Beneath the Wheel proscribes teachers as the enemies of genius, but a strong thread of reverence for the teacher and scholar runs on throughout Hesse, culminating in the reverence for the sages of The Glass Bead Game. Again, the bourgeois, his material possessions and pretensions—the conventional bourgeois which Hesse would have become had he completed his schooling—is constantly reviled; and yet the bourgeois life-style (while he is A Guest at the Spa or is Moving to a New House) is something he resists only by recording his doubts about it. And then, while much of Hesse's lyrical and fantastic writing is a hymn to the pleasures of the solitary imagination, the world of child-like dreaming, the other side of the coin is a lamentation at loneliness, a bitter sense of the isolation felt by the creative artist. Two sides to every question are constantly there: the...