(_Delivered on the 5th of March 1872._)
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--Now that you have followed my tale up to this
point, and that we have made ourselves joint masters of the solitary,
remote, and at times abusive duologue of the philosopher and his
companion, I sincerely hope that you, like strong swimmers, are ready
to proceed on the second half of our journey, especially as I can
promise you that a few other marionettes will appear in the
puppet-play of my adventure, and that if up to the present you have
only been able to do little more than endure what I have been telling
you, the waves of my story will now bear you more quickly and easily
towards the end. In other words we have now come to a turning, and it
would be advisable for us to take a short glance backwards to see what
we think we have gained from such a varied conversation.
"Remain in your present position," the philosopher seemed to say to
his companion, "for you may cherish hopes. It is more and more clearly
evident that we have no educational institutions at all; but that we
ought to have them. Our public schools--established, it would seem,
for this high object--have either become the nurseries of a
reprehensible culture which repels the true culture with profound
hatred--_i.e._ a true, aristocratic culture, founded upon a few
carefully chosen minds; or they foster a micrological and sterile
learning which, while it is far removed from culture, has at least
this merit, that it avoids that reprehensible culture as well as the
true culture." The philosopher had particularly drawn his companion's
attention to the strange corruption which must have entered into the
heart of culture when the State thought itself capable of tyrannising
over it and of attaining its ends through it; and further when the
State, in conjunction with this culture, struggled against other
hostile forces as well as against _the_ spirit which the philosopher
ventured to call the "true German spirit." This spirit, linked to the
Greeks by the noblest ties, and shown by its past history to have been
steadfast and courageous, pure and lofty in its aims, its faculties
qualifying it for the high task of freeing modern man from the curse
of modernity--this spirit is condemned to live apart, banished from
its inheritance. But when its slow, painful tones of woe resound
through the desert of the present, then the overladen and gaily-decked
caravan of culture is pulled up short, horror-stricken. We must not
only astonish, but terrify--such was the philosopher's opinion: not to
fly shamefully away, but to take the offensive, was his advice; but he
especially counselled his companion not to ponder too anxiously over
the individual from whom, through a higher instinct, this aversion for
the present barbarism proceeded, "Let it perish: the Pythian god had
no difficulty in finding a new tripod, a second Pythia, so long, at
least, as the mystic cold vapours rose from the earth."
The philosopher once more began to speak: "Be careful to remember, my
friend," said he, "there are two things you must not confuse. A man
must learn a great deal that he may live and take part in the struggle
for existence; but everything that he as an individual learns and does
with this end in view has nothing whatever to do with culture. This
latter only takes its beginning in a sphere that lies far above the
world of necessity, indigence, and struggle for existence. The
question now is to what extent a man values his ego in comparison with
other egos, how much of his strength he uses up in the endeavour to
earn his living. Many a one, by stoically confining his needs within a
narrow compass, will shortly and easily reach the sphere in which he
may forget, and, as it were, shake off his ego, so that he can enjoy
perpetual youth in a solar system of timeless and impersonal things.
Another widens the scope and needs of his ego as much as possible, and
builds the mausoleum of this ego in vast proportions, as if he were
prepared to fight and conquer that terrible adversary, Time. In this
instinct also we may see a longing for immortality: wealth and power,
wisdom, presence of mind, eloquence, a flourishing outward aspect, a
renowned name--all these are merely turned into the means by which an
insatiable, personal will to live craves for new life, with which,
again, it hankers after an eternity that is at last seen to be
illusory.
"But even in this highest form of the ego, in the enhanced needs of
such a distended and, as it were, collective individual, true culture
is never touched upon; and if, for example, art is sought after, only
its disseminating and stimulating actions come into prominence, _i.e._
those which least give rise to pure and noble art, and most of all to
low and degraded forms of it. For in all his efforts, however great
and exceptional they seem to the onlooker, he never succeeds in
freeing himself from his own hankering and restless personality: that
illuminated, ethereal sphere where one may contemplate without the
obstruction of one's own personality continually recedes from him--and
thus, let him learn, travel, and collect as he may, he must always
live an exiled life at a remote distance from a higher life and from
true culture. For true culture would scorn to contaminate itself with
the needy and covetous individual; it well knows how to give the slip
to the man who would fain employ it as a means of attaining to
egoistic ends; and if any one cherishes the belief that he has firmly
secured it as a means of livelihood, and that he can procure the
necessities of life by its sedulous cultivation, then it suddenly
steals away with noiseless steps and an air of derisive mockery.[6]
"I will thus ask you, my friend, not to confound this culture, this
sensitive, fastidious, ethereal goddess, with that useful
maid-of-all-work which is also called 'culture,' but which is only
the intellectual servant and counsellor of one's practical
necessities, wants, and means of livelihood Every kind of training,
however, which holds out the prospect of bread-winning as its end and
aim, is not a training for culture as we understand the word; but
merely a collection of precepts and directions to show how, in the
struggle for existence, a man may preserve and protect his own person.
It may be freely admitted that for the great majority of men such a
course of instruction is of the highest importance; and the more
arduous the struggle is the more intensely must the young man strain
every nerve to utilise his strength to the best advantage.
"But--let no one think for a moment that the schools which urge him on
to this struggle and prepare him for it are in any way seriously to be
considered as establishments of culture. They are institutions which
teach one how to take part in the battle of life; whether they promise
to turn out civil servants, or merchants, or officers, or wholesale
dealers, or farmers, or physicians, or men with a technical training.
The regulations and standards prevailing at such institutions differ
from those in a true educational institution; and what in the latter
is permitted, and even freely held out as often as possible, ought to
be considered as a criminal offence in the former.
"Let me give you an example. If you wish to guide a young man on the
path of true culture, beware of interrupting his naive, confident,
and, as it were, immediate and personal relationship with nature. The
woods, the rocks, the winds, the vulture, the flowers, the butterfly,
the meads, the mountain slopes, must all speak to him in their own
language; in them he must, as it were, come to know himself again in
countless reflections and images, in a variegated round of changing
visions; and in this way he will unconsciously and gradually feel the
metaphysical unity of all things in the great image of nature, and at
the same time tranquillise his soul in the contemplation of her
eternal endurance and necessity. But how many young men should be
permitted to grow up in such close and almost personal proximity to
nature! The others must learn another truth betimes: how to subdue
nature to themselves. Here is an end of this naive metaphysics; and
the physiology of plants and animals, geology, inorganic chemistry,
force their devotees to view nature from an altogether different
standpoint. What is lost by this new point of view is not only a
poetical phantasmagoria, but the instinctive, true, and unique point
of view, instead of which we have shrewd and clever calculations, and,
so to speak, overreachings of nature. Thus to the truly cultured man
is vouchsafed the inestimable benefit of being able to remain
faithful, without a break, to the contemplative instincts of his
childhood, and so to attain to a calmness, unity, consistency, and
harmony which can never be even thought of by a man who is compelled
to fight in the struggle for existence.
"You must not think, however, that I wish to withhold all praise from
our primary and secondary schools: I honour the seminaries where boys
learn arithmetic and master modern languages, and study geography and
the marvellous discoveries made in natural science. I am quite
prepared to say further that those youths who pass through the better
class of secondary schools are well entitled to make the claims put
forward by the fully-fledged public school boy; and the time is
certainly not far distant when such pupils will be everywhere freely
admitted to the universities and positions under the government, which
has hitherto been the case only with scholars from the public
schools--of our present public schools, be it noted![7] I cannot,
however, refrain from adding the melancholy reflection: if it be true
that secondary and public schools are, on the whole, working so
heartily in common towards the same ends, and differ from each other
only in such a slight degree, that they may take equal rank before the
tribunal of the State, then we completely lack another kind of
educational institutions: those for the development of culture! To say
the least, the secondary schools cannot be reproached with this; for
they have up to the present propitiously and honourably followed up
tendencies of a lower order, but one nevertheless highly necessary. In
the public schools, however, there is very much less honesty and very
much less ability too; for in them we find an instinctive feeling of
shame, the unconscious perception of the fact that the whole
institution has been ignominiously degraded, and that the sonorous
words of wise and apathetic teachers are contradictory to the dreary,
barbaric, and sterile reality. So there are no true cultural
institutions! And in those very places where a pretence to culture is
still kept up, we find the people more hopeless, atrophied, and
discontented than in the secondary schools, where the so-called
'realistic' subjects are taught! Besides this, only think how immature
and uninformed one must be in the company of such teachers when one
actually misunderstands the rigorously defined philosophical
expressions 'real' and 'realism' to such a degree as to think them the
contraries of mind and matter, and to interpret 'realism' as 'the road
to knowledge, formation, and mastery of reality.'
"I for my own part know of only two exact contraries: _institutions
for teaching culture and institutions for teaching how to succeed in
life_. All our present institutions belong to the second class; but I
am speaking only of the first."
About two hours went by while the philosophically-minded couple
chatted about such startling questions. Night slowly fell in the
meantime; and when in the twilight the philosopher's voice had sounded
like natural music through the woods, it now rang out in the profound
darkness of the night when he was speaking with excitement or even
passionately; his tones hissing and thundering far down the valley,
and reverberating among the trees and rocks. Suddenly he was silent:
he had just repeated, almost pathetically, the words, "we have no true
educational institutions; we have no true educational institutions!"
when something fell down just in front of him--it might have been a
fir-cone--and his dog barked and ran towards it. Thus interrupted, the
philosopher raised his head, and suddenly became aware of the
darkness, the cool air, and the lonely situation of himself and his
companion. "Well! What are we about!" he ejaculated, "it's dark. You
know whom we were expecting here; but he hasn't come. We have waited
in vain; let us go."
* * * * *
I must now, ladies and gentlemen, convey to you the impressions
experienced by my friend and myself as we eagerly listened to this
conversation, which we heard distinctly in our hiding-place. I have
already told you that at that place and at that hour we had intended
to hold a festival in commemoration of something: and this something
had to do with nothing else than matters concerning educational
training, of which we, in our own youthful opinions, had garnered a
plentiful harvest during our past life. We were thus disposed to
remember with gratitude the institution which we had at one time
thought out for ourselves at that very spot in order, as I have
already mentioned, that we might reciprocally encourage and watch over
one another's educational impulses. But a sudden and unexpected light
was thrown on all that past life as we silently gave ourselves up to
the vehement words of the philosopher. As when a traveller, walking
heedlessly across unknown ground, suddenly puts his foot over the edge
of a cliff, so it now seemed to us that we had hastened to meet the
great danger rather than run away from it. Here at this spot, so
memorable to us, we heard the warning: "Back! Not another step! Know
you not whither your footsteps tend, whither this deceitful path is
luring you?"
It seemed to us that we now knew, and our feeling of overflowing
thankfulness impelled us so irresistibly towards our earnest
counsellor and trusty Eckart, that both of us sprang up at the same
moment and rushed towards the philosopher to embrace him. He was just
about to move off, and had already turned sideways when we rushed up
to him. The dog turned sharply round and barked, thinking doubtless,
like the philosopher's companion, of an attempt at robbery rather than
an enraptured embrace. It was plain that he had forgotten us. In a
word, he ran away. Our embrace was a miserable failure when we did
overtake him; for my friend gave a loud yell as the dog bit him, and
the philosopher himself sprang away from me with such force that we
both fell. What with the dog and the men there was a scramble that
lasted a few minutes, until my friend began to call out loudly,
parodying the philosopher's own words: "In the name of all culture and
pseudo-culture, what does the silly dog want with us? Hence, you
confounded dog; you uninitiated, never to be initiated; hasten away
from us, silent and ashamed!" After this outburst matters were cleared
up to some extent, at any rate so far as they could be cleared up in
the darkness of the wood. "Oh, it's you!" ejaculated the philosopher,
"our duellists! How you startled us! What on earth drives you to jump
out upon us like this at such a time of the night?"
"Joy, thankfulness, and reverence," said we, shaking the old man by
the hand, whilst the dog barked as if he understood, "we can't let you
go without telling you this. And if you are to understand everything
you must not go away just yet; we want to ask you about so many things
that lie heavily on our hearts. Stay yet awhile; we know every foot of
the way and can accompany you afterwards. The gentleman you expect may
yet turn up. Look over yonder on the Rhine: what is that we see so
clearly floating on the surface of the water as if surrounded by the
light of many torches? It is there that we may look for your friend, I
would even venture to say that it is he who is coming towards you with
all those lights."
And so much did we assail the surprised old man with our entreaties,
promises, and fantastic delusions, that we persuaded the philosopher
to walk to and fro with us on the little plateau, "by learned lumber
undisturbed," as my friend added.
"Shame on you!" said the philosopher, "if you really want to quote
something, why choose Faust? However, I will give in to you, quotation
or no quotation, if only our young companions will keep still and not
run away as suddenly as they made their appearance, for they are like
will-o'-the-wisps; we are amazed when they are there and again when
they are not there."