His task is not to educate unusual boys but to produce good honest fools - Herman Hesse hates school

From one prodigy to another, to The Prodigy, a  short 1905 Hermann Hesse novel.  Unterm Rad is the real title, which is not even remotely The Prodigy, but rather, to use the title of an older translation, Beneath the Wheel.  The wheel of school and homework and society so on.  The novel is about a sensitive boy genius who is destroyed by the inflexibility and lack of imagination of his school and his thick-headed father.  There is another way to tell the story, but let’s go with this one.

John Stuart Mill was, by contrast, a comparatively insensitive genius, although more sensitive than he or anyone else had guessed.  Both Hesse’s prodigy and Mill lost their mothers at an early age, so they have that in common.

That is not true about Mill, by the way; completely wrong.  His mother lived a long time.  I had just assumed that she had died when Mill was young because he never mentions her.  It did strike me as odd, given that his mother was obviously absent, that younger siblings kept appearing.  Autobiography may be a much stranger book than it first seems.

Back to Hesse.  I know that the above summary of the novel is correct because the narrator directly tells me so:

A schoolmaster would rather have a whole class of duffers than one genius, and strictly speaking he is right, for his task is not to educate unusual boys but to produce good Latinists, mathematicians, and good honest fools…  we have the comfort of knowing that in true geniuses the wounds almost always heal, and they become people who create their masterpieces in spite of school and who later, when they are dead and the pleasant aura of remoteness hangs over them, are held up by schoolmasters to succeeding generations as exemplary and noble beings.  (Ch. 4, 85)

The narrator has picked his side.  The novel – the narrator – can have a tone of adolescent self-pity that is not so appealing.  Hesse was twenty-eight when it was published, but the narrator sounds younger.  Perhaps Hesse was younger when he wrote the book.  He did have the sense to create some distance by making the more autobiographical character not the main hero but rather the hero’s school friend, a wilder, more poetical creature, who reads not the Classics but rather Romantics like Schiller, Shakespeare, and Ossian, and who speaks “in the manner of romantic youths enamoured of Heine” (71).  Hesse can then explore the real mental crisis he experienced at school from different perspectives by dividing his symptoms and sufferings among the two characters.

Here’s how wild that poetic kid, Heilner, is:

Hans was also horrified when he first noticed how Heilner treated his text-books…  He was disgusted to see that [Heilner] had covered whole pages with pencilled scribble.  The west coast of the Spanish peninsula [it’s an atlas] had been distorted into a grotesque profile in which the nose reached from Oporto to Lisbon and the Cape Finsterre region had been stylized into a curly wig, while Cape St Vincent formed the beautiful twisted point of a man’s beard.  It went on like this for page after page…  Hans was accustomed to treat his books as sacred possessions and this disrespect seemed to him partly a desecration of the holy of holies, partly a criminal yet heroic act.  (70)

A madman.  Thank goodness he is expelled.

The boarding school portrayed in the novel is real and still operating.  It is housed in a Cistercian monastery dating back to the 12th century.  Neither sensitive nor a genius, I thought it sounded pretty great.

Quotations and page numbers are from the W. J. Strachan translation, Penguin, 1973.

I am rather below than above par - John Stuart Mill frightens me

Why I did not read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873) or at any number of strategic points along the way I do not know, but I’ve read it now.

Autobiography is a book about education:

I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek.  I have been told that it was when I have three years old…  I faintly remember going through Aesop’s fables, the first Greek book which I read.  The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second…  I also read, in 1813 [so Mill was seven], the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theaetetus inclusive: which last dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible.  (Ch. 1, Childhood and Early Education)

I see I have something in common with Mill, since I too remember finding Theaetetus impossible to understand, although I was not seven but rather thirty, and I read it in English rather than Greek.  I should include one more line:

But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done.

Mill was home-schooled, as we now say, by his father James Mill, who in a sense is the villain of Autobiography, if memoirs have villains.  Mill continued to work twelve to fifteen grade levels beyond his age all through his childhood and teens until, at age twenty, he experienced a “crisis in my mental history” that sounds to me like some kind of depression – “the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down” – from which he is eventually lifted by his discovery of the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Actually, his prodigious studies and writing continued even during his crisis.  “I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit” (Ch. 5).  What an extraordinary mental machine Mill was.  His last name is like a pun.  He was a Learning Mill, always grinding away.

Almost everyone I read is unusual, some kind of genius – I take it for granted that there are many kinds of genius – but a few writers stand out even from that background.  When I read about the early educational experiences of the future George Eliot or Robert Browning or John Stuart Mill (all three to some degree or another self-educated), or study the life of Goethe, I sometimes find myself a bit frightened by the evident vastness of their cognitive capabilities.

I suppose Mill's mental breakdown is socially useful.  Helps cheer up us lesser folks, like reading about how St. Augustine was a young sinner, even if he did not really sin all that much.  Here is Mill’s own opinion on his father's methods:

If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive; but in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par; what I could do, could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution: and if I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter century over my contemporaries.  (Ch. 1)

Part of the literary interest of the Autobiography is that it has a classic unreliable narrator who tells outrageous lies while unconsciously revealing the truth to the attentive reader.  I mean, “rather below par”!  How could he possibly have believed that?

An aside: the part of the last chapter about Mill’s short career as a Member of Parliament is of high and direct interest to fans of Trollope’s Parliament novels, especially Phineas Finn.  Mill would have been in Parliament alongside Finn; the riot scene is in both books.  Instructive.