s of such eager
teachers. It is in this department that the greatest number of deepest
deceptions occur, and whence misunderstandings are inadvertently
spread. In German public schools I have never yet found a trace of
what might really be called 'classical education,' and there is
nothing surprising in this when one thinks of the way in which these
institutions have emancipated themselves from German classical writers
and the discipline of the German language. Nobody reaches antiquity by
means of a leap into the dark, and yet the whole method of treating
ancient writers in schools, the plain commentating and paraphrasing of
our philological teachers, amounts to nothing more than a leap into
the dark.

"The feeling for classical Hellenism is, as a matter of fact, such an
exceptional outcome of the most energetic fight for culture and
artistic talent that the public school could only have professed to
awaken this feeling owing to a very crude misunderstanding. In what
age? In an age which is led about blindly by the most sensational
desires of the day, and which is not aware of the fact that, once that
feeling for Hellenism is roused, it immediately becomes aggressive and
must express itself by indulging in an incessant war with the
so-called culture of the present. For the public school boy of to-day,
the Hellenes as Hellenes are dead: yes, he gets some enjoyment out of
Homer, but a novel by Spielhagen interests him much more: yes, he
swallows Greek tragedy and comedy with a certain relish, but a
thoroughly modern drama, like Freitag's 'Journalists,' moves him in
quite another fashion. In regard to all ancient authors he is rather
inclined to speak after the manner of the aesthete, Hermann Grimm, who,
on one occasion, at the end of a tortuous essay on the Venus of Milo,
asks himself: 'What does this goddess's form mean to me? Of what use
are the thoughts she suggests to me? Orestes and OEdipus, Iphigenia
and Antigone, what have they in common with my heart?'--No, my dear
public school boy, the Venus of Milo does not concern you in any way,
and concerns your teacher just as little--and that is the misfortune,
that is the secret of the modern public school. Who will conduct you
to the land of culture, if your leaders are blind and assume the
position of seers notwithstanding? Which of you will ever attain to a
true feeling for the sacred seriousness of art, if you are
systematically spoiled, and taught to stutter indepen