25 PREFACE FOR A FRENCH TRANSLATION BY JEAN LAMBERT OF MORGENLANDFAHRT (A TRIP TO THE ORIENT) BY HERMANN HESSE
WHILE the world conference was taking place at Geneva, that I was afraid would be too tiring for me to take part in, I answered the appeal of young teachers and students of various nationalities gathered together in the vicinity of Innsbruck.
Nothing less solemn, more simply cordial than that assembly initiated by the French. I took the floor to repeat almost exactly what I had previously said in Alexandria, Beyrouth, then in Brussels: that our occidental culture appeared to me in grave danger; besieged on the right and the left by totalitarian doctrines into which all individuality had been reabsorbed.
“I believe in the virtue of a small number … The world will be saved by a few.” It is on the confession of a like conviction, expressed in almost the same words that the last book of Hesse ends: Frieden und Krieg, of which the last chapter alone is recent. The large number of articles he groups together is inspired by the other war and its consequences. From the beginning of Hitlerism, he foresaw the dangers of that sinister adventure into which Germany, with blind-folded eyes, was about to let herself be led.
In Pertisau, during the course of a little unofficial congress, someone asked how it happened that not a voice in Germany was raised in time to denounce the danger, and, perhaps, by denouncing it, to prevent it. “He who remains silent, approves. Germany, unanimous in its error, should be unanimously condemned.” I protested that that was to fail to recognize the many clandestine efforts and the heroic opposition of the churches, both Catholic and Protestant. One had to see in this general silence not so much indifference or submission, as muzzling. Totalitarianism, in this case as almost always, obtained only precarious results, and by what cruel means: censorship of writings, death, prison, exile, for those who would have liked to speak. May we in France never know a time when the dissenters would be reduced to silence in such a way! Merit is on the side of the small number; on the side of those who do not belong to a party, or, at least, who, even if they are enrolled (and that is then called “voluntary enlistment”) keep their consciences clean, their minds free and speak openly. They are rare; but the importance of their voices can be recognized by that very dissonance. It is it, it is they, who will be listened to later.
During the entire Hitlerian period, Hesse’s writings were banned in Germany. Even to-day printed in Switzerland, they have acquired, through repression, a power of expansion all the greater. Some of his books, translated into French, had appeared well before the war, but had remained little noticed. In our time, one scarcely pays heed to anything except explosives, and restrained writings hang fire. When they have real merit, it is rarely until several years after that their furrow spreads and widens.
With Hesse the expression alone is restrained, not the feeling or the thought; and what tempers the expression of these is the exquisite feeling of fitness, reserve and harmony, and, with relationship to cosmos, the interdependence of things; it is also a certain latent irony, of which few Germans seem to me capable, and whose total absence so often spoils so many works by so many of their authors, who take themselves terribly seriously. It is difficult to explain this, for we in France, to be sure, fall willingly into the opposite excess, and I am far from making the apology for our faults. For the narrow-minded convictions of Rousseau, I would often yield the most amusing maliciousness of Voltaire; but with Pascal, for instance, how much the laughter in the Provinciates deepens for me the gravity of the Pensées!
Schumann had this irony, with or without Heine, and I love the title he gives to one of his “Scenes of Children”: “Fast zu ernst!”1 What I have especially retained from Wilhelm Tell (apart from the spring tide song that opens the play) is, at the beginning of Act 2, the first words of Walter Furst’s wife, when she sees her husband all weighed down by cares that he has not yet related: “So ernst, mein Freund!” “So serious, my dear!” I shall have to reread that play.… Serious, does Schiller know how not to be so always? — and that is too much.
There are bitter ironies where bile and peccant humors pour out; but Hesse’s, so charming in quality, seems to me to depend on the faculty of leaving himself behind, of seeing himself without looking, of judging himself without complacency2; it is a form of modesty that becomes all the more attractive because more gifts and virtues accompany it.
Hesse is a painter almost as much as a poet. In certain of his collections of verse, the reproduction of a watercolor accompanies the poem as an illustration; it is of an almost childlike docility; so natural and translating a communion with the outer world, so harmonious and so perfect that no disturbance of the soul can find an access to it. It is a work of art. However diverse (in subject matter if not in tendency) may be Hesse’s books that I have read, I recognize in each of them the same pagan love of Nature: a sort of devotion. The open air circulates through their pages that quiver with panicky breaths, like the leaves of forest trees. In each of them, too, I refind the same indecision of soul; its contours are illusive and its aspirations, infinite; it is infatuated with vague sympathies, ready for the reception of any chance imperative; little determined by the past to find in submission itself an aim, a reason for living, an anchor for his floating impulses. Such, moreover, is the German soul of which Hesse, in spite of his resistance (which is explained by other and very rare virtues), remains one of the most representative witnesses. For something primitive lingers in the Germanic soul when not ameliorated by culture; a sort of functional availability; subject to the call of the seasons, of encounters and a proposed ideal to which to devote themselves without critical examination or haggling. From then on you understand easily what facile prey these souls will be, spontaneously disposed to abnegation. Indolently they allow themselves to be seized by a sort of voluptuousness brought about by non-resistance, the almost feminine abandon to the invitation of anything at all triumphant: enthusiasm, vague effusions, thirst for conquest and limitless expansion.… Let us add this too, as a corollary: a somewhat gregarious need to group themselves, to form Bund, a more or less secret society, and to wend their way in company toward an end often ill-defined, in appearance all the more noble because it is colored by mysticism and remains rather mysterious. That is, strictly speaking, the subject even of this book; and so it seems to me, in spite of its specious form, strangely revealing.
And everything that I say here would predispose Hesse to acceptance, would have offered him as a docile and easy victim to this totalitarian mirage that charms, even to-day, so many of the indecisive and so many “voluntary recruits”—had it not been for the singular virtue he advocates, that he declares he cherishes above all, that he considers superior to all other virtues, and which he deeply regrets that the German soul so often lacks lamentably; he calls it Eigensinn, a word that means at the same time confidence in oneself and consciousness of oneself. In a writing dated 1919 which he has just brought out again, he speaks of it excellently. All the human virtues (about the way he expresses it) are embodied in a single nomenclature alone: obedience. But it is a question of knowing to what. The Eigensinn itself is assimilated into obedience; but while all the other virtues, the most preached and the most beloved; go back or refer to laws that men have invented, this supreme virtue alone heeds and respects only itself. That this virtue isolates you goes without saying; and opposes you to the masses, and points you out to the fury of the chiefs and directors of the herd. Hesse paid with exile; and others with imprisonment and death.