ol thereby sacrifices 'classical education' and
the so-called 'formal education,' at one stroke, as the scientific man
and the cultured man belong to two different spheres which, though
coming together at times in the same individual, are never reconciled.

"If we compare all three of these would-be aims of the public school
with the actual facts to be observed in the present method of teaching
German, we see immediately what they really amount to in
practice,--that is to say, only to subterfuges for use in the fight
and struggle for existence and, often enough, mere means wherewith to
bewilder an opponent. For we are unable to detect any single feature
in this teaching of German which in any way recalls the example of
classical antiquity and its glorious methods of training in languages.
'Formal education,' however, which is supposed to be achieved by this
method of teaching German, has been shown to be wholly at the pleasure
of the 'free personality,' which is as good as saying that it is
barbarism and anarchy. And as for the preparation in science, which is
one of the consequences of this teaching, our Germanists will have to
determine, in all justice, how little these learned beginnings in
public schools have contributed to the splendour of their sciences,
and how much the personality of individual university professors has
done so.--Put briefly: the public school has hitherto neglected its
most important and most urgent duty towards the very beginning of all
real culture, which is the mother-tongue; but in so doing it has
lacked the natural, fertile soil for all further efforts at culture.
For only by means of stern, artistic, and careful discipline and
habit, in a language, can the correct feeling for the greatness of our
classical writers be strengthened. Up to the present their recognition
by the public schools has been owing almost solely to the doubtful
aesthetic hobbies of a few teachers or to the massive effects of
certain of their tragedies and novels. But everybody should, himself,
be aware of the difficulties of the language: he should have learnt
them from experience: after long seeking and struggling he must reach
the path our great poets trod in order to be able to realise how
lightly and beautifully they trod it, and how stiffly and swaggeringly
the others follow at their heels.

"Only by means of such discipline can the young man acquire that
physical loathing for the beloved and much-admired 'elega