to be deterred by ridicule.' These words were spoken by Loren Eiseley.

Any reflections on the question of the mutants must lead to speculation with regard to evolution, and the destiny and nature of Life and Man. What is Time, in regard to the cosmic scale by which the history of the Earth must be measured? Has not the, future, so to speak, been with us from all eternity? The appearance of the mutants would seem to suggest that our human society is from time to time given a foretaste of the future, and visited by beings already possessing a knowledge of things to come. Are not the mutants the memory of the future with which the great brain of humanity is perhaps endowed? ;

Another thing: the idea of a favourable mutation is clearly linked with the notion of progress. This hypothesis of a mutation can be dealt with on a strictly scientific level. It is known for certain that the areas most recently affected by evolution, and the least specialized - namely, the silent zones of cerebral matter - are the last to mature. Some neurologists think with reason that this points to possibilities which the future of the species will reveal. There may be individuals with 'other' possibilities; a superior kind of indi- vidualization. And yet the general trend of societies would seem to be towards a greater degree of collectivization. Is this contradictory? I We do not think so. Existence, in our view, does not mean contradiction, but complementing and going beyond.

In a letter to his friend Laborit, the biologist, Morand wrote these words: 'The perfectly logical man who has abandoned all passions and all illusions will become a cell in the vital continuum constituted by a society arrived at the peak of its evolution; we have obviously not reached that stage yet; but I do not think there can / Page 303 / be evolution without it. Then, and then only, will there emerge that "universal consciousness" of the collective being which we are all tending to become.'

Confronted with this vision, which seems highly probable, we are well aware that those who remain faithful to the old humanism that has moulded our civilization, will be filled with despair. They picture Man, henceforth deprived of any aim in life, entering into his decline. '. . . Perfectly logical, and having abandoned all passions and all illusions. . . .' How could a Man transformed into a being radiating intelligence be on the point of a decline? It is true that the psychological 'I', which we call 'personality' is likely to disappear. But we do not think that this 'personality' is Man's richest possession. It is only one of the instruments he has been given to enable him to pass into the 'awakened' state.

When the goal has been attained, the instrument disappears. If we had mirrors capable of revealing to us that 'personality' which we value so highly, we could not bear to look at our reflection so disfigured would it be by all sorts of monstrous excrescences. Only a truly 'awakened' man could look into such a mirror without being in danger of dying from fright, because then the mirror would reflect nothing and be absolutely pure. The true face is one which in the mirror of truth is not reflected. We have not yet acquired, in this sense, a face. And the gods will not speak to us face-to-face until we have one ourselves.

Rejecting the fluid and limited psychological 'I', Rimbaud long ago said: 'I is another.' This is the pure, transparent, immobile 'I' endowed with infinite understanding: in all traditions, Man is taught to give up everything to attain this state. Maybe we are living at a time when the near future speaks the same language as the distant past.

Apart from these considerations on the 'other' possibilities of the mind, our thinking, even at its most tolerant, perceives only contradictions between the individual and the collective conscience, and between a personal and a collective life. But thinking which perceives contradictions in living things is wrong thinking. The individual conscience, when truly 'awakened', enters into the universal. Personal life, if regarded and used wholly and solely as an instrument of 'awakening', can be merged with impunity in a collecuve life.

This does not mean, however, that the formation of this collective being is the ultimate aim of evolution. The spirit of the Earth and the individual soul have not yet fully emerged. The pessimist, seeing the great upheavals which are caused by this secret emerg- ence, say that we ought at least to try to 'save Man'. But this Man does not want saving, but changing. Man, as projected in orthodox psychology and current philosophy, has already been left behind, condemned as inadaptable. With or without mutation, we must envisage a different. kind of human if we want to bring the phenomenon of Man into line with the present trend of our destiny. / Page 304 / From now on, it is no longer a question of pessimism or optimism: it is a question of love.

At the time when I thought I could possess truth in my soul and in my body, when I imagined I should find the solution of every- thing at the school of the philosopher Gurdjieff, there was one word which I never heard pronounced, and that was: love.

Today there is nothing about which I feel absolutely certain. I could not guarantee the validity of even the most timid hypothesis put forward in the course of this book. Five years of study and work in collaboration with Jacques Bergier have only taught me one thing a determination to keep my mind prepared for surprises, and to have confidence in life in all its forms, and in intelligence wherever and however it may be manifested in living things around me. These two states: surprise and confidence are inseparable, The determination to attain them and to remain in them undergoes, in the end, a transformation. It ceased to be an act of will, in other words compulsion, and becomes love, in other words, joy and liberty. To sum up, all that I have gained is that I now bear within myself a love, which can henceforth never be uprooted, for all things living, in this world and in every world ad infinitum.

In order to express and pay homage to this powerful and complex love Jacques Bergier and I have, no doubt, not confined ourselves, as prudence would have dictated, to strictly scientific methods. But is there such a thing as prudent love? Our methods have been those familiar to scientists, but also to theologians, poets, sorcerers, magicians and children. In a word, we have behaved like barbarians, preferring invasion to evasion. This is because something told us that we were indeed a part of the strange armies, transparent cohorts and phantom hordes, heralded by ultra-sonic trumpets, which are beginning to descend upon our civilization. We are on the side of the invaders, on the side of the life that is coming, on the side of a changing age and changing ways of thought. Error? Madness? A man's life is only justified by his efforts, however feeble, towards better understanding. And to understand better is to become more attached. The more I understand, the more I love; for everything that is understood is good.

Page 53

Glimpse into Chaos contains two essays on Dostoevsky, on The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. Hesse prophesies the collapse of belief and downfall of European morals that we have examined at close quarters in Sartre and Camus. 'It is the rejection of every strongly held moral or ethic in favour of a comprehensive laissez-faire.' Hesse predicted the coming of 'the Russian man', a creature of nightmare who is no longer the Homo sapiens, but an Existentialist monster who rejects all thought, a Mitya Karamazov without an Ivan or Alyosha to counterbalance him:

He reaches forth beyond prohibitions, beyond natural instinct, beyond morality. He is the man who has grasped the idea of freeing himself, and on the other side, beyond the veil, beyond principium individuationis, of turning back again. This ideal man of the Karamazovs loves nothing and everything, does nothing and everything. He is primeval matter, monstrous soul-stuff . He cannot live in this form; he can only pass on.⁵

Demian begins the attempt to construct a system of values that shall not be at the mercy of the Russian man.

With its subtitle, 'The Story of a Youth', Demian can be thought of as Hesse's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. In his Introduction to this story of his youth, Emil Sinclair states:

'The life of everybody is a road to himself. . . . No man has ever yet attained to self-realization, yet he strives after it, one ploddingly, another with less effort, as best he can. Each one carries the remains of his birth, slime and eggshells, with him to the end.'⁶

Chapter One begins with the statement of a dichotomy. In Emil Sinclair's childhood, he knew two worlds. In the first world, his middle-class, well-ordered home, 'were straight lines and paths that led into the furore. Here were duty and guilt, evil conscience and confession, pardon and good resolutions, love and adoration, Bible texts and wisdom. To this world our future had to belong; it had to be crystal clear, beautiful and well-ordered.'

The other world is closer to the servants and workmen; there he encounters 'ghost stories and the breath of scandal. There was a gaily coloured flood of monstrous, tempting, terrible / Page 54 / enigmatical going-on, the slaughter-house and prison, drunken men and scolding women, cows in birth-throes, plunging horses, tales of burglaries, murders, suicides. . . . It was wonderful that in our house there was peace, order and repose. . . and wonderful that there were other things. . . sinister and violent, yet from which one could escape with one bound to mother.'⁷

It is an unpleasant shock to Sinclair when he discovers that the dark world can overflow its boundaries into his home, and there can be no 'appeal to mother'. Through certain lies he invents to gain the applause of some friends, he finds himself in the power of Frank Kromer, a lout of the town, son of a drunkard. To appease Kromer he is forced to steal money and deceive his parents; he finds himself separated, by an act of his own will, from the world of peace and order.

My life at that time was a sort of insanity. I was shy, and lived in torment like a ghost in the midst of the well-ordered peace of our house.⁸

The problem is stated: order versus chaos. In the second chapter, Hesse treats its solution. At Emil Sinclair's school there is a boy called Max Demian, who seems in all respects to be more 'grown-up' than the other boys. One day he gets into conversation with Sinclair on the subject of the Bible story of Cain and Abel, symbols of the two worlds, and suggests to him that the Bible story is a travesty of the truth. Perhaps Cain was not simply an evil man who killed his brother out of envy; perhaps there was something about him, some boldness or intelligence in his face, that made men fear him, and invent the story of the mark of Cain to excuse their cowardice.

This version of the story troubles Sinclair; its implication is clear: the descent into the dark world is not necessarily evil; it may be the necessary expression of boldness and intelligence. Demian is bold and intelligent, and rumours circulate that he has carnal relations with girls, even with his mother. Yet it is this Demian who frees Sinclair from the evil domination of Frank Kromer, and who appeals to him as being above the petty viciousness and dirty-mindedness of schoolboys. Still, Sinclair has not enough courage to embrace the conclusions that Demian shows him. With Kromer's domination over, he flings himself into the peace and order of his home, and 'sings / Page 55 / the dear old hymns with the blissful feeling of one converted'. Only much later he realizes that it was not to his parents that he should have made confession, but to Demian. By returning to his old notion of order, he has only turned his face away from chaos; the chaos still exists.

The remainder of the book describes Sinclair's adolescence and sexual awakening. The question he has passed up repeats itself, drives home its point that you cannot escape chaos by refusing to look at it. Demian reappears on the scene while Sinclair flounders hopelessly; he introduces him to his mother, and Sinclair finds in her the answer to the question of the two worlds. She symbolizes nature, the life force, the mother figuree Lilith, in whom all opposites are resolved. The novel ends in a whirl of Shelleyan airy-fairy that is a disappointment to the unromantic reader whose attention has been held by the terse- ness and practical eye-to-business of Hesse's analysis. This is a fault that recurs in most of Hesse's novels, a legacy from his romantic ancestry.

In spite of this, the conclusions of Demian are clear. It is a question of self-realization. It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result in freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos. This is Hesse's conclusion. In theological terms, the fall was necessary, man had to eat of the fruit of good and evil. (Later, dealing with Nietzsche and Blake, we shall touch upon similar views: the idea that good and evil are not ultimate antinomies, but expressions of a higher force that comprehends both.) In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expresses it: Those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.

Hesse's next novel has a delusive air of having solved great problems. Siddhartha was written on his return from India; it is the best written of the five novels and the most idyllic in tone. (We are reminded that it was through study of Hindu and Buddhist texts that Strindberg regained his sanity.) It suffers from the same defect as Demian: the reader feels that Hesse hadn't foreseen the end when he wrote the beginning.

Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, born in the time of the Buddha (approximately 563 to 483 B.C.). He feels the attraction to the life of the wandering monk; he leaves home while still a / Page 56 / youth and practises rigorous disciplines that give him great control of body and mind.

Siddhartha is already beyond the problems of Barbusse's Outsider.

Still feeling that this self-control is not ultimate self-realization, he goes to listen to the preaching of the saintly Gautama, Sakyamuni, called by his disciples the Buddha. Gautama reinforces the conclusion that Siddhartha had already reached, that extreme asceticism is not an essential of self-realization, for its purpose is only to test the will. The Buddha teaches the 'middle way' that depends on achieving a state of contemplation, of complete separation from all the human faculties. This state achieved, the monk, having extinguished every tendency to identify himself with his body, emotions, senses or intellect, knows himself to be beyond all, and achieves freedom from 'the wheel of rebirth'.

Siddhartha accepts this, but he doubts whether following the Buddha would bring him to self-realization. (In point of fact, Gautama said as much repeatedly: 'Let each man be unto himself an island', etc.). His best friend remains as a disciple; Siddhartha goes on, still searching. He tells himself: No man can teach another to be a Buddha; you can only teach yourself. Then the question occurs: Can a man teach himself by narrowing his life and perceptions until all love of nature has been filtered off? This decides him. He puts off the robe of the holy man; in the first town he comes to he goes to court a beautiful courtesan. When she tells him that he cannot possibly become her lover unless he has some worldly success behind him, he sets his mind to make money with such acumen that he soon has a house, and the beautiful courtesan for a mistress. After a few years of this, it dawns on him that he is less near to self-realization than ever, and one day his basic misery forces itself on him so irresistlbly that he tries to kill himself. He fails, but the honesty involved in facing his own unfulfilment gives him strength to renounce the house and success, and become a homeless wanderer again. This time he doesn't wander far; he joins the local ferryman (another contemplative) and again spends his days in spiritual discipline. When the courtesan dies, Siddhartha discovers that he has a son as a result of the last night they spent together; he brings the boy up, and then has to suffer the final misery of realizing that there is no real / Page 57 / communication with other human beings, even those we love most. The son leaves home: Siddhartha accepts his loss and continues to contemplate the river. The novel draws to a close.

It must have struck the reader, even from this brief summary, that Hesse had not quite succeeded in pulling off the conjuring trick. Siddhartha leaves home full of hope; asceticism fails him, so he turns to the Buddha. The Buddha fails him, so he turns to the worldly life. That fails too, so he becomes a ferry- man. The reader is waiting to be told of a successful solution, and as the novel comes towards the end, he realizes Hesse has nothing to offer. The river flows on; Siddhartha contemplates it. Hesse arrives at the conclusion that there is no ultimate success or failure; life is like the river; its attraction is the fact that it never stops flowing. There is nothing for it but to close the novel feeling rather let down.

The student of Eastern religion will object that the novel's. failure is Hesse's inability to grasp the essence of Vedantism or Buddhism, that he should have tried reading Ramakrishna or the Tibetan saint Milarepa to get his facts straight before he began writing the novel. This is probably true; we can only accept what we have, a finished novel, and consider it as a part of Hesse's attempt to define his own problems.

That Hesse himself was not satisfied is proved by his next book. In Steppenwolf he returns to the attack, sets out all his facts, and starts from the beginning again. From the point of view of this study of the Outsider, Steppenwolf (1928) is Hesse's most important contribution. It is more than that; it is one of the most penetrating and exhaustive studies of the Outsider ever written.

Steppenwolf is the story of a middle-aged man. This in itself is an important advance. The romantic usually finds himself committed to pessimism in opposition to life itself by his insistence on the importance of youth (Rupert Brooke is a typical example). Steppenwolf has recognized the irrelevancy of youth; there is a self-lacerating honesty about this journal of a middle-aged man.

In all externals, Steppenwolf (the self-conferred nickname of Harry Haller) is a Barbusse Outsider. He is more cultured perhaps, less of an animal; the swaying dresses of women in the street do not trouble him. Also he is less concerned to 'stand for truth'; he allows his imagination full play, and his journal is a / Page 58 / sort of wish-dream diary. But here again we have the man-on- his-own, living in rooms with his books and his gramophone; there is not even the necessity to go out and work, for he has a small private income. In his youth he considered himself a poet, a self-realizer. Now he is middle-aged, an ageing Emil Sinclair, and the moods of insight have stopped coming; there is only dissatisfaction, lukewarmness.

The journal opens with an account of a typical day: he reads a little, has a bath, lounges around his room, eats; and the feeling of unfulfilment increases until towards nightfall he feels like setting fire to the house or jumping out of a window. The worst of it is that he can find no excuse for this apathy; being an artist-contemplative, he should be ideally contented with this type of life. Something is missing. But what? He goes to a tavern and ruminates as he takes his evening meal; the food and wine relax him, and suddenly the mood he has despaired of having pervades him:

A refreshing laughter rose in me. . . . It soared aloft like a soapbubble . . . and then softly burst. . . . 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. . . .⁹

But this is at the end of a long day, and tomorrow he will wake up and the insight will be gone; he will read a little, have a bath. . . and so on.

But on this particular evening something happens. The reader is not sure what. According to Haller, he sees a mysterious door in the wall, with the words 'Magic Theatre: Not for everybody' written over it, and a man with a sandwich board and a tray of Old Moore's Almanacs gives him a pamphlet called A Treatise on the Steppenwolf: The treatise is printed at full length in the following pages of the novel, and it is obviously Haller's own work; so it is difficult for the reader to determine when Haller is recording the truth and when he is playing a game of wish-fulfilment with himself.

The treatise is an important piece of self-analysis. It could be called 'A Treatise on the Outsider'. As Harry reads it (or writes it) certain convictions formulate themselves, about himself and about the Outsider generally. The Outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire / Page 59 / is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.

To explain his wretchedness, Haller has divided himself into two persons: a civilized man and a wolf-man. The civilized man loves all the things of Emil Sinclair's first world, order and cleanliness, poetry and music (especially Mozart); he takes lodgings always in houses with polished fire-irons and well-scrubbed tiles. His other half is a savage who loves the second world, the world of darkness; he prefers open spaces and lawlessness; if he wants a woman he feels that the proper way is to kill and rape her. For him, bourgeois civilization and all its inanities are a great joke.

The civilized man and the wolf-man live at enmity most of the time, and it would seem that Harry Haller is bound to spend his days divided by their squabbling. But sometimes, as in the tavern, they make peace, and then a strange state ensues; for Harry finds that a combination of the two makes him akin to the gods. In these moments of vision, he is no longer envious of the bourgeois who finds life so straightforward, for his own conflicts are present in the bourgeois, on a much smaller scale. He, as self-realizer, has deliberately cultivated his two opposing natures until the conflict threatens to tear him in two, because he knows that when he has achieved the secret of permanently reconciling them, he will live at a level of intensity unknown to the bourgeois. His suffering is not a mark of his inferiority, even though it may render him less fit for survival than the bourgeois; unreconciled, it is the sign of his greatness; reconciled, it is manifested as 'more abundant life' that makes the Outsider's superiority over other types of men unquestionable. When the Outsider becomes aware of his strength, he is unified and happy.

Haller goes even further; the Outsider is the mainstay of the bourgeois. Without him the bourgeois could not exist. The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society's spiritual dynamos. Harry Haller is one of these.

/ Page 60 / There is a yet further step in self-analysis for the Steppenwolf: that is to recognize that he is not really divided into two simple elements, man and wolf, but has literally hundreds of conflicting I's. Every thought and impulse says 'I'. The word 'personality' hides the vagueness of the concept; it refers to no factual object, like 'body'. Human beings are not like the characters in literature, fixed, made immutable by their creator; the visible part of the human being is his dead part; it is the other part, the unconditioned Will that constitutes his being. Will precedes essence. Our bourgeois civilization is based on personality. It is our chief value. A film star has 'personality'; the salesman hoping to sell his first insurance policy tries to ooze 'personality':

The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard to maintain and strengthen.¹⁰

The treatise comes to an end with a sort of credo:

Man is not. . . of fixed and enduring form. He is . . . an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature. . . man. . . is a bourgeois compromise. ¹¹

That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow. ¹²

Steppenwolf knows well enough why he is unhappy and drifting, bored and tired; it is because he will not recognize his purpose and follow it with his whole being.

'He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.'¹³ Haller knows that even when the Outsider is a universally acknowledged man of genius, it is due to 'his / Page 61 / immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarifies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane'.¹⁴

This Steppenwolf. . . has discovered that. . . at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony. . . . No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair. . . . Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. . . . The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God, leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or the child, but ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life. . . . Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.¹⁵

The last image of the treatise recalls an idea of Rilke's: the Angel of the Duinese Elegies who, from his immense height, can see and summarize human life as a whole.

Were he already among the immortals-were he already there at the goal to which the difficult path seems to be taking him-with what amazement he would look back over all this coming and going, all the indecision and wild zig- zagging of his tracks. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf. ¹⁶

The Outsider's 'way of salvation', then, is plainly implied. His moments of insight into his direction and purpose must be grasped tightly; in these moments he must formulate laws that will enable him to move towards his goal in spite of losing sight of it. It is unnecessary to add that these laws will apply not only to him, but to all men, their goal being the same as his.

The treatise throws some light on Hesse's intention in Siddhartha. We can see now that Siddhartha revolted against the religious discipline that 'narrowed the world and simplified his soul', but in renouncing his monk's robes, he failed to 'take the whole world into his soul'; on the contrary, he merely / Page 62 / narrowed his soul to include a mistress and a house. The effort of 'widening the soul' must be controlled by a religious discipline; nothing can be achieved by ceasing to Will. All this the 'wretched Steppenwolf' knows, and would prefer not to know.

Logically, the 'Treatise on the Steppenwolf' should be the end of the book; actually, it is within the first hundred pages. Harry has only rationalized his difficulties; he has yet to undergo experiences that will make his analysis real to him. The Bildungsroman is only one-third completed.

After reading the treatise, he hits rock-bottom of despair; he is exhausted and frustrated, and the treatise warns him that this is all as it should be; he decides that this is the last time he allows himself to sink so low; next time he will commit suicide before he reaches that point. The thought cheers him up, and he lies down to sleep.

The treatise is the high point of the book from the reader's point of view, but Hesse still has a job to finish; he has to show us how Steppenwolf will learn to accept life again and turn away finally from the thought of cutting his throat. This comes about by a series of romantically improbable events. The man with the sandwich board has mentioned the name of a tavern; Haller goes there and meets a girl called Hermine. She takes him in hand; makes him learn ballroom-dancing and listen to modern jazz. She introduces him to the saxophone player, the sunburnt Pablo, and to the sensuously beautiful animal Maria, whom he finds in his bed when he returns home one night. Like Siddhartha, he goes through an education of the senses. In bed with Maria, he recovers his own past (as Roquentin was unable to) and finds it meaningful.

For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations. . . . My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been, for all its wretchedness, a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it might-the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars. . . .¹⁷

/ Page 63 / 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 / Page 64 / words: Tat Tvam Asi- That Thou Art-* 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 Steppanwolf: '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

*Chandogya Upanishad, VI, ii, 3.

/ Page 65 / 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* 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 life 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'.

*Translated into English by Mervyn Savill as Magister Ludi.

/ Page 66 / 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 in 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.

/ Page 67 / 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 intensify 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, / Page 68 / 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 / Page 69 / 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'.