With Hesse the expression alone is restrained, not the feeling or the thought; and what tempers the expression of these is the exquisite feeling of fitness, reserve and harmony, and, with relationship to cosmos, the interdependence of things; it is also a certain latent irony, of which few Germans seem to me capable, and whose total absence so often spoils so many works by so many of their authors, who take themselves terribly seriously. (p. 22)

Hesse's [ironies], so charming in quality, seems to me to depend on the faculty of leaving himself behind, of seeing himself without looking, of judging himself without complacency; it is a form of modesty that becomes all the more attractive because more gifts and virtues accompany it….

However diverse (in subject matter if not in tendency) may be Hesse's books that I have read, I recognize in each of them the same pagan...