for granted is attained to only by a
very limited number of men who complete it at a ripe age. Here
everybody without exception is regarded as gifted for literature and
considered as capable of holding opinions concerning the most
important questions and people, whereas the one aim which proper
education should most zealously strive to achieve would be the
suppression of all ridiculous claims to independent judgment, and the
inculcation upon young men of obedience to the sceptre of genius. Here
a pompous form of diction is taught in an age when every spoken or
written word is a piece of barbarism. Now let us consider, besides,
the danger of arousing the self-complacency which is so easily
awakened in youths; let us think how their vanity must be flattered
when they see their literary reflection for the first time in the
mirror. Who, having seen all these effects at _one_ glance, could any
longer doubt whether all the faults of our public, literary, and
artistic life were not stamped upon every fresh generation by the
system we are examining: hasty and vain production, the disgraceful
manufacture of books; complete want of style; the crude,
characterless, or sadly swaggering method of expression; the loss of
every aesthetic canon; the voluptuousness of anarchy and chaos--in
short, the literary peculiarities of both our journalism and our
scholarship.

"None but the very fewest are aware that, among many thousands,
perhaps only _one_ is justified in describing himself as literary, and
that all others who at their own risk try to be so deserve to be met
with Homeric laughter by all competent men as a reward for every
sentence they have ever had printed;--for it is truly a spectacle meet
for the gods to see a literary Hephaistos limping forward who would
pretend to help us to something. To educate men to earnest and
inexorable habits and views, in this respect, should be the highest
aim of all mental training, whereas the general _laisser aller_ of the
'fine personality' can be nothing else than the hall-mark of
barbarism. From what I have said, however, it must be clear that, at
least in the teaching of German, no thought is given to culture;
something quite different is in view,--namely, the production of the
afore-mentioned 'free personality.' And so long as German public
schools prepare the road for outrageous and irresponsible scribbling,
so long as they do not regard the immediate and practical discipline
of speaki