Like every great artist [Hesse] has essentially but one theme, of which all his works are only maturing variations. Hesse's fundamental fable is the endless struggle of the individual for self-recognition and self-realization, and the resulting conflict with the equalizing forces, the temptations, and taboos of a given environment. (p. 355)

Hermann Hesse is neither a "realistic" nor a "symbolistic" writer, in the loose and hazy sense in which these terms are commonly applied, but it is his perfect integration of both spheres, of the real and the phantastic, the unbroken simultaneousness of the world without and the world within and their constant interplay that produce the "magic realism" (to give it a name) which is his rare achievement and the lure of his books and wherein lies his greatness as an artist. Contemplating the microcosmos of the human heart, he perceives the macrocosmos created in its image, and...