A review of Hesse's prose and poetry reveals three distinct periods. Each represents a different stage in the course of the author's struggle with himself and with life as a whole, and each reflects a correspondingly different phase in his style.
The first of these three periods, the two decades preceding Demian …, is one of uncertainty and vague presentiment. These are the early years of a sensitive outsider who cannot cope directly with his particular problem of existence. He resorts instead to fantasy and withdraws into the realm of beauty, there to indulge in the extremes of late nineteenth-century aestheticism. 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 is the work of a talented beginner whose world of experience is still too limited, and whose imagination is entranced by the facile flow of beautiful language. In the absence of discipline and restraint, the whole is sacrificed to the part, and what was meant to be art fails to become more than picturesque patter. (p. 14)
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