Hermann Hesse
TWO STORIES
DREAM JOURNEYS: A RECORD
He was a man who followed the not very highly regarded
profession of popular writer but who belonged, nevertheless, to that
smaller circle of authors who take their profession with the greatest
seriousness and are honored by certain enthusiasts just as true poets
used to be honored in earlier times when poets and poetry still
existed. This man of letters wrote all sorts of pleasant things; he
wrote novels, stories and even poems, and he took the greatest pains
to do his work well. Seldom, however, did he succeed in satisfying
his ambition, for he made the mistake, although he considered him–
self a modest man, of presumptuously comparing himself with and
measuring himself against not his colleagues and contemporaries, the
other writers of light literature, but the poets of the past-those, that
is, who have survived for generations. And so, to his distress, he had
to recognize again and again that the most successful page he had
ever written still fell far short of the most wayward sentence or
verse of those true poets. Thus he grew constantly more dispirited
and lost all joy in his work, and if now and again he still wrote some
trifle, he did so only to give vent and expression to this dissatisfaction
and inner aridity in bitter criticism of his times and of
himself,
and
naturally nothing was thereby improved. Sometimes, too, he tried
to find his way back into the enchanted gardens of pure poetry and
praised beauty in pretty word pictures, in which he paid conscientious
tribute to Nature, Women and Friendship. These verses did in fact
possess
a
certain music and some similarity to the true poetry of true
poets, of which they reminded one in much the same way that a
passing infatuation or flutter of the emotions may on occasion re–
mind a business man or worldling of his lost soul.
One day in the season between winter and spring, this author,
