things he was investigating? Nor did he take refuge in irony, though certain episodes in his novels are saturated with it. Perhaps his temper is shown best in two axioms of his: that compared with the divine law, however unjust it may sometimes appear, all human effort, even at its highest, is in the wrong; and that at all times, whatever we may think, the demand of the divine law for unconditional reverence and unconditional obedience is beyond question. But⁠—here again he surprises us⁠—unconditional reverence and obedience do not seem in his eyes to have excluded the strictest scrutiny, or even the most acute comic observation. His descriptions of the Heavenly Powers are very curious. He notes their qualities and their foibles with something of the respectful appreciation of Plutarch writing of Alexander or Cato. To more ignorant eyes, it is true, those foibles might appear mere faults, but to him, as to Plutarch in somewhat analogous circumstances, they are worthy of esteem as the qualities of superior beings, qualities perhaps disconcerting and even incomprehensible to the writer himself, but qualities nevertheless which would be found to incarnate unquestionable virtues were his mind capable of understanding them. In Kafka’s descriptions of the conflict of his heroes with heavenly destiny there are, amid all the bewilderment and nightmare apprehension, interludes of the purest humour.

Of Kafka’s style one can get an adequate idea only by going to the original. It is a style of the utmost exactitude, the utmost flexibility, the utmost naturalness, and of an inevitable propriety. His vocabulary is small, but his mastery of it is absolute. By means of the simplest words he can evoke new effects and convey the most difficult thoughts. His management of the sentence is consummate. Flowing without ever being monotonous, his long sentences achieve an endless variety of inflection by two things alone, an inevitable skill in the disposition of the clauses, and of the words making them up. I can think of no other writer who can secure so much force and meaning as Kafka does by the mathematically correct placing of a word. Yet in all his books he probably never placed a word unnaturally or even conspicuously. His sentences are