t to be merely a nursery for
science, but, above all, the actual consecrated home of all higher and
nobler culture.

"Of the many necessary measures which this change called into being,
some of the most important have been transferred with lasting success
to the modern regulations of public schools: the most important of
all, however, did not succeed--the one demanding that the teacher,
also, should be consecrated to the new spirit, so that the aim of the
public school has meanwhile considerably departed from the original
plan laid down by Wolf, which was the cultivation of the pupil. The
old estimate of scholarship and scholarly culture, as an absolute,
which Wolf overcame, seems after a slow and spiritless struggle rather
to have taken the place of the culture-principle of more recent
introduction, and now claims its former exclusive rights, though not
with the same frankness, but disguised and with features veiled. And
the reason why it was impossible to make public schools fall in with
the magnificent plan of classical culture lay in the un-German, almost
foreign or cosmopolitan nature of these efforts in the cause of
education: in the belief that it was possible to remove the native
soil from under a man's feet and that he should still remain standing;
in the illusion that people can spring direct, without bridges, into
the strange Hellenic world, by abjuring German and the German mind in
general.

"Of course one must know how to trace this Germanic spirit to its lair
beneath its many modern dressings, or even beneath heaps of ruins; one
must love it so that one is not ashamed of it in its stunted form, and
one must above all be on one's guard against confounding it with what
now disports itself proudly as 'Up-to-date German culture.' The German
spirit is very far from being on friendly times with this up-to-date
culture: and precisely in those spheres where the latter complains of
a lack of culture the real German spirit has survived, though perhaps
not always with a graceful, but more often an ungraceful, exterior. On
the other hand, that which now grandiloquently assumes the title of
'German culture' is a sort of cosmopolitan aggregate, which bears the
same relation to the German spirit as Journalism does to Schiller or
Meyerbeer to Beethoven: here the strongest influence at work is the
fundamentally and thoroughly un-German civilisation of France, which
is aped neither with talent nor with taste, and the imit