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 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 ferryman. 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 (i§2%) 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 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 meIt soared aloft like a soapbubble ... and then softly burstThe golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and
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 ferryman. 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 (i§2%) 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 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 meIt soared aloft like a soapbubble ... and then softly burstThe golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and
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