HERMANN HESSE -- BIOGRAPHY

by Joseph Mileck

In 1915, Romain Rolland paid Hermann Hesse a rare compliment when he referred to him as the only German poet of rank maintaining a truly Goethean attitude during the First World War. Andre Gide found a kindred soul in Hesse, a rebel individualist divorced from established dogma and institutions, a lonely, incorruptible seeker of new norms. In 1947, upon the occasion of Hesse's seventieth birthday, Thomas Mann had this to say of his friend and fellow writer: "For me his life work, with its roots in native German romanticism, for all its occasional strange individualism, its now humorously petulant and now mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times, belongs to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labors of our epoch. Of the literary generation to which I belong I early chose him, who has now attained the Biblical age, as the one nearest and dearest to me and I have followed his growth with a sympathy which sprang as much from our differences as from our similarities." These are typical tributes to a foremost spokesman for three generations of enlightened Germans, to a most prominent figure on the literary scene of Germany from the outset of the century until his death, August 9, 1962.

Hermann Hesse was born in the little Swabian town of Calw, Wurttemberg, July 2, 1877. His father's side of the family was North German with a Slavic strain, and his mother's side was South German with a French inclusion. Both sides of the family were severely religious. His mother was born in India, daughter of the famous Swabian Pietist  missionary and Indologist, Hermann Gundert. His father dedicated himself to the practical service of Christ at the age of eighteen and served for four years as a Pietist missionary in India. Brought back to Europe by ill health, he became editor of a Pietist periodical, taught at a Pietist mission school, and finally succeeded his father-in-law as director of the Pietist publishing house in Calw. This severe Pietism with its belief in the inherent sinfulness of man, in the necessity of breaking the will of the individual, and with its uncompromising renunciation of all that is of this world, was the first of many social structures which were to rouse the rebel in Hesse.

A hypersensitive, imaginative, lively, and extremely headstrong child, Hesse proved to be a constant source of despair and annoyance to his parents and his teachers. School held as little attraction for him as for Thomas Mann, and his formal education was even briefer than Mann's. Even as a youngster he was determined to become a writer and not to follow in the footsteps of his father. In 1892 he took French leave from the church school in Maulbronn only six months after his admission. He then managed to survive the first year at the Gymnasium in Cannstatt, but hardly had the second year begun before he again became delinquent and was promptly dismissed. An apprenticeship in a bookshop in Esslingen terminated abruptly only three days after it had begun. Hesse now assisted his father for about six months in the publishing house in Calw, then decided to learn a trade before emigrating to Brazil. However, after sixteen months of manual labor in a machine shop, he left Calw in October, 1895, to begin a relatively uneventful apprenticeship of four years in a bookshop in Tubingen.

Although Hesse composed poetry almost before he was able to wield a pencil, these years in Tubingen mark the actual beginning of his career. It was during this period that he wrote his first collection of verse, Ramantische Lieder (1899), and the very romantic prose episodes of Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (1899). Hesse's next five years in Basel (1899-19o4) were busy ones. He published his miscellaneous Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte van Hermann Lauscher in 1901. More poetry, Gedichte, followed in 1902. By 1903, he was financially able to leave the book business and to devote all of his time to his writing. His first novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), was an immediate success. Hesse became a celebrity almost overnight. That same year, he received the Wiener Bauernfeldpreis, the first of many literary awards.

In September, 1904, Hesse married Maria Bernoulli, the daughter of an old and prominent family of Basel. Soon there after, he and his bride left for the little village of Gaienhofen on the German side of the Untersee. Marriage and Gaienhofen were meant to end the morbid estheticism into which Hesse had allowed himself to drift. He hoped thereby to become an established, respected member of society. This hope was never realized. Except for the first few years, his marriage did not alleviate his loneliness, nor could his idyllic retreat long contain his inherent restlessness. By 1912, Gaienhofen had lost all its meaning. It had become quite apparent to Hesse that he could not be both a creative dreamer and a "solid citizen," a Phantasiemensch and a Burger, as he put it.

Despite their strong undercurrent of discord, these years from 1904 to 1912 were most prolific. Monographs on Boccaccio and St. Francis of Assisi were published in 1904. In Unterm Rad (1906), Hesse recalled his own unhappy days in Maulbronn and paid his respects to the tendentious school-novel fashionable in Germany at the turn of the century. In Peter Camenzind, he had concerned himself with the misfortunes of a troubled young writer; with Gertrud (1910), his second artist novel, Hesse turned his attention to an equally and similarly troubled young musician. Both gifted misfits were projections of their author; their problems of life were his. Three volumes of short stories playfully depicting life's little tragedies and comedies in a provincial setting were published in rapid succession:  Diesseits (1907), Nachbarn (1909), and Umwege (1912). A third volume of poetry, Unterwegs, appeared in 1911. That same year, restive and discontented, unable to bear his comfortable, established mode of existence in Gaienhofen any longer, Hesse fled Europe for the Orient. His diary like impressions of this trip to Ceylon, Malaya, and Sumatra were published as Aus lndien in 1913. Most of the prose sketches of Bilderbuch (1926), and the tales of Fabulierbuch (1935) were also written during this period from 1904 to 1912. Hesse also found time to edit the periodical Marz (1907-12), and to contribute a steady stream of book reviews, articles, and short stories to such periodicals and newspapers as Neue Rundschau, Die Rheinlande, Simplicissimus, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt.

In 1912, after his return from the East, Hesse left Gaienhofen for Bern. He was to remain here only until the spring of 1919. These were to be grim years. The youngest of three sons was seriously ill for more than a year. The war brought with it endless mental agony and even privation. Hesse was an outspoken pacifist and soon fell into disrepute. The death of his father proved to be a severe shock. His wife became deranged and began to spend most of her time in asylums. And Hesse himself was compelled to seek relief in psychoanalysis (1916-17).

Despite this incessant harassment, Hesse's prolificacy continued undiminished in Bern. His third artist novel, Rosshalde (1914), is the story of a painter whose mismarriage foreshadowed the approaching impasse of Hesse's own marriage. Demian (1919), Hesse's very Freudian study of adolescence, with its Nietzschean emphasis upon the superior individual, immediately enjoyed the loud acclaim of postwar disillusioned German youth seeking a new way of life. Knulp, three episodes from the life of a romantic vagabond, appeared in 1915. Musik des Einsamen, another volume of poetry, was published in 1916. More short stories were gathered together in Kleiner Garten (1919) and in Marchen (1919), and more than half of the essays of Betrachtungen (1928) were written during this period. Hesse also continued to contribute his reviews, articles, and short stories to newspapers and periodicals, and even found time to help edit the Deutsche Internierten-Zeitung and a series of books for German prisoners of war.

Exhausted and distraught, Hesse left Bern in the spring of 1919 and wandered southward in quest of solitude. Before life could now become meaningful for him, he had to find and come to terms with himself. His wife remained in an asylum and his three sons were placed in the care of close friends. He found the retreat he sought in the remote village of Montagnola in southern Switzerland. Here he began painfully to take stock of himself and to devote himself assiduously to his art. For almost four poverty-stricken years Hesse lived like a hermit, and for years thereafter, except for regular winter visits to Zurich and for intermittent cures in Baden, he rarely left his refuge for any length of time. This pattern of life was interrupted only briefly by an unsuccessful second marriage in 1924.

Hesse remained in his bachelor quarters in Montagnola for twelve years, the most productive years of his life. In his relentless quest of the self, his writing now received a fresh impetus and assumed a new direction. The pre-First World War traditionalist became an uninhibited and exciting innovator. The short stories and novels which now followed one another in quick succession are all only slightly disguised inner autobiographies, Seelenbiographien, as Hesse himself termed them. In Klein und Wagner (1920), a tense psychological study, Hesse recalled his own flight from Bern. In Klingsors letzter Sommer (1920), he recorded the intoxicating emotional release he experienced during his first summer in Montagnola. Siddhartha, Hesse's Buddha-like search for the basic unity and meaningfulness of life, begun in the closing months of 1919, was finally finished and published in 1922. Kurgast, the ironic psychologizing and philosophizing of an embittered rheumatic, appeared in 1923. Nurnberger Reise, the tart memoirs of a lecture tour through southern Germany in the autumn of 1925, was published in 1927.

Steppenwolf, the experimental novel which Thomas Mann later termed no less daring than James Joyce's Ulysses or Andre Gide's Counterfeiters, appeared that same year. It was greeted with a curious mixture of awe, bewilderment, antagonism, and disgust. Harry Haller's story, Hesse's own uninhibited self-exposure accompanied by a searing appraisal of Western civilization, troubled even the staunchest of the author's supporters. In the concluding remarks of Krisis (1928), the poetic counterpart of Steppenwolf, Hesse had to remind his friends that his new literary ventures were not an irresponsible deviation but a necessary culmination in the self-quest which began with Demian. Repressions had to be exposed, even at the price of unpleasant notoriety. In his correspondence (Briefe, 1951), readers had to be cautioned repeatedly that the magic theater and the eternals, Mozart and Goethe, representatives of values which make life possible and worth living, and not jazz, eroticism, and cynicism, constituted the real substance of Steppenwolf. And in the postscript appended to the 1942 edition of Steppenwolf, Hesse insisted that his novel was actually an article of faith and not a document of despair. Like Harry Haller, Hesse wallowed in despair but lived in faith, a faith in the ultimate meaningfulness of life. For him, life never became the perplexing absurdity it was for Franz Kafka or the Sisyphean monotonous senselessness it was to become for Albert Camus.

Nor was the indictment of our age in Steppenwolf something new. Like Hesse's self-exposure, this rejection of twentieth-century civilization was again only a culmination, a sharper statement of attitudes already present in Peter Camenzind. Spiritually and culturally, the twentieth century had always appeared most bleak to Hesse. Our era was for him one of moral depravity and intellectual mediocrity, of surface glitter, smug comfort, sham conventionality, and foolish optimism. It is a materialistic age where science has become a religion and the final criterion of value is function. Man has lost his soul in this world of money, machines, and distrust. He has exchanged his spiritual peace for physical comfort. With his imagination stunted and his feelings stifled, he no longer appreciates beauty, nor is he capable of real artistic creation. All vital rapport with God and nature has been lost, reason has supplanted faith, and society has forgotten the individual.

The middle-class core of our civilization never ceased to be the butt of Hesse's ire. The bourgeois represents all that is negative. A stalwart and stodgy nonentity, he is governed in all his ideals and pursuits solely by the impulse of self-preservation.  He fears individuation and deliberately sacrifices the precarious but precious intensities of life for comfort and security. He is the characterless Philistine who epitomizes mediocrity, cowardice, compromise, irresponsibility, and servility. He is the strapping, insensitive physical specimen who enjoys health and wealth but lacks all culture. He has a sound appetite but no taste, a good deal of confidence but no ideals. He possesses a surfeit of zeal and diligence but has no lofty aspirations or worthy goals. It is to him that the world belongs, while the sensitive worshipers of beauty and the earnest seekers after truth and the meaning of life are misfits and outcasts. Hesse and all of his heroes belong to these outsiders. Testy Harry Haller brooding at the edges of the bourgeois world and scoffing at its idols is no exception.

Steppenwolf was followed in 1930 by Narziss und Goldmund, the less personal and less excruciating adventures of a restless artist committed to the world of the senses. And Morgenlandfahrt, a playfully personal and highly symbolical fantasy, the timeless eastward trek of artists, philosophers, and scholars in search of wonder and truth, was completed in 1931. During this period a steady stream of verse accompanied Hesse's prose: Gedichte des Malers (1920), Ausgewahlte Gedichte (1921), ltalien (1923), Verse im Krankenbett (1927), the notorious Krisis (1928), and Trost der Nacht (1929). Numerous very personal prose episodes and literary studies were written: Wanderung (1920), eleven of the many items in Bilderbuch (1926), a considerable portion of the Betrachtungen (1928), two-thirds of the Traumfahrte (1945), and Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (1929), a very intimate perusal of world literature. And in the midst of all this productivity, Hesse managed to continue his output of reviews, to edit some twenty new books and to serve as co-editor of Vivos Voco (October 1919 to December 1921), a pacifist periodical intended to assist youth in its quest for higher spiritual values and more worthy intellectual and physical pursuits.

Thanks to the generosity of his close friend and patron, Hans C. Bodmer, Hesse was able to quit his bachelor retreat in the summer of 1931 and move into the villa at the edge of Montagnola where he continued to live until his death. His third wife joined him in Casa Bodmer in the autumn of that same year.

With the rise of Hitler's regime, Hesse's popularity in Germany began again to wane. During the First World War he had been branded an enemy of the Fatherland. Now he became a Jew-lover and a traitor to the German cause. Nevertheless, since Hesse had become a Swiss citizen in 1923 and because he refrained from any public pronouncement of his otherwise obvious antipathy toward the Third Reich, his name never was put on the official black list of undesirable authors. His books, however, were tacitly banned and began to appear in ever decreasing numbers. By 1943 publishing houses had ceased to print them and bookdealers to display them. Since 1945, Hesse has again become one of the most widely read and respected authors in Germany.

The years after 1931 were marked more by effort than by spontaneity, more by persistence than by passion, and more by recollection than by new horizons. More than a decade was necessary to write the very enigmatic and monumental Glasperlenspiel (1943), the only novel of this period. Again Hesse was concerned with the individual, but quite impersonally now and no longer only in terms of self-knowledge and self-realization, but also in terms of his fellow human. Glasperlenspiel was also Hesse's final, most detailed and most mature scrutiny of our Western world.

The major volume of verse published after 1931 was Die Gedichte (1942), Hesse's collected poems. These have been supplemented several times since. Vom Baum des Lebens (1934), Neue Gedichte (1937), Der Blutenzweig (1945), and Jugendgedichte (1950) are only minor collections of selected poems. Stufen (1961), another collection of selected poems, includes Hesse's last poems. The idyl, Stunden im Garten (1936), and the poetic episode, Der Lahme Knabe (1937), both written in Greek hexameters, are the only verse publications which belong entirely to this last period of Hesse's life.

Most of the many later collections of short stories, brief recollections, and articles were only republications of old material. Hesse's earliest works are represented in Mahnung (1933), Kleine Welt (1933), Fruhe Prosa (1948), Gerbersau (1949), and Die Verlobung und andere Erzahlungen (1951). Wege zu Hermann Hesse (1947), Aus vielen Jahren (1949), Alle Bucher dieser Welt (1949), Gluck (1952), and Hermann Hesse. Eine Auswahl (1953), all afford sparse cross-sections of Hesse's lifetime work. Only eleven of the articles in Krieg und Frieden (1946) belong to the thirties and forties. Two of the four items in Dank an Goethe (1946) were first published in the twenties. Fabulierbuch (1935) returns to the earliest period of Hesse's career. Most of the Kleine Betrachtungen (1941) was written almost as early. Ten of the recollections Gedenkblatter (1937), two of the five tales in Der Pfirsichbaum und andere Erzahlungen (1945), both landscape studies of Berg und See (1948), Errinerung an Andre Gide (1951), and Bericht an die Freunde (1960) belong to the years after 1931. Spate Prosa (1951) and Beschworungen (1955), diarylike miscellanies, were written from 1944 to 1950 and from 1947 to 1955 respectively. Gesammelte Dichtungen, six volumes of Hesse's collected works were published in 1952; a seventh volume was added in 1957.

Only a small segment of Hesse's voluminous correspondence has been published to date. Briefe (1951) includes a broad and fascinating selection of letters from 1927 to 1950; a supplemented edition appeared in 1959. Eine Handvoll Briefe, also published in 1951, is only a briefer selection from this same period. And Hermann Hesse/Romain Rolland Briefe (1954) presents a revealing interchange between these two kindred spirits from 1915 to 1940.

Hesse was no stranger to literary honors. The Wiener Bauernfeldpreis of 1904 was followed in 1936 by the Swiss Gottfried-Keller-Preis. Frankfurt awarded him the Goethepreis in 1946, and that same year he received the Nobel Prize. In 1947, the University of Bern granted him an honorary doctorate. Braunschweig selected him for its Wilhelm-Raabe-Preis in 1950. In 1955, his name was added to the Friedensklasse des Ordens pour Ie Merite, and later that same year Hesse accepted his last major award, the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels.

II

There was always a very close relationship between the circumstances of Hesse's life and his art. His life and his art fall into three distinct and coincident periods. Each represents a different stage in the author's struggle with himself and with life at large, and each reflects a correspondingly different phase in both the substance and the form of his art. As such, Hesse provides an excellent field of investigation for the psychology of art.

The first of these three periods, the two decades preceding Demian (finished in 1917), was one of uncertainty and vague presentiment. These were the early years of a sensitive outsider who could not cope directly with his particular problem of existence. He resorted instead to fantasy and withdrew into the realm of beauty, there to indulge in the extremes of late nineteenth-century estheticism. The first prose of these years (Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht, 1899; Hermann Lauscher, 1901) is enveloped in a perfumed melancholy. It is characterized by exclamatory remarks and rhetorical questions, by sensuous adjectives and adverbs in languid cadence. The form is loose, a random succession of vignettes and dramatic monologues held together primarily by their common spirit of decadent romanticism. Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht is notable for its affected heroic pose, its pathos, profuse colors, and its muted sounds. Hermann Lauscher, a Hoffmannesque fusion of fantasy and reality, is both cynical and morbidly intimate. This was the work of a talented beginner whose world of experience was still too limited, and whose imagination was entranced by the facile flow of beautiful language. In the absence of discipline and restraint, the whole was sacrificed to the part, and what was meant to be art failed to become more than picturesque patter.

Beginning with Hesse's determination to escape the isolation of the introverted esthete, and with his consequent efforts in marriage to find a place for himself in the bourgeois world, this initial, emotionally intense romanticism yielded abruptly to a hardier, more entertaining realism. Peter Camenzind (1904), Gertrud (1910), and to a lesser degree, Rosshalde (1914) continued the tradition of Gottfried Keller's Der Grune Heinrich (1880). The many Gerbersau short stories (Diesseits, 1907; Nachbarn, 1909; Umwege, 1912), with their humorous and pleasantly ironic treatment of small-town life, and even the more tragic school-novel, Unterm Rad (1906), are closely akin to Keller's Seldwyla tales. The dream world of Hesse's earliest prose was here succeeded by a more vigorous rustic reality. Hesse's characters became more human and less shadowy; inertia and desperation yielded to movement and humor. His prose now achieved a more narrative style, and his language became clearer, crisper and more forceful.

It was in this vein of nineteenth-century poetic realism that Hesse continued until his crisis of 1916-17. The decade to follow, the second of the three periods, marked the most dramatic and most critical years of his life. The war and the tragic events in his family had brought with them an over whelming accumulation of tensions. Hesse was now compelled to realize that in his desire to make existence less painful he had been avoiding a close look at the true nature of his inner discord, and had blinded himself to the morally and spiritually impoverished world around him. Like Veraguth, the hero of Rosshalde, Hesse left the comfortable fold of the bourgeois world, which had never afforded him the security he had hoped it might, and accepted the more difficult existence of an outsider. In a desperate and determined effort to find himself, he began systematically to diagnose his inner conflicts, to go his long-shunned inward path (Weg nach lnnen). Only now did he finally come to grips with the intrinsic problems of human existence.

In Montagnola escape became quest, and in quest Hesse's inner problems resolved themselves into the basic malaise humain, into the tension between the spiritual and the physical (Geist und Natur). For years he was to oscillate between these poles, acclaiming first one, then the other, then neither. He never ceased hoping for a harmonious accord, though well aware that for him this was impossible. In Demian (1919), he acclaimed spirit, stressing self-knowledge and self-realization with a Nietzschean emphasis upon the superior being. But spirit as a guiding principle of life could only mean greater individuation and more painful isolation. Hesse still lacked the firm conviction and the inner fortitude necessary to endure these consequences. The immediate reaction was as extreme as the initial impulse. The assertive Nietzschean activism of Demian yielded suddenly to a Schopenhauer-like passivity, a restless quest to a quietistic acceptance, and self-realization to a yearning for self-obliteration. The world of the senses is as demanding and as impossible for the hero of Klein und Wagner (1920) as is the realm of the spirit, and respite can be found only in the nirvana of a will-less "letting go of oneself" (Sichfallenlassen).

Hesse; however, was as unprepared to accept Klein's resolution as he had been to follow the path of Demian. Envisaging more possibilities and giving precedence neither to the spiritual nor to the physical, he proceeded with Klingsor, the hero of Klingsors letzter Sommer (1920), to revel in the intoxication of both. In Siddhartha (1922), Hesse continued to acknowledge the reality, the goodness and the necessity of both realms of experience. However, whereas Klingsor fails to emerge from his revelry, Siddhartha exhausts and transcends both his mental and his Physical self and rises to an impersonal plane which knows only unity, affirmation, and humble service. Kurgast (1924), however, was a reminder that resolutions ate more easily visualized than experienced. In a sober tone of acceptance, Hesse realized that despite all efforts to the contrary, his existence would probably continue as a restless tension., a constant oscillation between life's opposing poles. It was the most acute stage of this continued tension that was recorded in Steppenwolf (1927). In his own words, Hesse had reached another of those stages in life when spirit becomes tired of itself, dethrones itself, and retreats before nature, before chaos, before the animal in man (Krisis, p. 81). With his recuperation from this embittered and desperate state of mental exhaustion, this trying period of quest and indecision ended. A tired and wiser man, fully aware of the value and the necessity of humor, Hesse was at last prepared to accept spirit, that part of human nature repeatedly deemed the very bane of existence during the difficult years immediately following Demian, as his guiding principle.

The new, more vigorous approach to life of this second period brought with it a new, more vigorous stage in Hesse's creative activity. The years from Demian to Steppenwolf were recklessly prolific. An abrupt change in both the substance and the style of his prose extended Hesse's literary horizons far beyond their previous conventional range. The course of this new, more dramatic phase of his writing was very unpredictable.  It Was characterized by spasmodic transition rather than by gradual progression.

With Demian, the once rather innocent entertainer suddenly became a disconcerting, problematic seeker whose complex expressionistic art all but defies satisfactory interpretation. The concrete world, the simplicity of language and clarity of thought which had become characteristic of Hesse's writings now gave way to the inner world, to abstractions, an enigmatic Freudian symbolism. But for their artistry, Demian and Klein und Wagner could be termed clinical reports. On the other hand, though obviously still under the influence of Demian and its symbolism, Klingsors letzter Sommer returns to a decadent romanticism similar to that of Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht. The atmosphere is again scented, the scene removed and feverish. And although more vibrant and cohesive, the whole once more becomes a maze of melodramatic vignettes.

The unpredictable course of Hesse's art during this period is even more evident in the sudden transition from Klingsors letzter Sommer to Siddhartha. Intoxication and random spontaneity change to contemplation and severe artistry. Siddhartha is classical in the symmetry of its form, in the stylized pattern of its expression, and in the lofty simplicity of its language. This is followed by an equally abrupt transition to the diarylike intimacy, the capricious, comic realism, and the acrid leitmotiv technique of Kurgast. The extremes of Steppenwolf are even more startling. Here Hesse's path to himself reached its climax in a fascinating confusion of symbol and irony, fantasy and realism.

The excruciating catharsis of Steppenwolf and Krisis brought to an end Hesse's period of distress and quest. He had come to terms with himself. He was now to come to terms with life at large. Quitting his hermitage, he remarried, and, in a more philosophical spirit, allowed the third and last phase of his life to take its more even course. In quiet retirement and ever closer communion with nature, struggle with himself and the circumstances of life gradually subsided. Emotions became subdued, and thought yielded to contemplation. The schizophrenic Steppenwolf, with his somber seriousness and his desperate gospel of humor, became a serene Magister Ludi (Glasperlenspiel) who knew the value of playful observation, and for whom acceptance of the human predicament was that of faith and love. It was only now that Hesse at last found the peace of sincere self-affirmation and life-affirmation.

A corresponding change took place in Hesse's art, While the spirit-flesh dichotomy continued to be the vital issue in his world of thought, it was no longer the acutely personal problem it once had been. It was in the milder, the more detached manner of recollection, rather than in further quest, that the question was reconsidered in Narziss und Goldmund (1930). Both poles of life are again acknowledged and affirmed, but Hesse's previous attitude of resignation to a life drawn from one extreme to another is supplanted by a new, more determined adjustment to life. The individual must take and continue along that path which the predominant aspect of his nature impels him to choose. Each, whether given to the senses or to the spirit, must be prepared to suffer the lot of his kind; to attempt, in curiosity or desperation, to do otherwise is to foster a perpetual Steppenwolf-like dissension. Determined as he was to suffer this inner discord no longer, Hesse's future road was obvious to him. It could only be that of the Morgenlandfahrt (1932), the way of the spirit.

Glasperlenspiel (1943) was the final stage along this road. Spirit, formerly stressed primarily in terms of the individual and of self- expression, was now finally viewed in terms of humanity and of self-justification. Cultivated for its own sake in a Castalialike estrangement from reality, spirit must remain sterile. Only when it becomes a vital factor in human existence, mellowed by love, service, and sacrifice, as exemplified in Josef Knecht's (the hero of Glasperlenspiel) way of life, can spirit serve its true purpose.

In keeping with this new adjustment to life and more dispassionate attitude toward what he regarded as its basic problem, Hesse's once explosive inspiration became more disciplined and his creative activity less impulsive and also less prolific. His art came to reflect the slower and more orderly tempo his life assumed, less dramatic in its tensions, in its now expansive nature, and much more given to narrative. The atmosphere is less charged, the language is less constrained, the vocabulary is marked more than ever by a poetic simplicity, while syntax becomes more playfully involved and symbolism even more prevalent and profoundly enigmatic. In all three of his last tales, a romantic spirit again prevails. But, purged of its decadence, it is now mature, mellow, wider in its scope, and deeper in its thought. Hesse was now less conscious of himself and more conscious of his art. Narziss und Goldmund, while very modern in its psychological depth, belongs to German Romanticism's best tradition of storytelling. Morgenlandfahrt, reverting briefly to the episodic-tale form most characteristic of the second period, is a playful fantasia which could have been written by Novalis. Glasperlenspiel immediately recalls Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, both in substance and in its baroque proportions. But it is also quite romantic in its loose composition, its fragmentary nature, in the naivete of its idyllic setting, and in its efforts to give symbolic expression to the otherwise inexpressible. And it is decidedly romantic in its dream, the glass-bead game able with its esoteric language of symbols to achieve a mystical union of all fields of learning.

While Hesse's prose passes through the three phases just outlined, the center about which his creative activity revolves remains constant. This center is the individual, opposed to society, its mores, and its institutions. And the individual is Hesse himself. He recalls, nostalgically, the simpler years of childhood. He re-experiences youth with its excruciating years of awakening. He portrays modern man, the intellectual and the artist in particular, within the framework of a declining culture. For his subject he provides an ever-changing setting. The Occident yields to the Orient, commonplace reality to the magic realm of the fantasy, and the Middle Ages and the distant future are as immediate and vital as the present. This fluid, diversified, and yet continuous whole represents the Odyssey of Hesse's changing self. It is in this, its intimately egocentric nature, that his art bears the stamp of its age, an age of cultural decline, of spiritual and moral distress, and of extreme loneliness.

Hesse's pre-1917 heroes are made of soft stuff. They are predominantly esthetes who live only in dreams, hopes and anticipation, and who shrink before realization. Self-preoccupied, temperamental artists or kindred souls, they are paralyzed by chronic indecision and indulge in romantic morbidity. They are outsiders consumed by their own loneliness, misfits to whom the art of life and the art of love are foreign, timid souls who ask too little of life and expect too much of it. They live in perpetual frustration and disillusionment. Such is the nature and fate of the sentimental cynic Lauscher, of the would-be child of nature Camenzind, of the timorous composer Kuhn (Gertrud), even of the more resolute painter Veraguth (Rosshalde), and of the more stoic wanderer Knulp. Such, too, was Hesse.

While Hesse's figure looms behind the person and fate of each of his pre-Demian heroes, in the decade to follow author and hero gradually merge in a poetic autobiographical fusion. Wayward Klein, frenzied Klingsor, and, in particular, the rheumatic protagonist of Kurgast and the desperate Steppenwolf are almost flesh of Hesse's person and spirit of his being. Now, like Hesse, in serious quest of self-knowledge and self-realization, these new heroes shed their lethargy and take fate by the forelock.

It is perhaps only in Siddhartha, Narziss und Goldmund, and in Glasperlenspiel, that Hesse managed to extricate himself sufficiently from this engrossment with his own immediate personal problems to enable him to mold his art with that care necessary to insure it beyond any doubt against the wear of time, and to give it some of the more universal implications inherent in all truly great art. Steppenwolf, however, will remain Hesse's most gripping and most fascinating "document of the times, for Haller's sickness of the soul . . . is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts."

University of California, Berkeley, March, 1963.  Joseph Mileck

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