by Colin Wilson
This is a question that we are not fully in a position to examine yet. First, it is important that we should understand more of the ‘poet’s’ approach, the ‘romantic’ approach, and see how far this can be developed to transcend its own limitations. It might yield observations that will make the ‘attempt to gain control’ easier to analyse.
CHAPTER THREE
THE ROMANTIC OUTSIDER
The atmosphere of the Existentialist Outsider is unpleasant to breathe. There is something nauseating, anti-life, about it: these men without motive who stay in their rooms because there seems to be no reason for doing anything else. It is essentially an adult world, this world-without-values. The child’s world is altogether cleaner; the air tastes of expectation, A big store at Christmas time is a new world. For the sick soul, the man outside, this ‘new world’ produces a feeling of horror; it is a symbol of a mechanical civilization that runs in grooves like a gramophone record, precluding freedom.
This difference between the child’s world and the adult’s is also one of the main differences between the world of the nineteenth century and our own. The revolutions in thought, brought about by the Victorian sages, J. S. Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Emerson, Spencer, Carlyle, Ruskin, seemed to presage endless changes in human life, and man would go forward indefinitely on ‘stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things’. Before we condemn it for its short-sightedness, we survivors of two world wars and the atomic bomb, it is as well to remember that we are in the position of adults condemning children. The rationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not a sterile, boring state of mind; it was a period of intense and healthy optimism that didn’t mind hard work and pedestrian logic because it felt free as never before; at close quarters, the Victorian sage is often found whooping and cutting capers.
In such a state of affairs, the Outsider is always the man who is not susceptible to the general enthusiasm; it may be that he is too short-sighted to see the establishment of Utopia before the end of the century. At all events, he is bound to be a child of his century if he draws his nourishment from its earth; he cannot be a nihilistic pessimist (like Camus and Sartre) in a century when the philosophers are behaving like cowboys at a rodeo. He cannot believe that it is human nature that is in the wrong, for rationalism has completely discredited such morbid dogmas as original sin. He must believe that he alone is in the wrong. Human nature cannot be sick, since the prevailing philosophy of the time declares it to be perfectible. It follows that it is the Outsider who is in some way ‘not of this world’, and if he dies young, like Shelley, or is a sick man, like Novalis and Schiller, or takes drugs, like Coleridge, that is all in the proper order of things. It only remains for him to set the seal of respectability on his life by claiming to be a Platonic idealist, a dreamer of dreams, and the bourgeois is quite willing to admit his right to exist. The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.
This is the situation we find at the beginning of the last century in Europe. Goethe had invented the Romantic Outsider in his Sorrows of Toung Werther; the type of the high, idealistic young poet, pale, but manly. In the previous century, the pining lover had been a comic figure:
Will, when looking well can’t move her Looking ill prevail? 1
Young Werther brought about a change of heart. Schiller’s Robbers and Don Carlos followed. (Nietzsche somewhere quotes a German military man as saying: If God had foreseen the Robbers he would not have created the world’—to such an extent does it set up the humanistic standard and discredit the divine.) There was Novalis, scientist and romantic, who created Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the poet predestined from birth for a high destiny of singing. In England, German romanticism was introduced when Coleridge translated Schiller and Byron published ‘Childe Harold’. Shelley’s Alastor is a young man who pines away and dies because he can find no earthly counterpart of the beautiful girl who had embraced him once in a dream. The dream reveals to Heinrich von Ofterdingen his future path.
At a little distance rose hazy blue cliffs through whose sides shone gleaming veins of gold. All around him was a soft mellow light, and the skies above him were blue and cloudless.2
When, half a century later, William Morris writes of his own vision of a socialist Utopia, it expresses itself naturally in ‘A Dream of John BalP. The romantic Outsider is a ‘dreamer of other worlds’. He is not very active—not for the same reason as Evan Strowde, but because he is essentially a dreamer, ‘the idle singer of an empty day’. In this role we can trace him from Goethe’s Werther to Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger. He is the father of Barbusse’s hero with his hole in the wall, and so of Roquentin and Meursault. The twentieth century simply alters the way of presenting him, feels the need to place him in his environment. The treatment of the theme becomes more clinical, more analytical. The hilltops and mountain caves disappear from the scenery props; Barbusse’s Outsider comes on, with his small room in a modern city. But he is still the romantic. His main concern is still the fact that his surroundings seem incapable of fully satisfying his desires. He is afraid that the world was not created to meet the demands of the human spirit. He is troubled and frustrated today, and he is afraid he may die troubled and frustrated, with nothing but a series of only partly satisfying experiences to give him incentive to get out of bed in the morning.
We can witness the change in method of presenting the Outsider in a writer like James Joyce, who kept a foot in both traditions, romantic and social realist. His ‘artist’, Stephen Dedalus, begins as the type of the predestined poet:
The noise of children at play annoyed him, and their silly voices made him feel that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image that his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to find it, or how... 8
Joyce writes of:
The unrest which sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes (the heroine of Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo). A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him as he looked on the quays and on the river and on the lowering skies, and yet he continued to wander up and down, day after day, as if he really sought someone that eluded him.
This prose, that echoes the rhythms of Marius the Epicurean, is deliberately hypnotic, intended to induce a dream state. It contrasts sharply with the passages of observation:
The stout student who stood below them on the steps, farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:
‘Did an angel speak?’
Cranly turned also, and said vehemently, but without anger: ‘Goggins, you’re the flamingest dirty devil I ever met, do you know?’4
The first two passages are the prose of ‘an idle singer of an empty day’; the third has an aggressive desire to ‘stand for truth instead of imagination’. It could not have been written before the second decade of the twentieth century. And the two are typical of the different approaches of the realist Outsider of the first two chapters, and the romantic Outsider.
The difference is considerable. The realist asks: Truth, what do they mean by it? The romantic wouldn’t dream of asking such a question; his cry is: Where can I find Truth? He has no doubt whatever that (in the words of another poet who began as a romantic Outsider, [W. B. Yeats: 'The Shadowy Waters']) :
What the world’s million lips are searching for
Must be substantial somewhere...
The Existentialist attitude has been replaced by a Platonic Idealist approach; the search for the idea, the ‘insubstantial image that his souls so constantly beheld’. The Sartre of La Nausée would not countenance the Joyce of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a moment; Stephen’s urge to ‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ cannot exist at the side of the belief that ‘there’s no adventure’. But if our approach is valid, the realist and the romantic Outsider have something fundamental in common; for we are assuming that a man becomes an Outsider
when he becomes alive to certain questions which we have called, for convenience, ‘the Outsider’s problems’. The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to decide what are the Outsider’s problems in the terms of the romantic Outsider. For this purpose, it would be sufficient to take any of the ‘romantic’ novelists or poets, and determine from his own works what he regards as his central theme. If we decided upon Shelley or Coleridge, their bias could be defined respectively in Platonic or Kantian terms. German literature can offer many examples whose metaphysics would be more difficult to label: Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Lessing, Holderlin; or, coming down to modern times, Thomas Mann, R. M. Rilke, Hermann Hesse. In France there is Marcel Proust, whose ‘Portrait of the Artist’ extends through twelve volumes, or a whole earlier generation that includes Rimbaud and Mallarme, and even extends to curiously literary painters like Gauguin and Puvis de Ghavannes. Any of these men would fit into our Outsider plan, and all have in common an approach that can be called the romantic.
In this chapter, I intend to deal with the work of Hermann Hesse; not because it has any great advantages over the work of any of the other men I have mentioned in defining the Outsider’s problems, because the magnitude of Hesse’s achievement is hardly recognized in English-speaking countries, where translations of most of his works are difficult to come by.
[NOTE: At the time of writing, four out of five of the major novels have been out of print in England for several years, and none of the earlier novels has been translated into English.]
***
Hesse’s achievement divides clearly into two periods; there is that of the poetry and autobiographical novels published between 1902 and 1916, and the period of the five major novels, extending from 1919 (Demian) to 1945 {The Bead Game). The work of the earlier period makes use of the peculiarly German form, the Bildungsroman, the novel of education. The Bildungsroman sets out to describe the evolution of the ‘hero’s soul’; it is fictional biography that is mainly concerned with its hero’s reaction to ideas, or the development of his ideas about ‘life’ from his experience. The Bildungsroman is a sort of laboratory in which the hero conducts an experiment in living. For this reason, it is a particularly useful medium for writers whose main concern is a philosophical answer to the practical question: What shall we do with our fives? Moreover, it is an interesting observation that as soon as a writer is seized with the need to treat a problem he feels seriously about in a novel, the novel automatically becomes a sort of Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman is the natural form of serious fictional art, no matter how short the period of its hero’s life that it treats. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the earliest Bildungsromans in English, because it treats the evolution of Hamlet’s ‘soul’, his realization that killing and revenge are not simple matters of the old lex talionis, but something that he feels to be unsatisfactory as a solution of his personal problems. It will be seen at once that, within this definition, most of the books we have considered are Bildungsromans.
The ‘novel of education’ entered modern literature with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (although Johnson’s Rasselas preceded it by a quarter of a century). Hesse admits his debt to Goethe, and the autobiographical sequence that begins with Hermann Lauchers in 1902 shows how great the debt was. Unterwegs (1916) is the last of the series. After that, there was a break of three years; in those three years great changes took place in Hesse’s outlook. The war, the mass-murder, the defeat of Germany, produced a mental cataclysm that made Hesse review all his early work and find it valueless. Details of this period are lacking, but when Hesse reappeared in literature with Demian, the results of the upheaval, and the uncertain attempts to rebuild, are apparent; the psychology is more penetrating, the questioning of values is deeper than ever before. Demian is an example of the artist’s miraculous power of surviving a mental earthquake that can only be compared to Strindberg’s tremendous ‘come-back’ after his period of insanity. Demian and the four novels that follow it require a full analysis here.
But before proceeding to this, there is another work of the immediate post-war years that calls for comment. This is the ‘testament’ that grew out of the breakdown, a slim book about the same size as Mind at the End of Its Tether called Blick in Chaos.
PAGE NOTE: We owe what is probably the first modern Outsider parable to Dr. Johnson, whose Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia was published in 1759. The Prince lives in a Social Utopia called the Happy Valley, where all life is controlled, ordered; where consequently everyone is condemned to an endless round of pleasure that devitalizes the few who have minds of their own and removes the last element of usefulness from the naturally worthless. The Prince is logically unable to account for his increasing boredom and irritation; he can only put his finger on it by musing: ‘It has always seemed to me that man has some sixth sense, or some faculty apart from sense, that must be satisfied before he can be completely happy.’ He has expressed the Outsider’s problem in a sentence. In company with the astronomer Imlac (Johnson himself), Rasselas escapes from the ‘Happy Valley’ and goes into the world to face ‘stubborn, irreducible fact’. He reaches the same conclusion as Secondborn in Shaw’s Buoyant Billions’, ‘I dont want to be happy; I want to be alive and active.’
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 individuations, 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 future. 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 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 mother5. 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 par
ents; 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.
