For the Germanist of my own age, over thirty but not yet too far over, the great enthusiasm for Hermann Hesse among younger people poses a vexing dilemma. For the fact is that many of us, with important exceptions, do not think that Hesse is a writer of the first rank…. (p. 112)

Hesse's stylistic mediocrity directs attention to other problems. First of all, his characteristic stylistic posture is certainly willed. There is a certain amount of vivid writing in Steppenwolf, here and there in Narcissus and Goldmund, and elsewhere, while Siddhartha is, of course, exceptionally mannered, as is, to a lesser extent, The Glass Bead Game…. (p. 113)

The inner way and the search for wholeness [, Hesse's themes,] are aspects of a criticism of modern society with sources in the resistance to the developing phenomena of the modern world in German Classicism and Romanticism around the turn of the...