Again he says in a short writing that all creatures under the sun live and develop as they wish and according to their own laws; man alone allows himself to be fashioned and bent by the laws that others have made. The entire work of Hesse is a poetic effort for emancipation with a view to escaping imitation and reassuming the genuineness compromised. Before teaching it to others, it is necessary to preserve it in oneself. Hesse arrives at it through culture. Although profoundly and fundamentally German, it is only by turning his back on Germany that he succeeds. Those in his country who were able to remain loyal to themselves, and not to allow themselves to be deflected are rare; it is to them he addresses himself and says: however few you may be, it is in you, and you alone, that the virtue of Germany has taken refuge and it is on you that her future depends.
With them we can come to an understanding. With them we should speak.
1 “Almost too serious.”
2 Such also is the humor of which he speaks in his Steppenwolf: “You have to learn to laugh. To attain a higher form of humor, cease first to take yourself too seriously.”
26 LETTER-PREFACE TO THE POEMS OF JEAN LACAZE
Dear Sir,
HOW could I not yield to your appeal? But then you must permit me to quote, in the course of this preface, a few lines from your letter which explain and motivate it. For it concerns this grave question: the responsibility of the writer, and, in the present case, so painful and glorious, of my influence in particular which, you say, played such an important role in the formation of your son (am I to understand also: in his final decision?): … “Your morality had become his! And how I had to fight you!” In a word, you hold me responsible; but you add immediately: “And now, I no longer know … I am not angry with you any more. On the contrary.…”1 Then, as a recognition of his feelings, you inform me of your “great desire to see (my) name near his in the publication of his poetic work.” And your letter ended with this sentence (of which a few words only call for a protest that I am going to express): “Perhaps you will answer me favorably, or, rather, disregarding the father, and thinking of the sacrifice of the son, of the sacrifice of all the young men who died because their souls were too fine and had nothing to do among us, would you be willing, by honoring one of them, to honor them all?” Yes, to be sure, and with all my heart; but first I protest: how can you say of that soul of your child so noble and fine, and of those who are like him, that “they have nothing to do among us?” Exactly the contrary, we greatly need their beauty, their nobility; and if their sacrifice has saved France, the sacrifice of the best, France remains lamentably impoverished by it. At any rate, that is not how the matter should be presented; you must think: Without doubt these griefs are frightful; so much promise, so much hope — but it is thanks to that signal holocaust that France can be born again to-day. It is to your son, it is to those who died as he died, that our gratitude and that of a reborn fatherland is extended.
My influence has been much spoken about. And not with approval. Some consider me a perverting influence. I had this inner satisfaction of seeing the young who claimed kinship with me (and every one of my real friends) enter into the Resistance one after the other, while my most noteworthy accusers of yesterday.… That was also because the latter represented submission to an established order, in whose very name they condemned me, however arbitrary that order might be; the others, revolt, liberty of thought, emancipation of the mind and exactingness toward themselves; and such is the principle teaching those young “disciples” had been able to. extract from my writings. I retain for your son that particular gratitude for having proved, in an exemplary fashion, that they can nourish heroes. “Influence does not create; it awakens,” I said back in 1900, in my first lecture — and I am satisfied if my books have been able to help young people to ascertain and liberate whatever of the heroic was sleeping in them. To raise man above himself, to deliver him from his weight, to help him go beyond himself, by exalting him, reassuring him, warning him, tempering him, is not that the secret aim of literature? Not, to be sure, the only one, but the highest, the best, and the one from which, in these recent times, it has turned aside most unfortunately. I say the secret aim, for nothing is worse than edifying, moralizing, stupefying. But if the artist, as he works, should concern himself only with the plastic qualities of his writings, the esthetics and morality, almost without his knowing it, are intermingled in it.
“Your Nourritures terrestres were his breviary,” you write me. “How many times have I heard him repeat with rapture: “… Melancholy is only the lapsing of fervor.” He loved life.… He said to you (And you quote some lines by him, dedicated to me, to which his death has given an increase of tragic meaning):
Oh! I am afraid
And I don’t want to die.
For life is precious and singular
And I have not lived enough …
You add: “His life! … He had a talent for living it beautifully. He gave it. Knowing he was giving it.”
In the long poem he entitled “Departure Songs,” he wrote with clairvoyant consciousness and a sort of foresight into his tragic destiny:
I am going to leave in the Pale Light of dawn
For a Death eternal and joyous
That will cleanse my heart
Of its grief and love
I shall never return
And that, perhaps, is better
* * * *
I must leave behind for all time
Familiar and weighty things — like chains
I must cast aside with a shrug of the shoulder
The Past — behind my back,
And see before me only a single, straight road
Opening before life — before Death.
O bitter despair of the inevitable
Parting!
— And never shall I return …
This poem dates from the beginning of July 1944; the 17th of August Jean Lacaze joined a group of the maquis. You copied for me the letter that you found on his table, after his clandestine departure. I am transcribing the first lines with deep emotion:
“My dear Parents,
I am leaving. This decision that I have put off for a long time out of consideration for you, I must take to-day. The national uprising is near. General de Gaulle has ordered every unwounded man to join up with the maquis by whatever means possible. I consider that it would be shameful cowardice on my part to remain here at this time. And so I am going.…”
Three days after Jean Lacaze, with about twenty comrades, threw himself into the attack of a closed column of Germans. As bold as that sortie was in open territory, your only son alone was hit.