Pictor's Metamorphoses Part 1

Pictor's Metamorphoses.

Hermann Hesse.

Contents.

The year of composition follows each t.i.tle; in most cases, first publication in German also occurred that year.

Introduction by Theodore Ziolkowski.

Lulu (1900).

Hannes (1906).

The Merman (1907).

The Enamored Youth (1907) Three Lindens (1912).

The Man of the Forests (1914) The Dream of the G.o.ds (1914).

The Painter (1918).

Tale of the Wicker Chair (1918) Conversation with the Stove (1919).

Pictor's Metamorphoses (1922).

The Tourist City in the South (1925).

Among the Ma.s.sagetae (1927) King Yu (1929) Bird (1932).

Nocturnal Games (1948) Report from Normalia (1948) Christmas with Two Children's Stories (1950).

The Jackdaw (1951).

Books by Hermann Hesse.

Introduction.

IN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ent.i.tled "Childhood of the Magician" (1923), Hermann Hesse confessed that it had been his overriding ambition, while he was a child, to become a magician. This ambition stemmed from a dissatisfaction with what people conventionally call reality. "Very early I felt a definite rejection of this reality, at times timorous, at times scornful, and the burning wish to change it by magic, to transform it, to heighten it." In his childhood, the wish was directed toward external childish goals-to make apples grow in winter or to fill his purse with gold and silver. Looking back, however, Hesse came to realize that his whole subsequent life had been motivated by the desire for magic powers-though by magic he now meant the transformation of reality, the creation of a wholly new reality, in his writing.

Certainly the distrust of everyday "reality"-it is characteristic that he customarily bracketed the term with quotation marks to indicate what he regarded as its tentative, problematic nature-remained a conspicuous theme in Hesse's thought throughout his life. In 1930 he wrote to a reader: "I don't believe in our politics, our way of thinking, believing, amusing ourselves; I don't share a single one of the ideals of our age." Ten years later he stated in another letter that "it is becoming apparent that the so-called 'reality' of the technologists, the generals, and the bank directors is growing constantly less real, less substantial, less probable."

At the same time, Hesse inevitably coupled his rejection of present "reality" with an a.s.sertion of his faith in a higher truth. "I am not without faith," he continued in the letter of 1930. "I believe in laws of humanity that are thousands of years old, and I believe that they will easily outlive the turmoils of our times." In 1940 his denial of "so-called reality" concluded with the claim that "all spiritual reality, all truth, all beauty, all longing for these things, appears today to be more essential than ever."

This perceived dichotomy between contemporary "reality" and eternal values produces the tension that is characteristic of Hesse's entire literary oeuvre. The heroes of his best-known novels-Demian, Siddhartha, Harry Haller of Steppenwolf, Goldmund, H.H. in The Journey to the East, and Joseph Knecht, the magister ludi of The Gla.s.s Bead Game-are men driven by their longing for a higher reality that they have glimpsed in their dreams, their visions, their epiphanies, but tied by history and destiny to a "reality" that they cannot escape. At times, however, Hesse sought to depict that other world outright, and not simply as the vision of a figure otherwise rooted in this world.

Northrop Frye has observed that "fantasy is the normal technique for fiction writers who do not believe in the permanence or continuity of the society they belong to." Accordingly, fantasy is the appropriate generic term for Hesse's attempts-both in his fiction and, as we shall see, in his painting-to render the world of which his fictional surrogates can only dream. In his cla.s.sic essay "On Fairy-Stories" (1939), Tolkien defined fantasy as "the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds," and many of Hesse's works display precisely the "arresting strangeness," the "freedom from the domination of observed fact," that Tolkien has elsewhere called the essential qualities of fantasy. But fantasy, as the tension between an unsatisfactory "reality" and an ideal reality suggests, is more than the creation of other-worlds per se. A more precise definition might specify that fantasy is a literary genre whose effect is an ethical insight stemming from the contemplation of an other-world governed by supernatural laws.

By far the most common form of fantasy practiced by Hesse was the fairy tale or, to use the somewhat broader German term, the Mrchen. Symptomatically, his earliest extant prose composition was a fairy tale ent.i.tled "The Two Brothers" (included here in the piece called "Christmas with Two Children's Stories"). In this Mrchen from the pen of the ten-year-old Hesse, a crippled child runs away from home because he is despised by his strong and handsome older brother. Arriving in the mountains, he is adopted by the dwarfs who mine diamonds there. Years later, the older brother, having lost the use of his right arm in the wars, wanders into the mountains. Meeting his brother, whom he fails to recognize, he begs a crust of bread. The younger brother leads him into the cave and offers him, instead, all the diamonds that he can dig out by himself. When the one-armed beggar is unable to extract a single jewel, his host says that he would gladly permit the man's brother to a.s.sist him. Thereupon the beggar, breaking into tears, admits that he once had a brother, small and crippled yet good-natured and kind, whom he had callously driven away. At this display of remorse, the younger brother discloses his ident.i.ty, and the two brothers live happily together ever after.

When he a.n.a.lyzed this bit of juvenilia many years later, Hesse noted that it was based not upon his own experience-he had never wittingly seen a diamond, much less a mountain of jewels inhabited by dwarfs-but upon his reading, notably the Grimms' Fairy Tales and the Arabian Nights. These two collections, with which Hesse became acquainted as a child, remained his favorites throughout his lifetime. In 1929 he singled out the Arabian Nights for inclusion in his ideal "Library of World Literature," calling it "a source of infinite pleasure." Although all the peoples of the world have produced lovely fairy tales, he continues, "this cla.s.sic magic-book suffices for our library, supplemented solely by our own German Mrchen in the collection of the Brothers Grimm."

Hesse was not simply stating the obvious on the basis of limited knowledge; he knew what he was talking about. In an extended career of book reviewing, he appraised many collections of fantasies from countries all over the world, including Richard Wilhelm's edition of Chinese fairy tales, a translation of Somadeva's folktales from India, a twelve-volume set of Oriental tales, Enno Littmann's anthology of Arabian contes des fees from Jerusalem, Leo Frobenius's edition of African folktales, and Douglas Hyde's volume of fairy tales from Ireland. He welcomed new editions of Musus's cla.s.sic anthology of German folktales as well as Andersen's fairy tales. He recommended Friedrich von der Leyen's international collection of Mrchen along with an anthology of the world's finest fairy tales, edited by his friend Lisa Tetzner, who was well known in the twenties as an author and reciter of Mrchen.

Hesse was not merely a connoisseur of fairy tales; he also understood something about their history and theory. He knew that folktales employ a limited stock of familiar motifs that recur in constantly varying configurations, and he was aware of the Oriental sources of many European tales as well as the ancient sources of many medieval tales. Fairy tales, he wrote in 1915 (in an essay on "German Storytellers"), are doc.u.ments that reaffirm "the eternally identical structure of the human soul in all peoples and all lands." The fairy tales of the world provide us with incomparably valuable examples of "the genetic history of the soul."

In the light of this predilection, it is hardly surprising that Hesse undertook, from time to time, to write Mrchen of his own-works in which the techniques and motifs of the international repertoire of fairy tales are much in evidence. At first glance, this fascination seems predictable in a writer who often a.s.serted his fondness for Oriental culture and German romanticism, two of the princ.i.p.al sources for the fairy tales of the world. Yet we must not take too much for granted. Why, to put it most simply, does a mature writer in the twentieth century write fairy tales?

We can start with Hesse's thoughts. When he compared his early story "The Two Brothers" with a similar tale written some sixty years later by his grandson, Hesse observed that in both cases a wish is magically fulfilled, and in both cases the narrator has constructed for his hero a role of moral glory, a "crown of virtue." In short, both tales are characterized by elements of the supernatural (magical wish fulfillment) and by an explicit ethical dimension.

We see precisely the same pattern underlying Hesse's most entrancing fairy tale, "Pictor's Metamorphoses." When Pictor first enters the garden of paradise, he is captivated by the continual transformations that all nature is undergoing: he sees a bird turn into a flower, the flower into a b.u.t.terfly, and the b.u.t.terfly into a colored crystal with magical powers. Before he has fully comprehended the laws of transformation, yet eager to become a part of that wonderful process, he seizes the magic stone and overhastily wishes to be transformed into a tree. After his metamorphosis, Pictor realizes that he is still not part of the cycle of transformation because, unlike all the other creatures in the garden, he has remained single, he is not a pair. Hence he is doomed to retain a specific form. Many years later a young girl comes into the garden, picks up the stone, and is trans.m.u.ted into the tree along with Pictor. Now, in their new unity, they undergo transformation after blissful transformation. In other words, the device of double wish fulfillment is used to ill.u.s.trate a moral situation: the first wish creates the plight which is subsequently resolved by the fulfillment of the second wish.

Hesse is also capable of using the elements of the Mrchen for purposes of humor or irony. In "Tale of the Wicker Chair," a talking chair precipitates the ethical insight: a young dilettante has been inspired by reading a biography of Van Gogh to try to paint the simple objects in his garret. When he discovers how difficult it is to paint even a wicker chair, he decides to give up painting for what he considers the easier job of writing. In a later Mrchen it is suggested that "Bird" may be the bird from "Pictor's Metamorphoses"; but he is also an allegorical projection of Hesse himself, who was known to his third wife by the nickname Vogel ("bird"). At first regarded fondly as a queer eccentric by the inhabitants of Montagsdorf (Monday Village, a pun on Montagnola, the Swiss village where Hesse lived), "Bird" is eventually driven away when a price is put on his head by foreign governments and the villagers begin to shoot at him. Again we find the magical transformation-which psychoa.n.a.lysis calls a theriomorphic projection-that gives rise to a heavily allegorical tale with p.r.o.nounced ethical implications. Indeed, the whole tale is very lightly veiled autobiography. But here Hesse has added a further ironic twist. After Bird's disappearance, various legends begin to circulate about him. "Soon there will be no one left who can attest that Bird ever actually existed." Future scholars will no doubt prove, Hesse suggests, that the legend is nothing but an invention of the popular imagination, constructed according to folkloristic laws of mythmaking. Here Hesse uses the form of the Mrchen to make an ironic comment on the academic study of fairy tales, which tends through its a.n.a.lysis to disenchant the very object of its study, as well as the scholarly a.s.sessments of his own works, to several of which he alludes playfully in the text.

In every case, then, from the fairy tale of the ten-year-old Hesse to the ironic fable of the sixty-year-old, the narratives that Hesse specifically labeled as Mrchen display two characteristics that distinguish them from his other prose narratives. There is an element of magic that is taken for granted: wish fulfillment, metamorphosis, animation of natural objects, and the like. And this magic incident produces in the hero a new dimension of ethical awareness: the necessity of love in life, the inappropriateness of ambition, and so forth. To be sure, wonders and miracles occur in other forms of fantasy employed by Hesse: but elsewhere the miracle is regarded as an interruption or suspension of normal laws. In the legends, for instance, the miracle represents an intervention by some higher power (e.g., "The Merman" or "Three Lindens") that underscores the special nature of the occurrence. The figures in the fairy tales, in contrast, accept the wonders as self-evident: they do not represent any intrusion of the supernatural into the rational world, because the entire world of the Mrchen operates according to supernatural laws. Little Red Riding Hood takes it for granted that the wolf can talk; the wicked stepmother in "Snow White" consults her magic mirror just as routinely as a modern woman might switch on her television set; and the tailor's son is not astonished at a table that sets itself with a feast when the proper formula is uttered. Hesse's Mrchen share this quality of self-evident magic. Pictor does not question the powers of the magic stone; the aspiring young artist is not astonished when the wicker chair talks back to him.

However, a world in which magic is taken for granted does not in itself suffice to make a fairy tale: it must also be a world with an explicit ethical dimension. Oversimplified interpretations have argued that the world of fantasy is one in which things happen in accord with the expectations of nave notions of good and evil, right and wrong. More sophisticated theorists offer a different explanation: the fairy tale begins with a situation of ethical disorder and finally, after resolving the conflicts, reestablishes a new order. Still others regard the Mrchen as the poetic expression of man's confidence that we live in a meaningful world. All the theorists agree that the supernatural events do not occur simply for the delectation of the reader or listener; rather, the fairy tale reminds us through its magic that despite all appearances to the contrary there is meaning and order in the world. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in The Uses of Enchantment, "the child can find meaning through fairy tales," which offer an experience in moral education through which he brings order into the turmoil of his feelings. This is precisely the message of Hesse's Mrchen: the characters are brought to an awareness of some principle of meaning that they had previously misunderstood. Indeed, the ethical dimension is p.r.o.nounced in all fantasies, whether or not they display the explicitly supernatural element that characterizes fairy tales.

The impulse toward fantasy remained powerful in Hesse's temperament throughout his life. The fairy tale of "The Two Brothers" was written in 1887, when he was ten years old; "The Jackdaw" was a product of his seventies. Between those two extremes, the various forms of fantasy that Hesse employed reflect accurately the stages of his development as a writer. "The Two Brothers," as Hesse recognized, was patterned closely after the so-called Volksmrchen, or popular fairy tales, that he knew as a child from the collection of the Brothers Grimm. His later fantasies are more profoundly indebted to the so-called Kunstmrchen, or literary fantasy, that has const.i.tuted one of the major genres of German literature for the past two centuries. In 1900, when he was finding his way as a writer and experimenting with the various forms offered by the German romantic tradition, Hesse was inspired princ.i.p.ally by E. T. A. Hoffmann, whom he regarded as the "Romantic storyteller of the greatest virtuosity." "Lulu," an autonomous section of the early novel ent.i.tled The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher (1901), is based explicitly and in specific detail on Hoffmann's cla.s.sic fantasy The Golden Flower Pot (1813). The tale was inspired by a holiday trip that Hesse made in August of 1899 with a group of friends from Tbingen who called themselves (as in the story) the pet.i.t cenacle and whose names and sobriquets are playfully modified in the text. By means of the Hoffmannesque device of an encapsulated myth, Hesse succeeds in narrating the story of their collective infatuation with the innkeeper's niece (named in reality Julie h.e.l.lmann) in such a manner that it occurs on two levels: a "realistic" one as well as a fantastic or higher one. Through his skillful and ironic imitation of the romantic conventions Hesse paid his greatest tribute to Hoffmann.

Soon Hesse rejected the neoromanticism of his youth and turned to a less fanciful type of narrative after the fas.h.i.+on of the great nineteenth-century realists. To be sure, the impulse toward fantasy was not simply to be denied. In "Hannes," Hesse offered a realistic depiction of a contemporary who-because his consciousness has not yet undergone the characteristically modern dissociation and who therefore still enjoys a Mrchen mentality that enables him to see G.o.d in the thunderclouds and to encounter Jesus on remote rural paths-is regarded by his neighbors as a simpleton. In general, however, having to find other outlets for his fantasy, Hesse chose a form consistent with his current realism-the legend, a genre in which the supernatural was not entirely implausible because it could be attributed to the mythic consciousness that existed in remote times and places (patristic Gaza in "The Enamored Youth," Renaissance Italy in "The Merman," seventeenth-century Berlin in "Three Lindens," and prehistoric jungles in "The Man of the Forests"). As we noted, however, the supernatural occurrences in the legends are regarded as an interruption of normal "reality" and not, as in the fairy tales, as self-evident. But Hesse soon found other ways of dealing with fantasy.

Dreams always played a lively role in Hesse's psychic life, as he tells us in the late essay "Nocturnal Games." The ominous precognitive dream of war related in "The Dream of the G.o.ds" (1914) is significant because it signaled the unleas.h.i.+ng of the powers of fantasy that Hesse had sought for more than a decade to suppress. During World War I, a variety of pressures-the death of his father, the deteriorating mental health of his first wife, the responsibilities for his three young sons, the burdens of his war-relief work in Switzerland-produced in Hesse an emotional crisis so severe that, in 1916 and 1917, he sought help in psychoa.n.a.lysis. It was Jungian a.n.a.lysis, with its emphasis on dreams and their interpretation, that enabled Hesse to recover the childlike contact with the world of fantasy that he had attempted so long to repress. Hesse recognized what he owed to the insights of depth psychology. In a review of Oskar A. Schmitz's Fairy Tales from the Unconscious (Mrchen aus dem Unbewuten, 1933), Hesse observed: "Finally, with the aid of a psychoa.n.a.lytical method, he overcame the inhibitions that cut him off from his own fantasy and wrote these very readable fairy tales." Hesse is speaking from personal experience because several of the fairy tales that he wrote during the war are barely disguised metaphors for the recovery of the past through psychoa.n.a.lysis: notably, "Iris" and "The Hard Pa.s.sage." And in many of his fictional works-e.g., Demian and Steppenwolf-dreams function as an outlet for fantasy.

Hesse was fully aware of the significance of the wartime Mrchen and dreams in his personal development. In August of 1919 he wrote his publisher that Demian along with the Mrchen that he composed from 1913 to 1918 were "tentative efforts toward a liberation, which I now regard as virtually complete." By means of the fairy tale, he had succeeded in reestablis.h.i.+ng the link with the unconscious that had been ruptured. Yet the fairy tale as a genre was only a pa.s.sing phase in his literary career. In another letter of August 1919, he wrote to a friend that "the Mrchen were for me the transition to a new and different kind of writing; I no longer even like them." This wholesale rejection of his Mrchen was a bit premature; some of his most charming efforts in the genre were still to come. However, the tone begins to change from the high seriousness of the wartime fables to the irony of "The Painter" and "Tale of the Wicker Chair," which antic.i.p.ate Hesse's movement toward social satire in the twenties.

It is no accident that these two fantasies deal with painters, for toward the end of the war years Hesse had discovered in painting a new avocation. For a time, indeed, he toyed with the notion of attempting an entirely new career as an artist rather than a writer. Although this s.h.i.+ft did not come about, Hesse continued to paint until the end of his life. (Indeed, his accomplishments as a painter have only recently come to be more widely appreciated, thanks to major exhibits of his work since the centenary of his birth in 1977). For many years, moreover, he earned money for special purposes-during World War I for his war-relief work, and then during the thirties for the relief of refugees from n.a.z.i Germany-by producing holograph editions of his poems on commission: characteristically, a handwritten copy of a poem, or group of poems, accompanied by original watercolor ill.u.s.trations. "Pictor's Metamorphoses" (pictor is the Latin word for "painter") celebrates and exemplifies this activity.

Following the separation from his first wife in 1919, Hesse moved to southern Switzerland, where he at first lived a relatively isolated life. Coming to realize eventually that this solitude was neither natural to him nor productive, the mid-fortyish writer courted and, in 1924, was briefly married to a much younger woman, the singer Ruth Wenger. "Pictor's Metamorphoses" amounts to an allegorical account, in fantasy form, of that love affair. The painter, entering the paradise of Ticino (as depicted in the accompanying aquarelles), first lives alone as a tree and then, recognizing his mistake, reenters the natural cycle of transformations by attaching himself to a beautiful young woman. It is significant that, apart from a limited edition in 1925, Hesse did not allow this work to be published until a facsimile edition of an early version was brought out in 1954. Here the text is so closely tied to the watercolor ill.u.s.trations-indeed, the text emerges from them, as Hesse wrote to Romain Rolland when he sent a presentation copy-that the full meaning is apparent only when word and image are taken together. For three decades Hesse took enormous satisfaction from preparing new holographs of this fairy tale, in which the impulse toward fantasy is as p.r.o.nounced in the ill.u.s.trations as in the story itself. (The ill.u.s.trations reproduced in this volume are those that Hesse did for a copy he presented in 1923 to Ruth Wenger.) Hesse was by no means the only writer of his generation to be attracted to the genre of fairy tale or fantasy. Indeed, no period since German romanticism produced as many fairy tales as the years around World War I. This fact was noted by early reviewers of Hesse's first published volume of Mrchen (1919). One reviewer, observing that so many new editions of old fairy-tale collections had appeared since the turn of the century and that so many writers had tried their hand at the form, concluded that "in certain epochs a particular preference for Mrchen makes itself felt, not only on the part of the creators, but also on the part of the recipients. For, in the life of the spirit, supply and demand often reflect each other." The benefit of hindsight has prompted literary scholars to inquire if perhaps a hidden affinity exists between the forms and contextual potentialities of the fairy tale and the ideas and goals of German expressionism. For virtually every major writer a.s.sociated with expressionism experimented with the genre, including Hugo Ball, Ernst Barlach, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Dblin, and Kurt Schwitters.

While a fascination with the unconscious world of dreams is conspicuous in expressionism, students of the period have emphasized in particular the socio-critical purposes to which the fairy tale was often devoted. The next group of Hesse's fantasies is certainly consistent with that generational tendency (notably, "The Tourist City in the South," "Among the Ma.s.sagetae," "King Yu," and "Bird"). The techniques of the fantasy-reification of abstract concepts within the framework of a simplified moral system-lend themselves to the exposure of existing social and cultural ills. Hesse shared the expressionist sense that the old social order was collapsing and that a new humanity was going to emerge from that chaos. So Hesse's use of the Mrchen reflected the literary trends of the times, a fact of literary history that should be kept in mind if we hope to evaluate these works properly.

Hesse's late stories, while they bring no new variations in form, nevertheless display his continuing experimentation with the forms of fantasy. Indeed, the narrative is often encapsulated within a speculative framework in which the writer reflects on the nature of fantasy. "Nocturnal Games" embeds the account of several dreams in a rumination on the meaning of dreams in Hesse's life. "Report from Normalia," the fragment of an unfinished novel that might well have grown into a satirical counterpart to the utopian vision of The Gla.s.s Bead Game, depicts a Central European country "in the north of Aquitaine." "Normalia," we are told, emerged by expansion from the parklike grounds of a onetime insane asylum to become the most rational nation in Europe. But Hesse, making use of a fictional device that has recently appealed to writers of the absurd, casts doubt on all our a.s.sumptions concerning "normality." The narrator, it turns out, is ultimately unsure whether the former madhouse he inhabits has indeed become the seat of sanity in a mad world or whether it is not in fact still a madhouse. In "Christmas with Two Children's Stories" the two fairy tales-Hesse's own and the tale written by his grandson-generate a theoretical digression on the function and nature of fantasy. And in "The Jackdaw"-another example of Hesse's recurrent identification with birds-Hesse shares with us the manner in which his imagination plays with reality to generate stories about an unusually tame bird that he encounters at the spa in Baden. "And yet our imagination is not always satisfied with the most plausible explanation, it also likes to play with the remote and the sensational, and so I have conceived of two further possibilities beyond the probable one."

While fantasy in the unadulterated form that it displays in "Pictor's Metamorphoses" (where we are dealing literally with an "other-world" in Tolkien's sense) occurs infrequently in Hesse's mature works, it is fair to say that the tendency toward fantasy is evident in his writing from childhood to old age. Indeed, fantasy can be called the hallmark of Hesse's major novels of the twenties and thirties, the surreal quality that disturbs critics of a more realistic persuasion: for instance, the Magic Theater in Steppenwolf or the fanciful scenes in The Journey to the East, where reality blends into myth and fantasy. Indeed, fantasy is a state of mind into which Hesse and his literary surrogates enter with remarkable ease. Toward the end of Demian, for instance, Emil Sinclair encounters his friend after a long separation and is introduced into the enchanted home presided over by Demian's mysterious mother. Once again, we find the familiar juxtaposition of reality and fantasy. "Outside was reality: streets and houses, people and inst.i.tutions, libraries and lecture halls-but here inside was love; here lived fantasy [das Mrchen] and the dream." And what, after all, is the province of Castalia as depicted in Hesse's last great novel, The Gla.s.s Bead Game, if not a magnificent and sustained projection of a fantasy? In sum: any complete appreciation of Hesse must take into account this central tendency in his work. The most concentrated period of Mrchen composition occurred, as noted, from 1913 to 1918, and the eight fantasies of those years were published in 1919 in a volume with the simple generic t.i.tle Mrchen (translated as Strange News from Another Star and Other Tales). However, the sustained obsession with fantasy in its various manifestations-folktale, literary fairy tale, dream, satire, rumination-is apparent only in a collection like the present one, which contains nineteen fantasies in chronological sequence covering a period of more than sixty years.

It would be a mistake to regard the tendency toward fantasy, in Hesse or other writers, as mere escapism. True, the cla.s.sic periods of fantasy have been those ages (Napoleonic Germany, Victorian England, Weimar Germany, and America in the 1960s) when technological reality was perceived as so overwhelming that the individual began to question its values and measure them against other ideals. But fantasy, with its explicitly didactic tendency, represents not so much a flight from confrontation as, rather, a mode in which the confrontation can be enacted in a realm of esthetic detachment, where clear ethical judgments are possible. Indeed, fantasy often reveals the values of a given epoch more vividly than the so-called realisms it may bring forth. In any case, a generation that decorates its walls with the calendars of the Brothers Hildebrandt while perusing Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, that hastens from meetings of the C. S. Lewis Society to performances of s.p.a.ce fantasies like Star Wars, has mastered the semiotics necessary to decode the hidden signs of "Pictor's Metamorphoses" and Hesse's other fantasies.

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI.

Lulu.

A YOUTHFUL ESCAPADE.

In Memory of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

1.

THE LOVELY OLD TOWN of Kirchheim had just been washed clean by a brief summer downpour. Everything looked new and fine; the red rooftops, the weather vanes and garden fences, the shrubs and chestnut trees along the embankments s.h.i.+mmered gaily in the sun, and the statue of Konrad Widerhold with his stony better half, agleam in the quiet light, enjoyed its robust old age. The warm sun shone through the purified air with renewed strength, turning the last raindrops that hung on the branches into blazing sparks; the inviting, broad path along the embankment was flooded with splendor. Children skipped happily along in a row, a little dog yelped exultantly at their heels; along the line of houses, a yellow b.u.t.terfly traced restless curves in flight.

Under the embankment's chestnut trees, on the third bench to the right of the post office, beside his friend Ludwig Ugel, sat the itinerant aesthete Hermann Lauscher, who launched a spirited and charming discourse on the benefactions of the newly fallen rain and the reemergence of the azure of the heavens, embellis.h.i.+ng his monologue with fanciful observations about matters which were close to his heart, tirelessly rambling, as was his wont, on the meadow of his rhetoric. During the course of the poet's long, eloquent address, the amused and silent Herr Ludwig Ugel repeatedly cast sharp glances toward the main road to Boihingen, looking out for a friend who would be coming to meet them.

"Don't you agree?" the poet cried out with gusto as he rose up slightly from the bench. Its straight back had become uncomfortable. What's more, Lauscher had been sitting on some dry twigs. "Isn't it just as I say?" he repeated, while his left hand brushed away the twigs and smoothed out the creases they had made in his trousers. "The Essence of Beauty must lie in Light! Don't you agree that that's where it is?"

Ludwig Ugel rubbed his eyes; he had not been listening to what his friend was saying and had only caught Lauscher's last question.

"Certainly, certainly," he hastily replied. "But from here you can hardly see a thing. It's just over there, in back of the Schlotterbecks' barn!"

"What? What did you say?" Lauscher demanded vehemently. "What's in back of the barn?"

"Why, Oetlingen, of course! Karl's got to be coming from there; there isn't any other way."

Disagreeable and silent now too, the itinerant poet fixed his eyes on the bright, broad main road. And we can leave these two young men sitting and waiting on their bench; the shade is sure to last there for another hour. In the meantime, let us turn our attention beyond the Schlotterbecks' barn. There we will find neither the village of Oetlingen nor the Essence of Beauty, but rather the awaited third friend, the student of jurisprudence Karl Hamelt, returning from Wendlingen, where he had spent his vacation.

Though not misshapen, his figure, in growing prematurely plump, had acquired a touch of the comical in its corpulence; in his shrewd and capricious face, a powerful nose and oddly plump lips were at odds with inordinately full cheeks. His broad chin fell in rich fleshy folds over his narrow stand-up collar; and his short hair, in disarray and sopping with perspiration, brazenly stuck out between his hat and his forehead. Stretched out to full length on his back in the gra.s.s, he gave every appearance of sleeping peacefully.

Tired from traveling in the midday heat, he really had fallen asleep; but his slumber was far from peaceful. A most singular and fantastic dream troubled it. He dreamed that he lay in an unfamiliar garden, under strange trees, reading an old book whose pages were of parchment. The book was written in characters that boldly and chaotically looped and tangled through one another, in a completely foreign language, one which Hamelt neither recognized nor understood. And yet he could read and understand the contents of the pages; for again and again-whenever he grew tired-out of the inextricable tangle of flourishes and script, pictures magically arose, shone in bright colors, and again sank out of sight. These pictures, flas.h.i.+ng up one after another as in a magic lantern, portrayed the following, extremely old, true story.

THAT SAME DAY on which the talisman of the bronze ring was stolen from the Laskian Spring by means of black magic and fell into the hands of the Prince of Dwarfs, the bright star of the House of Ask began to pale. The Laskian Spring dried up into naught but a barely visible silver thread. The earth beneath the Opal Palace began to sink; the subterranean vaults swayed and started to crack. Great devastation befell the lily garden; the double-crowned royal lily alone managed to hold itself proud and tall, but only for a little while, for the Serpent Edelzung had breathed a tight la.s.so of h.o.a.rfrost around its stem. In the desolate City of Ask, all gaiety and music were silenced; since the last string of the Harp Silversong had snapped, not a note of music sounded even in the Opal Palace. Day and night the King sat by himself, like a statue, in the great banquet hall; he could not cease marveling at the decline of his happiness, for he had been the happiest of all kings since Mirthful the Great. A sad sight he was to behold, King Sorrowless in his red robes, sitting in his great hall, marveling and marveling; he could not weep, he had been born without the gift of sorrow. And he marveled at still another thing: mornings and evenings, instead of the music he was accustomed to hearing played, there was only a huge silence, and from behind the door to her room, the gentle weeping of Princess Lilia. Only rarely did a brief, austere burst of laughter shake the King's broad chest, and this merely out of habit. In former times, not a blessed day had pa.s.sed without his laughing twice four-and-twenty times.

His retinue and servants had scattered to the four winds; apart from the King in the hall and the sorrowing Princess Lilia, only one member of the household remained: the faithful servant Haderbart, who, besides filling the posts of court poet and court philosopher, performed the duties of court jester as well.

But now the Prince of Dwarfs shared the power of the bronze talisman with the Witch Poisonbreath, and one can imagine to what ends they used it.

The glorious days of the House of Ask were coming to an end. On the evening of a day on which the King had not laughed even once, he summoned the Princess Lilia and the faithful Haderbart into his presence in the empty banquet hall. A thunderstorm filled the sky; framed by the huge, black, vaulted windows, sudden bolts of lightning palely lit the hall.

"I haven't laughed at all today, not even once," said King Sorrowless.

The court jester stood before the King and pulled one of his most audacious faces; but the grimace made his troubled old face look so distorted and desperate that the Princess had to avert her eyes, and the King just shook his heavy head without laughing.

"Music! Bring out the Harp Silversong!" King Sorrowless commanded. "Music, there must be music!" he said, and his cry sorrowfully resounded in the hearts of the other two; for the King did not know that the harpist and all the other musicians had left him, these two faithful companions being all that remained of his household.

"The Harp Silversong no longer has any strings," said the faithful Haderbart.

"No matter, it must be played," said the King.

Then Haderbart took Princess Lilia by the hand and left the hall. Through the withered lily garden he led her up to the dried out Laskian Spring, scooped up the last handful of water from its marble basin, and poured it into her right hand; then they returned into the presence of the King. From the Laskian water the Princess fas.h.i.+oned seven s.h.i.+ning silver strings for the Harp Silversong; but there was not enough water for the eighth, and she had to make it with the help of her own tears. And now, her empty, trembling hand gently stroked the strings of the harp, so that once again the old, sweet, joyful sound issued and swelled blissfully. But no sooner had she plucked a string than it snapped, and when the last string sounded and broke, an enormous thunderbolt burst from the heavens, and the whole vault of the Opal Palace came cras.h.i.+ng down. But the last Song of the Harp went as follows: Hushed Silversong will be, Both harp and melody, But on its strings will sound someday Once more this ancient roundelay.

(End of the true story of the Laskian waters.) * * *

THE STUDENT Karl Hamelt did not awaken from his dream before his two friends-having grown impatient-had walked down the road a bit and found him lying in the gra.s.s. They reproached him in no uncertain terms for his dawdling. Hamelt responded with silence, except for bidding them "Good morning" with a cursory nod.

This made Ugel especially indignant. "Good morning, indeed!" he flared. "It hasn't been morning for some time! Couldn't wait for us, eh? I can see you've been to the tavern in Oetlingen; the wine's still glowing in your eyes!"

Karl sneered and pulled his brown felt hat farther down over his brow. "Never mind," said Lauscher. The three friends turned toward the town, pa.s.sed the railroad station, crossed the bridge over the stream, then meandered along the embankment until they reached the King's Crown. Not only was this inn their favorite Kirchheim watering hole, it was also the temporary lodgings of the itinerant poet.

As the three friends approached the stairs that led to the inn, the heavy doors of the house suddenly flew open, and plummeting toward them at lightning speed came a highly agitated, white-haired man with a gray beard and an angry red face. In consternation, the friends recognized the old crank and philosopher Turnabout, and they barred his way at the foot of the stairs.

"Stop right there, my good Herr Turnabout!" the poet Lauscher called out to him. "How does it happen that a philosopher can lose his sense of balance like this? Just turn around, my esteemed fellow, and tell us your troubles inside, where it's cool!"

With a sidelong, acute look of distrust, the philosopher raised his s.h.a.ggy head and peered at the three young men. "Oh, so it's you," he cried. "The whole pet.i.t cenacle! You'd better hurry and go inside, my friends. Go in and drink your beer and wonder at what you'll find in there; but please don't insist on the company of this poor, broken-down old man, whose heart and brain are in the clutches of demons!"

"But, dear Herr Turnabout, whatever is the matter with you today?" Ludwig Ugel asked sympathetically. But immediately thereafter he found himself staggering from the blow of the philosopher's fist in his side, and propped himself up against the railing of the staircase. The old man ran down the street, cursing and raging.

"Infamous Poisonbreath," he bellowed as he hurried off, "ill-fated talisman, transformed into a red-blue flower! Abused, trampled in the dust, the only ... Victim of satanical malice ... The excruciating memory revived..."

The three friends shook their heads in astonishment and let the rampaging man go his way. At long last they began to ascend the stairs, when once again the doors flew open, and, with a friendly gesture of adieu to those still inside, Parson Wilhelm Wingolf stepped out. Those who stood on the stairs greeted him with all good cheer, and immediately inquired as to the cause of the radiance that gilded his broad and most worthy head. Mysteriously, he raised his chubby index finger, took the poet confidentially aside, and with a roguish smile whispered into his ear, "Just think, today, for the first time in my life, I have made a verse! And I did it not a moment ago!"

The poet opened his eyes so wide that they circled above and below the narrow frames of his wire-rimmed spectacles. "Recite it!" he cried. The parson turned toward the three friends, again raised his finger, and with blissfully half-closed eyes he recited his verse: Perfection, Today you've peered in my direction!

And, without uttering another word, he took his leave of the comrades, waving his hat.

"Good G.o.d!" said Ludwig Ugel. The poet stood silent, lost in thought. But Karl Hamelt, who had not let a single word pa.s.s his lips since he'd awakened in the gra.s.s, emphatically announced, "What a good poem!"

At this point, expecting the unexpected, the thirsty friends finally managed, without further hindrance, to enter the cool parlor of the Crown. It was much the best room, for in it the young wife of the innkeeper waited on the customers herself; furthermore, at this time of day they could count on being the only guests and could practice their jocular good manners on their hostess.

The first remarkable thing that all three noticed as soon as they entered and took their seats was this: today, for the very first time, the small, round hostess no longer seemed at all pretty. This, however, was owing to something each of them quickly remarked to himself in silence. Towering above the polished ornate border of the roomy sideboard, in semi-darkness, was the head of a strange and beautiful young maiden.

2.

THE SECOND, no less remarkable thing was that the elegant Herr Erich Tnzer-one of the inner circle of the cenacle and the bosom friend of Karl Hamelt-though seated at the small table immediately beside that of his friends, in no way remarked or acknowledged their arrival. Before him on the table was a half-full gla.s.s of light beer, into which he had placed a yellow rose. He sat there slowly rolling his big, somewhat bulging eyes; and for the first time in his life he looked utterly ridiculous. From time to time he lowered his stately nose closer to the flower and sniffed at it, while simultaneously casting a nearly impossible sidelong glance at the unknown woman's face. Despite the complete transformation of his own visage, hers showed not the slightest change of expression.