The Glass Bead Game

by Hermann Hesse

  These impulses, he concluded, could be so strong in a good many pupils that they erupted despite all restraints and led those who yielded to them away from the elite world of Castalia and into that other world which was dominated not by discipline and cultivation of the mind, but by instincts. To one striving for Castalian virtue that world seemed sometimes a wicked underworld, sometimes a tempting playground and arena. For generations many young consciences have experienced the concept of sin in this Castalian form. And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again. This is what underlay all the powerful movements, aspirations, and upheavals in Knecht's life. Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal they have believed in, or the country and community they love, afflicted with ills.

  Tracing this same thread further, we come to Knecht's first period in Waldzell, his final years as a schoolboy, and his significant meeting with the guest pupil Designori, which we have described in detail in its proper place. This encounter between the ardent adherent of the Castalian ideals and the worldling Plinio was not only intense and long-lasting in its effects, but also had a deeply symbolic significance for young Knecht. For the strenuous and important role imposed upon him at that time, seemingly sent his way by sheer chance, in fact so closely corresponded with his whole nature that we are tempted to say his later life was nothing but a reiteration of this role, an ever more perfect adaptation to it. The role, of course, was that of champion and representer of Castalia. He had to play it once more some ten years later against Father Jacobus, and as Master of the Glass Bead Game he played it to the end: champion and representative of the Order and its laws, but one who was constantly endeavoring to learn from his antagonist and to promote not the rigid isolation of Castalia, but its vital collaboration and confrontation with the outside world. The oratorical contest with Designori had been partly a game. With his far more substantial friendly antagonist, Father Jacobus, it was altogether serious. He had proved himself against both opponents, had matured in his encounter with them, had learned from them, had given as much as he had taken in the course of their disputes and exchanges of views. In neither case had he defeated his antagonist; from the start that had not, after all, been the goal of the disputations. But he had succeeded in making each of them respect him as a person, and the principles and ideal he advocated. Even if the disputation with the learned Benedictine had not led directly to its practical result, the establishment of a semiofficial Castalian envoy at the Holy See, it would have been of greater value than the majority of Castalians could have guessed.

  These embattled friendships with Plinio Designori and with the wise old Benedictine had provided Knecht, who otherwise had had little to do with the world outside Castalia, with some knowledge, or at any rate some intuitions, about that world. Few persons in Castalia could say the same for themselves. Except for his stay in Mariafels, which could scarcely give him any acquaintance with the real life of the outside world, he had neither seen nor experienced this worldly life since his early childhood. But through Designori, through Jacobus, and through his historical studies he had acquired a lively sense of its reality. His intimations, though they were mostly intuitive and accompanied by very meager experience, had made him more knowledgeable and more receptive to the world than the majority of his Castalian fellow citizens, including the higher authorities. He had always been a loyal and authentic Castalian, but he never forgot that Castalia was only a small part of the world, though for him the most valuable and beloved part.

  What was the character of his friendship with Fritz Tegularius, that difficult and problematical character, that sublime acrobat of the Glass Bead Game, that pampered and high-strung pure Castalian whose brief visit among the coarse Benedictines in Mariafels had made him so wretched that he declared he could not have stayed there a week, and enormously admired his friend for enduring the life there quite well for two years? We have entertained a wide variety of thoughts about this friendship, have had to reject some of them, while others seemed to stand up to examination. All these thoughts centered around the question of what the root and the significance of this lasting friendship must have been. Above all we should not forget that in all of Knecht's friendships, with the possible exception of that with the Benedictine Father, he was not the seeking, courting, and needy partner. He attracted, he was admired, envied, and loved simply for his noble nature; and from a certain stage of his "awakening" on he was even conscious of this gift. Thus he had already been admired and courted by Tegularius in his early student years, but had always kept him at a certain distance.

  Nevertheless, there are many tokens that he was really fond of his friend. As we see it, it was not just the latter's outstanding talent, his nervous brilliance and receptivity, particularly to all the problems of the Glass Bead Game, that drew Knecht to him. Rather, Knecht took so strong an interest not only in his friend's great gifts, but also in his faults, in his sickliness, in precisely those qualities that other Waldzellers found disturbing and frequently intolerable in Tegularius. This eccentric was utterly Castalian. His whole mode of existence, inconceivable outside the Province, was so entirely consonant with its atmosphere and level of culture that if he had not been so eccentric and hard to get along with he might have deserved the epithet arch-Castalian. And yet this arch-Castalian hardly fitted in with his fellows; he was no more popular with them than with his superiors, the officials. He constantly disturbed people, repeatedly offended them, and but for the stout protection and guidance of his prudent friend he would probably have been destroyed very early. For what was called his illness was primarily a vice, a character defect, a form of rebelliousness. He was profoundly unhierarchical, totally individualistic in his attitudes and his conduct. He adjusted to the system only enough to pass muster within the Order.

  He was a good, even a shining light as a Castalian to the extent that he had a many-sided mind, tirelessly active in scholarship as well as in the art of the Glass Bead Game, and enormously hard-working; but in character, in his attitude toward the hierarchy and the morality of the Order he was a very mediocre, not to say bad Castalian. The greatest of his vices was a persistent neglect of meditation, which he refused to take seriously. The purpose of meditation, after all, is adaptation of the individual to the hierarchy, and application in it might very well have cured him of his neurasthenia. For it infallibly helped him whenever, after a period of bad conduct, excessive excitement, or melancholia, his superiors disciplined him by prescribing strict meditation exercises under supervision. Even Knecht, kindly disposed and forgiving though he was, frequently had to resort to this measure.

  There was no question about it: Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such
a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd. And, to our mind, this was the very reason his friend cherished him.

  Certainly there was always a measure of pity in Knecht's relationship to Tegularius. His imperiled and usually unhappy state appealed to all his friend's chivalric feelings. But this would not have sufficed to sustain this friendship after Knecht's elevation to an official life overburdened with work, duties, and responsibilities. We take the view that Tegularius was no less necessary and important in Knecht's life than Designori and Father Jacobus had been. Moreover, exactly like the other two, he was a dynamic element, a small open window that looked out upon new prospects. In this peculiar friend Knecht sensed, we think, the features of a type. As time went on he realized that the type was one not yet existent except for Tegularius. For Tegularius was a portent of the Castalian as he might some day become unless the life of Castalia were rejuvenated and revitalized by new encounters, new forces. Like most solitary geniuses, Tegularius was a forerunner. He actually lived in a Castalia that did not yet exist, but might come into being in the future; in a Castalia still sequestered from the world, but inwardly degenerating from senility and from relaxation of the meditative morality of the Order; a Castalia in which the highest flights of the mind were still possible, as well as totally absorbed devotion to sublime values--but this highly developed, freely roaming intellectual culture no longer had any goals beyond egotistic enjoyment of its own overbred faculties. Knecht saw Tegularius as the two things in one: embodiment of the finest gifts to be found in Castalia, and at the same time a portent of the demoralization and downfall of those abilities. Measures must be taken to keep Castalia from becoming a dream-ridden realm populated entirely by Tegulariuses.

  The danger was remote, but it was there. Castalia as Knecht knew it needed only to build its walls of aristocratic isolation slightly higher, needed only to undergo a decline in the discipline of the Order, a lowering of the hierarchical morality, and Tegularius would cease to be an eccentric individual; he would become the prototype of a deteriorating Castalia. Magister Knecht's most important insight, the source of all his concern, was that the potentiality for such decadence existed. The disposition for it was there; in fact it had already begun. Probably he would have realized this much later, perhaps never at all, had not this future Castalian, whom he knew so intimately, lived at his side. To Knecht's keen instincts, Tegularius was a danger signal, as the first victim of a still unknown disease would be for a clever physician. And Fritz was after all no average man; he was an aristocrat, a supremely gifted person. If the still unknown disease just coming to light in this forerunner Tegularius were ever to spread and change the whole image of Castalian man, if the Province and the Order were ever to assume the degenerate, morbid form latent in them, these future Castalians would not be all Tegulariuses. Not everyone would have his precious gifts, his melancholy genius, his flickering intensity and acrobatic artistry. Rather, the majority of them would have only his unreliability, his tendency to fritter away his talents, his lack of any discipline or sense of community. In times of anxiety Knecht seems to have had such gloomy premonitions; and surely it cost him a great deal of strength to overcome them, partly by meditation, partly by intensified activity.

  The very case of Tegularius offers an instructive example of the way Knecht attempted to overcome morbidity and temperamental difficulties by meeting them directly. But for Knecht's watchfulness and pedagogic guidance, his imperiled friend would in all likelihood have come to grief early in his life. What is more, he would undoubtedly have introduced endless disturbances into the Players' Village. There had in any case been a good deal of such discord ever since Fritz had become a member of the elite. With consummate art the Magister kept his friend tolerably well on course, while at the same time contriving to employ his gifts in the interests of the Glass Bead Game and to extract fine achievements from Fritz's talent. The patience with which he coped with the latter's eccentricities, overcoming them by tirelessly appealing to his virtues, must be called a masterpiece in the technique of human relations. Incidentally, it would be a fine project which might yield some surprising insights (we should like to recommend it strongly to some of our historians of the Glass Bead Game) to subject the annual Games of Knecht's magistracy to a close analysis of their stylistic peculiarities. These Games, so majestic and yet sparkling with delightful inspirations and formulations, so scintillating and original in their rhythms, yet such a far cry from smug virtuosity, owed their underlying idea, their development, and the slant of their series of meditations exclusively to Knecht's mind, whereas the fine polishing and the minor details of Game technique were mostly the work of his collaborator Tegularius. Even had these Games been forgotten, Knecht's life and work would lose none of its attractiveness and pertinence for posterity. But to our great good fortune they have been recorded and preserved like all official Games. And they do not merely lie dead in the Archives. They survive in our traditions to this day, are studied by the young, supply cherished examples for many a Game course and many a seminar. And in them the collaborator survives, who otherwise would be forgotten, or would at any rate be no more than a strange, shadowy figure out of the past, haunting a host of anecdotes.

  Thus, in managing to assign a place to his refractory friend Fritz, and in providing him with an area in which he could work effectively, Knecht enriched the history and culture of Waldzell, while at the same time assuring his friend's memory a certain permanence. Incidentally, this great educator was well aware of the real basis of his educational influence on his friend. That basis was his friend's love and admiration. As we have seen, the Magister's harmonious personality, his innate sense of mastery, had almost from the first won over so many other fellow aspirants and pupils that he counted on this more than on his high office to sustain his authority, despite his kindly and conciliatory nature. He sensed precisely the effect of a friendly word of greeting or appreciation, or of withdrawal and disregard. Long afterward one of his most ardent disciples related that one time Knecht did not speak a single word to him in class and in his seminar, seemingly did not see him, ignored him completely--and that in all the years of his schooling this had been the bitterest and most effective punishment he had ever known.

  We have considered these retrospective observations essential in order that our reader may perceive the two antipodal tendencies in Knecht's personality. Having followed our account to the present peak of Knecht's remarkable life, the reader will then be prepared for its final phases. The two tendencies or antipodes of this life, its Yin and Yang, were the conservative tendency toward loyalty, toward unstinting service of the hierarchy on the one hand, and on the other hand the tendency toward "awakening," toward advancing, toward apprehending reality. For Joseph Knecht in his role of believer and devoted servant, the Order, Castalia, the Glass Bead Game were sacrosanct. To him in his awakened, clairvoyant, pioneering role they were, irrespective of their value, full-grown institutions, their struggles long past, vulnerable to the danger of aging, sterility, and decadence. The idea underlying them always remained sacred to him, but he had recognized the particular forms that idea had assumed as mutable, perishable, in need of criticism. He served a community of the mind whose strength and rationality he admired; but he thought it was running grave risks by tending to see its own existence as the be-all and end-all, by forgetting its duties to the country and the outside world. If it continued along this course, growing increasingly separated from the whole of life, it was doomed to fall into sterility. In those earlier years he had had presentiments of this peril; that was why he had so often hesitated, fearing to devote himself solely to the Glass Bead Game. In discussions with the monks, and especially with Father Jacobus, the problem had come to mind ever more forcibly, even while he was bravely defending Castalia. Ever since he had been back in Waldzell, and holding office
as Magister Ludi, he had continually seen tangible symptoms of that danger: in the loyal but unworldly and formalistic methods of work among his own officials and in many of the other departments; in the highly intelligent but arrogant expertise of the Waldzell elite; and last but not least, in the touching but worrisome personality of his friend Tegularius.

  With his first difficult year in office behind him, he resumed his historical studies. For the first time he examined the history of Castalia with his eyes open, and soon became convinced that things were not going as well as the inhabitants of the Province thought. Castalia's relationships with the outside world, the reciprocal influences operating between Castalia and the life, politics, and culture of the country, had been on the downgrade for decades. Granted, the Federal Council still consulted the Board of Educators on pedagogical and cultural matters; the Province continued to supply the country with good teachers and to pronounce on all questions of scholarship. But these matters had assumed a routine and mechanical cast. Young men from the various elites of Castalia nowadays volunteered less eagerly, and less frequently, for teaching assignments extra muros. Individuals and authorities in the rest of the country less frequently turned for advice to Castalia, whose opinion had in earlier times been sought and listened to even, for example, on important cases of law. If the cultural level of Castalia were compared with that of the country at large, it became apparent that the two were by no means approaching each other; rather, they were moving apart in a deeply troubling way. The more cultivated, specialized, overbred that Castalian intellectuality became, the more the world inclined to let the Province be and to regard it not as a necessity, as daily bread, but as a foreign body, something to be a little proud of, like a precious antique which for the time being the owners would not like to give up or give away, but which they would happily keep stored in the attic. Without fully grasping the situation, people on the outside attributed to Castalians a mentality, a morality, and a sense of self which was no longer viable in real, active life.