and stimulating formula--is a perfect symbol for Tolstoy’s social and
political (or, rather, his anarchistic, antipolitical) views. His
famous letter to Czar Alexander III develops these most concisely. The
new Czar’s father had been murdered on the first of March 1881; and
Tolstoy wrote begging him to exercise clemency toward the murderers. He
here sets down for the Emperor, in words so compelling that one almost
wonders at their not prevailing, the two _political_ expedients which
had been applied up to date against increasing political disorder:
first, force and terror; and second, liberalism, constitution,
parliament. Both these have finally shown themselves impotent. There
remains, however, a third expedient, which is not of a political
nature and which has at least the advantage of having never yet been
tried. It consists in the fulfilment of the divine will regardless of
consequences, without any cautious reservations of policy; quite simply
in love, forgiveness, the requital of evil with good; in mildness, in
non-resistance against evil, in freedom.... In a word, Tolstoy advises
the Czar to “let all the children out of the benches”; he counsels
anarchy--I am not using the word in a derogatory sense, but quite
objectively, to specify a definite social and political gospel of
salvation.
The Asiatic bias of this great Russian genius has already been shown
to be a mixture of various psychical elements: oriental passivity,
religious quietism, and an unmistakable tendency to Sarmatian wildness.
Here, in this anarchistic theory, it lies down with quite different
company: with the revolutionary ideals of western Europe, with the
educational and political conceptions of Rousseau and his pupil
Pestalozzi, in both of whom there is present the element of wildness,
the return to nature--in short, the anarchistic element in another
form and under other colours. Here, then, we are arrived at the common
factor in the education of our two protagonists--but with a difference.
On the educational side, Goethe fell away from his allegiance to
Rousseau. Pedagogic Rousseauianism, as preached and practised by its
founder, revolted him. Furiously, even desperately, he rejected it, and
the anarchical individualism of the revolutionary education.
Boisserée tells how Goethe expressed to him his distress on the
score of Pestalozzi and his system. For its original purpose and
in its original setting, where Pestalozzi had only the children of
the people in mind, the poor who lived in their isolated huts in
Switzerland and could not send their children to school, it might be
a capital idea. But it became the most destructive one in the world
so soon as it ceased to confine itself to elementary teaching and
went on to language, art, the general field of knowledge and power,
which of course presupposed a _previous tradition_.... And then
the insubordination this cursed kind of education aroused: look at
the impudence of the little school-urchins, who feel no awe of any
stranger, but rather put him in a fright instead. All respect gone,
everything done away with that makes human beings human beings in their
relations with each other. “What should I have been,” cried Goethe, “if
I had not always been obliged to show respect for others? And these
men, in their madness and frenzy, to reduce everything to terms of the
single individual and be simply gods of self-sufficiency! They think
to educate a nation which shall stand against the barbaric hordes,
just as soon as the latter shall have mastered the elementary tools of
understanding, which Pestalozzi has made it so very easy for them to
do.”
Tradition, reverence--which “makes human beings human beings in their
relations with each other”--conformity of the ego within a noble and
estimable community; do you not feel the nearness of the Pedagogic
Province? Let me recall a moment that dream so wise and splendid, at
once austere and blithe, in which can be traced much of the humanism of
the eighteenth century, much of the spirit of the _Zauberflöte_, of
Sarastro and the “moving toward good with one’s hand in a friend’s”;
and which at the same time contains so much that is new and bold, and,
humanly speaking, advanced that it cannot be called less revolutionary
than Tolstoy’s educational ideas. Only, of course, the anarchistic
flavour is utterly lacking; while its conception of humanity and
human dignity, culture and civilization, is so consonant with solemn
regulation and gradation, with such a pronounced sense of reverence, of
traditions, symbols, mysteries, and rhythm, with such a symmetrical,
almost choreographic restraint in its freedom, that I may be permitted
to call it statesmanlike in the best and finest sense, by way of
pointing the contrast to Tolstoy’s “letting the children out of the
benches.” However, the boys and youths of Goethe’s dream-province do
not sit glued to their benches either, at least we do not see them
thus. The basis of their education is quite in the Pestalozzan style:
it is husbandry. And their training goes forward in the open air,
work and play constantly accompanied by singing. We are told, quite
explicitly, what its essence is: “Wise men lead the boys to find out
themselves what is fitted for them; and shorten the by-ways into which
man will often too readily turn aside.” Every well-marked bent to a
pursuit is fostered and cultivated, for “to know and practise one thing
rightly gives higher culture than half-way performance of a hundred
things.” But if the education is thus adapted to the individual, it
is not thereby in the very least individualistic--so little, in fact,
that respect for convention is insisted upon, and regarded as a
conspicuous characteristic of genius; for genius understands that art
is called art just because it is not nature; and easily accommodates
itself to paying respect to the conventions, in the view that they
represent “an agreement arrived at by the superior elements of society,
whereby the essential and indispensable is regarded as the best.” That
is hostility toward the voluntary, with a vengeance; and the Head is
at pains to define and interpret it by a musical parallel. “Would a
musician,” he asks, “let a pupil make a wild attack on the keyboard
or invent intervals to please himself? No, the striking thing is that
nothing is left to the choice of the learner. The element in which
he is to work is fixed, the tool he must use put into his hand, even
the way he shall use it is prescribed--I mean the change of fingers,
in order that one get out of the other’s way and make the path plain
for its successor; until by dint of this regulated co-operation and
thus alone the impossible at last becomes the possible.”--It is not by
chance, I insist, that the Heads of the Province draw their parallel
from the field of music: is she not truly the most spirited symbol for
that regulated co-operation of manifold elements toward an end and goal
which is culturally noble and worthy of humanity? In the Pedagogic
Province song presides over all the activities, everything else is
linked with it and communicated by it. “The simplest pleasures as well
as the simplest tasks are animated and impressed by song; yes, even our
instruction in morals and religion is communicated in this wise.” Even
the elements of knowledge, reading, writing, reckoning, are derived
from song, note-writing, and putting text beneath, and from observing
the basic measures and notation--in short, as agriculture is the
natural, so music is the spiritual element of education, “for from it
level paths run out in all directions.”
Another great German and shaper of German destiny comes to mind here:
Luther’s view of music as an instrument of education was very like
Goethe’s. “_Musicam_,” he says, “I have always loved. One should
accustom youth to this art, for it makes fine, capable people. A
schoolmaster who cannot sing I will not look at.” And in the schools
under his influence there was almost as much singing as in the
Pedagogic Province--whereas no one would know whether they sang in
Tolstoy’s school or not. To the wanderer through the Pedagogic Province
it seems as though none of its inhabitants did anything of his own
power, but as though a mysterious spirit animated them through and
through, leading them on toward one single great goal. This spirit is
the spirit of music, of culture, of “regulated co-operation,” whereby
alone at length “the impossible”--that is to say, the state as work of
art--becomes possible; it is a spirit remote from and hostile to all
barbarism; one would like to be allowed to call it a German spirit.
The salutation in three degrees, whose meaning, the threefold
reverence, is kept secret from the boys themselves, because mystery
and respect for the mysterious is a moral and civilizing influence;
the insistence upon modesty and decorum; the lining up and standing
at attention of the young human being in face of the world, and
his honourable comradeship with his kind; the enhancing of his own
honour through the honours he renders; all this militarism so highly
imbued with the spirit and with art--how far it is from the rational
radicalism of Tolstoy’s Christianity, with its heart of wildness! Is
it anyway credible that, in essentials, a remarkable likeness subsists
between the educational conceptions of our two geniuses?
Tolstoy in all pious simplicity once declared that the world can
find salvation simply by no longer doing anything which does not
seem inherently reasonable: that is to say, anything which our whole
European world is doing today; for example, teaching the grammar of
dead languages. What finds utterance, what bursts forth, in this
polemic against the study of ancient tongues is the revolt of the
Russian people against humanistic civilization itself. Tolstoy’s
unclassic paganism stands revealed, his ethnic godhead, which,
according to Gorky, was not Olympian, but more like that of a Russian
god, “sitting on a maple throne, under a golden lime-tree.” Tolstoy’s
pedagogic writing betrays an extremely anti-humanistic, anti-literary,
anti-rhetorical conception of the relative importance of different
branches of study. He has anything but the traditional European
view of the importance of the discipline of reading and writing;
entertaining not the faintest humanistic fear of “analphabetism,”
but rather openly defending what to our way of thinking would almost
amount to a state of barbarism. “We see people,” he says, “who are
equipped with all the knowledge necessary for farming; who perfectly
comprehend all its bearings, though they can neither read nor write;
or capital military leaders, tradespeople, foremen, machine-overseers,
labourers, all people who got their training from life, not books,
and stored up large resources of information and reflection. On the
other hand we see people who can both read and write, but who have not
profited by this advantage to learn any new thing.” When he dwells
upon the conflict between the needs of the people and the learning
forced upon them by the ruling classes, he has in mind the fact that
the elementary schools are an outgrowth of the higher ones. First the
church school, then the higher education, then after that the primary
school--a false hierarchy, for it is false that the primary school,
instead of conforming to its own needs, should conform--only on a
smaller scale--to the demands of the higher education. His meaning is
clear. He finds the folk-school too literary, too much subordinated
to the classical ideal of education, not practical or vital enough,
not guided by the principle of training for a calling in life. But we
shall be mistaken in expecting from him any greater kindness for either
the system or the spirit of the higher institutions of learning. He
accuses them of being “entirely divorced from actual life.” He compares
the true education derived from life itself with that offered to the
academic student, and finds that the former produces men capable in
their calling, the latter merely “so-called people with a university
education--advanced, that is to say irritable, sickly liberals.” He
gives “Latin and rhetoric” another hundred years of life, not more,
and so much only for the reason that “when the medicine has once been
bought, one must take it.” The phrase betrays plainly enough his
attitude toward classical education, toward the traditional European
culture, toward humanism. It betrays at the same time his attitude
toward the west and civilization, his folk-hatred of all that is not of
the people, that is foreign, that comes from abroad, that has merely a
cultural value--in short, the anger of primitive Russia against Peter
the Great.
It is time we looked round in the Pedagogic Province for the place
where youth busies itself with the ancient tongues. And, after all, it
is rather a shock not to find it. Goethe is not such a barbarian as to
despise the study of language or languages, as a cultural instrument.
He calls it enthusiastically the most sensitive in the world, and
emphasizes its value as a civilizing agent, by having his imaginary
pupils take it in connexion with the rude tasks of stable-work; so
that, caring for and training animals, they do not become like animals
themselves. But the languages here are modern languages. The tongues of
various nations are studied in turn--but Latin and Greek, it will be
noted, are not in the curriculum.
Well, there are other things which are not expressly mentioned either.
But that precisely these subjects should be absent is after all rather
striking. Was Goethe a humanist, or was he not? In the first place,
his humanism was always of another and a broader kind than merely the
philological. And in the second place, the impress of a certain high
austerity lies upon all the regulations of the Pedagogic Province,
despite the Parnassian blitheness that reigned there. There is no doubt
that Goethe, in his consciously pedagogic period, felt, curiously
enough, toward the humanistic, Winkelmannian ideal of education much
as Tolstoy and Auerbach did about music: a moral severity against the
sybaritic, dilettante, the roving and ranging, sipping and changing,
which he considered the danger of the “universally human” ideal as
applied to pedagogy. He considered this danger more threatening
than the peril of specialization and its consequent narrowness and
impoverishment--the horrors of which we later comers, to be sure, have
learned to know. He espouses the cause of vocational against verbal
training, out of the same anti-literary tendency which we observed
in Tolstoy; sharing with him the conviction that human culture makes
sounder progress by the method of limitation; he is radical enough
to use the _Wanderjahre_ as a mouth-piece through which to shout
“_Narrenpossen_ (Stuff and nonsense)!” at the “universally human”
educational ideal and “all its works.” That is severe. But today, when
nobody any longer can live on his income, does it not sound like an
uncommonly clear-sighted prophecy when he declares: “Whoever from now
on does not take to either an art or a trade will have a hard time of
it”?
I have made no secret of my tendency to interpret the paganism of the
children of nature in a primarily ethnical sense. And I am greatly
strengthened by this astonishingly radical and decisive rejection, on
Goethe’s part, of a humane and literary education. Almost I might have
dared interpret that gruff “_Narrenpossen!_” as the revolt of Germanic
folkishness against the humanistic culture itself. I have every
warrant for asserting that Goethe would have fought like Tolstoy the
folly of offering watered scholarship to the people for education--a
folly by which one waters the people’s sense and spirit, debases and
insults, instead of, as one fondly imagines, elevating them! Goethe,
who in the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ advances--surreptitiously, “_weil die
Menge gleich verhöhnet_”--the reactionary and esoteric doctrine: “Bring
up the boys to be servants and the girls to be mothers, then all will
be well”: was he the man to advocate the breeding of “advanced, that
is to say irritable and sickly liberals”? And was there not perhaps
prophetic vision at work in the severity and the limitations of his
educational principles? Did his sense of time, like the Russian’s, give
“Latin and rhetoric” a limit of some hundred years of life? Strange
events in our Europe today incline one to regard his maxims in a
prophetic light.
The great revolution in Russia brought to the light of day--that
light which is so good at illuminating the _surface_ of things--the
western Marxism which had put its impress upon Tolstoy’s country. But
it must not blind us to the spectacle of the bolshevist revolution
as the end of an epoch: the epoch of Peter the Great, the western,
liberalizing, European epoch in the history of Russia, which now, with
this revolution, faces eastward once more. It was to no European idea
of progress that the Czar fell victim. In him Peter the Great was
murdered, and his fall opened to his people not the path toward Europe,
but the way home to Asia. But is there not also in western Europe,
precisely since the time of this crisis--whose prophet Leo Tolstoy
was, although Moscow sees it not--is there not also in western Europe
a feeling alive that not only for Russia, but for it, for us, for all
the world there is at hand the ending of an epoch: the bourgeois,
humanistic, liberal epoch, which was born at the Renaissance and
came to power with the French Revolution, and whose last convulsive
twitchings and manifestations of life we are now beholding? The
question is put today whether this Mediterranean, classic, humanistic
tradition is commensurate with humanity and thus coeval with it, or
whether it is only the intellectual expression and apanage of the
bourgeois liberal epoch and destined to perish with its passing.
Europe seems to have answered the question already. The anti-liberal
rebound is more than plain, it is palpable. It finds political
expression in a disgusted turning away from democracy and parliamentary
government, in an about-face toward dictatorship and terror, executed
with frowning brows. Italian fascism is the precise pendant to Russian
bolshevism; all its archaistic gesturings and mummery cannot disguise
its essential hostility to the humane. And on the Iberian peninsula,
where the destruction of the liberal system was still more obvious than
in Italy, things have taken the same course, even more decisively;
military dictatorship has been well established there for some time.
But, indeed, all over Europe--as a consequence of the war and a sign
of an anti-liberal temper--the waters of nationalism are mightily
swollen. The individual peoples of Europe display a turkey-cock
self-assertiveness, a furious self-deification, in striking contrast
to the poverty and prostration of the continent as a whole.
The spiritual destinies of France are remarkable indeed, and of
immediate importance to us Germans. In the first years after the war
no country seemed more confirmed in the bourgeois-classical tradition.
France seemed the one truly conservative country in all Europe. Far
from thinking of war as a new revolution, it was bent instead, after
the victory and on the basis of the victory, on seeing in it nothing
but the confirmation and the consummation of the old, the bourgeois
order of 1789. To such questions as the one I have raised above, France
made answer with tranquil irony. If Germany, she said, wanted to dream
apocalyptic dreams, let her do so by all means; for herself, she felt
very comfortable in her classical tradition. Once on the occasion of
an international exchange of ideas I had sought to get some of these
matters expressed; and I remember how a contributor to the French
official newspaper organ answered me that France had always been and
would always remain _solidement rationaliste et classique_.
But that was the voice of official, bourgeois, conservative France,
not the other France, loftier, young, intellectual, secretly astir.
Certainly, this new France is beginning to “dream apocalyptically”;
there is of late a good deal of reason to doubt that she feels as much
at home as she used to in her tradition. What M. Poincaré, who has no
better name for it, knows and hates as “communism” is nothing but the
process that is going on there of undermining his bourgeois, classical,
old-revolutionary France; the disintegration of the Latin conception
of civilization by the action of spiritual ferments which have filtered
in from the outside and are doing their work in the blood of the
youth--a new, anti-bourgeois, spiritual, and proletarian revolution;
and we in Germany think we have ground for hope that, if there are to
be atmospheric changes, we too may get a little more air to breathe.
For in France the interests of nationalism and of the humanistic
culture coincide, in so far as both are based upon the conviction of
the absolute supremacy of the Latin civilization and its mission of
world-domination as an abiding concern of humanity. Whereas a spirit of
European solidarity, and a certain readiness, however conditional, to
come to terms with Germany, is more likely to be found on the side of
the “communistic” new-revolutionary France, which is no longer quite so
sound on the score of its cultural Latinity.
Germany’s position, with reference to these phenomena to the west of
her, is a difficult and complicated one. For us Germans ourselves, and
for the world at large, it is highly important that she see it clearly
and recognize it for what it is. For in Germany too there exist the
two camps, a humanistic and a “communistic”; from which it follows
that two peoples may behave the same, culturally speaking, and reach
quite different results, and that there are circumstances under which
the pursuance of the same spiritual tendency may be the worst possible
method of arriving at political _rapprochement_.
I do not propose to dwell upon German fascism, nor upon the
circumstances, the quite comprehensible circumstances, of its origin.
It is enough to say that it is a racial religion, with antipathy
not only for international Judaism, but also, quite expressly, for
Christianity, as a humane influence; nor do its priests behave more
friendly toward the humanism of our classical literature. It is a pagan
folk-religion, a Wotan cult: it is, to be invidious--and I mean to be
invidious--romantic barbarism. It is only consistent in the cultural
and educational sphere, where it seeks to check the stream of classical
education, to the advantage of the primitive German heritage. And it
does not or it will not see what an unhappy pendant it thus furnishes
to the anti-Latinism of modern-minded France, and how very much it
plays into the hands of M. Poincaré, the communist-hater. To profess
paganism in Germany today, to worship Odin and hold feasts of the
solstice, to conduct oneself like a folk-barbarian, is to prove those
French patriots in the right who would like to erect on the Rhine the
breastwork of occidental civilization; it is asininely to compromise
the position of those Frenchmen who do not make such fine distinctions
between Latinity and barbarism, and who are interested in peace,
understanding, compromise, and a “gentleman’s agreement” with Germany.