This is what Castalia knew nothing of; this is what his own life had lacked, When his pupil dives into the lake, Knecht follows him, fired, like Ibsen’s Master Builder, by youth and life. The cold and the effort overcome him, and he drowns. Still, in this last work (to date) Hesse has not drawn a clear and final conclusion from his analysis. The young Tito has revealed himself as ‘completely his peer’. At the last, Hesse cannot choose between Narziss and Goldmund. We can see in retrospect why both were failures. Goldmund merely lived; he failed to ‘take the whole world into his soul’, although, through art he came closer to it than Sinclair or Siddhartha. Knecht merely thought; he tried, through the bead game, to take the whole world of knowledge into his soul. His ideal of service was right, but it was service to the wrong cause, as he realizes when he sees Tito performing a different sort of service in the dawn. Considered as a whole, Hesse’s achievement can hardly be matched in modern literature; it is the continually rising trajectory of an idea, the fundamental religious idea of how to ‘live more abundantly’.
