BOOKS
MIND, BODY, SPIRIT: THE ROAD TO THE CASTLE
MAGISTER LU DI. By Hermllnn Hesse. Henry Holt. $5.00.
THE WOMAN OF ROME. By Alberto Morovio. Forror, Straus. $3.50.
UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN. By Georges Bernonos. Pontheon. $3.00.
Magister Ludi
is a book of wonders. As far as I know, this is
the first time that speculative intelligence has been given freedom in a
work of fiction.
It
therefore has nothing in common with the theatrical
philosophizing which, in all writers but Dostoevsky, has made up the so–
caIIed "novel of ideas." Hesse does not try to deduce characters from
ideas, or vice versa, but dispenses with characterization altogether. Joseph
Knecht, the hero, has the kind of existence that is given to philosophers
by historians of culture: he stands at a point of intersection or con–
vergence of lines of thought. Hesse absolutely commits himself to this
conception of character; I was unable to believe it. I kept waiting
throughout the novel for something "to happen," the usual conversion
of character into drama. "Nothing happens"; and that which does not
happen turns out to be a departure from the conventional novel, at a
slow pace, creeping at times and even standing dead still, that goes at
least as far as
Ulysses
though not, unfortunately, in as interesting a way.
The scene is somewhere in Europe, some time in the future, after the
Age of the Digest, our own, which had all but destroyed culture, and
whose wars had devastated the earth. To preserve the humane tradi–
tion, a number of scholars have joined together to found Castalia, a
realm separate from the ordinary world, but dependent on it for sub–
sistence. No one in Castalia works at practical things. The life, which
with the exception of a period in youth is chaste and unworldly, is com–
pletely given over to a study of the various cultural traditions, including
the Chinese, and of the development of the forms in music, poetry,
mathematics, philosophy, etc. The work is scholarly, never creative. Its
highest expression is achieved in the Bead Game, which lends itself to
a refinement in subtlety as profound as chess, though it is played not
with pieces (there are however beads to manipulate as well as hiero–
glyphics and other symbols) but with concepts. A theme, of music,
