ANDRÉ GIDE

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 love of Nature: a sort of devotion. The open air circulates through their pages that quiver with panicky breaths, like the leaves of forest trees. In each of them, too, I refind the same indecision of soul; its contours are illusive and its aspirations, infinite; it is infatuated with vague sympathies, ready for the reception of any chance imperative; little determined by the past to find in submission itself an aim, a reason for living, an anchor for his floating impulses. (p. 23)

[Hesse has said] that all creatures under the sun live and develop as they wish and according to their own laws; man alone allows himself to be fashioned and bent by the laws that others have made. The entire work of Hesse is a poetic effort for emancipation with a view to escaping imitation and reassuming the genuineness compromised. Before teaching it to others, it is necessary to preserve it in oneself. Hesse arrives at it through culture. Although profoundly and fundamentally German, it is only by turning his back on Germany that he succeeds. Those in his country who were able to remain loyal to themselves, and not to allow themselves to be deflected are rare: it is to them he addresses himself and says: however few you may be, it is in you, and you alone, that the virtue of Germany has taken refuge and it is on you that her future depends. (p. 24)