Just as the gramophone ihe esthetid intellectual atmosphere of my study and just as the Ameri dances broke in as strangers and disturbers, yes, and as destroyers, into my carefully tended garden of music, so, too, from all sides there broke in new and dreaded and disiing influences upon my life that, till now, bad been so sharply marked off and so deeply secluded. The Steppenwolf treatise, and Hermioo, were right in their doe of the thousand souls. Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old ones; making clamorous demands and creating fusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been. The feacities and pursuits in which I had happeo be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of myself as a person who was in faothing more than a most refined and educated specialist iry, musid philosophy; and as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities, instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrand gave the label of Steppenwolf.
Meanwhile, though cured of an illusion, I found this disiion of the personality by no means a pleasant and amusing adventure. On the trary, it was often exceedingly painful, often almost intolerable. Often the sound of the gramophone was truly fiendish to my ears in the midst of surroundings where everything was tuo so very different a key. And many a time, when I danced my oep in a stylish restaurant among pleasure seekers and elegant rakes, I felt that I was a traitor to all that I was bound to hold most sacred. Had Hermi me for one week alone I should have fled at once from this wearisome and laughable traffig with the world of pleasure. Hermine, however, was always there. Though I might not see her every day, I was all the same tinually under her eye, guided, guarded and seled—besides, she read all my mad thoughts of rebellion and escape in my face, and smiled at them.
As the destru of all that I had called my personality went on, I began to uand, too, why it was that I had feared death so horribly in spite of all my despair. I began to perceive that this ignoble horror in the face of death art of my old ventional and lyiehe late Herr Haller, gifted writer, student of Mozart and Goethe, author of essays upoaphysics of art, upon genius and tragedy and humanity, the melancholy hermit in a cell encumbered with books, was given over bit by bit to self-criticism and at every point was found wanting. This gifted and iing Herr Haller had, to be sure, preached reason and humanity and had protested against the barbarity of the war; but he had not let himself be stood against a wall and shot, as would have been the proper sequence of his way of thinking. He had found some way of aodating himself; one, of course, that was outwardly reputable and noble, but still a promise and no more. He was, further, opposed to the power of capital a he had industrial securities lying at his bank and spent the i from them without a pang of sce. And so it was all through. Harry Haller had, to be sure, rigged himself out finely as an idealist and ner of the world, as a melancholy hermit and growling prophet. At bottom, however, he was a beois who took exception to a life like Hermines and was munoyed over the nights thrown away in a restaurant and the money squahere, and had them on his sce. Instead of longing to be freed and pleted, he longed, on the trary, most early to get back to those happy times when his