nce' of style
of our newspaper manufacturers and novelists, and for the 'ornate
style' of our literary men; by it alone is he irrevocably elevated at
a stroke above a whole host of absurd questions and scruples, such,
for instance, as whether Auerbach and Gutzkow are really poets, for
his disgust at both will be so great that he will be unable to read
them any longer, and thus the problem will be solved for him. Let no
one imagine that it is an easy matter to develop this feeling to the
extent necessary in order to have this physical loathing; but let no
one hope to reach sound aesthetic judgments along any other road than
the thorny one of language, and by this I do not mean philological
research, but self-discipline in one's mother-tongue.

"Everybody who is in earnest in this matter will have the same sort of
experience as the recruit in the army who is compelled to learn
walking after having walked almost all his life as a dilettante or
empiricist. It is a hard time: one almost fears that the tendons are
going to snap and one ceases to hope that the artificial and
consciously acquired movements and positions of the feet will ever be
carried out with ease and comfort. It is painful to see how awkwardly
and heavily one foot is set before the other, and one dreads that one
may not only be unable to learn the new way of walking, but that one
will forget how to walk at all. Then it suddenly become noticeable
that a new habit and a second nature have been born of the practised
movements, and that the assurance and strength of the old manner of
walking returns with a little more grace: at this point one begins to
realise how difficult walking is, and one feels in a position to laugh
at the untrained empiricist or the elegant dilettante. Our 'elegant'
writers, as their style shows, have never learnt 'walking' in this
sense, and in our public schools, as our other writers show, no one
learns walking either. Culture begins, however, with the correct
movement of the language: and once it has properly begun, it begets
that physical sensation in the presence of 'elegant' writers which is
known by the name of 'loathing.'

"We recognise the fatal consequences of our present public schools, in
that they are unable to inculcate severe and genuine culture, which
should consist above all in obedience and habituation; and that, at
their best, they much more often achieve a result by stimulating and
kindling scientific tendencies, is