full-blown before it. Having admitted this, one may see better the extreme difficulty of Kafka’s attempt. For his allegory is not a mere recapitulation or recreation; it does not run on lines already laid down; it is a pushing forward of the mind into unknown places; and so the things he describes seem to be actual new creations which had never existed before. They are like palpable additions to the intellectual world, and ones which cannot be comprehended at a single glance, for there is meaning behind meaning, form behind form, in them all.

I have indicated less than a tithe of the things which may be found in this book and in The Trial , and that is all that I can do here, for Kafka’s writings have an almost endless wealth of meaning. His superb gifts as a storyteller, and his genius for construction, hardly need to be pointed out; it is obvious, however, that without them he would have been unable to introduce us to his strange world. In a recent issue of the Literarische Welt Herr Willy Haas remarks very finely of him that he has a tremendous power of deducing the real from the real, of starting from something concrete and sinking his thought into something which seems still more concrete. This is his method, and in the present novel with its consummate construction, few of those links between the concrete and the more concrete are left out; the progress of the invention coincides with the exploring and creating thought, so that in being carried forward by the action we are at the same time participators in the discovery and spectators of a world being built.

The unique quality of Kafka’s temperament is shown in his attitude to this world which he is investigating. That attitude may be best described by negatives. He avoided scrupulously the pose of the spectacular wrestler with God, which even certain great writers, such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, have incomprehensibly assumed, but from which he was saved by the modesty of his view of his own place in the universe, and by his sense of humour. He avoided also the gesture of resignation, for what meaning could resignation have⁠—except a pragmatic one⁠—in face of the