To be sure, objections to all this bristle. Is not the blessing of the school—so this or that objector might urge—so manifest that, on account of the blessing, all its evils might be very well put up with? The school makes the unintelligible intelligible. The school widens the bed of the spiritual life, so that its stream no longer devastatingly overflows its banks. The school builds canals everywhere, that the watering of the land of the human may be as extensive as possible, and the spirit of life be universally fertilized with the achievements of civilization and culture. We may thank our schools that all the world today has learned to read and write. And, for him who can read and write, the way is open to all the treasures of the human spirit—and where is there a civilization that equals ours in the effort to provide schools corresponding to all the spheres of life? Ought we not to bless such effort, promote and support it, with all the means in our power?
Now, looking upon life more seriously and profoundly, we shall not be able to show that the censor of these schools is entirely in the wrong, when he declares that the spirit is perverted and corrupted by them. School is model, is a uniform of the spirit which all individuals are to don and wear. Hence as this school business spreads there is a dying-out of spiritual originality, a monotony of manufactured personality.
Everything that belongs to the average is best conserved by school. The most proper average man is always the best scholar. But all that is above or below the average—this is often the best in a man—decays and finds no nourishment. We have but to look at the whole state of our literature in this country, to see what has become of the art of writing, of authorship, in an age bursting with pride over everybody’s being able to read and write. All the nameless insipidity and thoughtlessness written and printed today, all the mendacity and perversity of feeling, which in novels find their way into hut and salon alike might be happily spared us did not everybody think he could read, and especially write! There is no denying it, a serious question stares at us in the name of the school today. This question is above all questions of school-reform, which seem so important to us, for the improved, nay, the best school remains just—school! And something of schoolmasterism and scholasticism cleaves to school! And therefore Nietzsche was its so bitter foe because he would have men, men who spoke and thought and felt powerfully and not as the scribes! Nietzsche was its foe because he would have among men, personalities, individualities, diversities, not uniformity and identity of spiritual life.
If, now, we have rightly comprehended the force of this censure against the school and its master, we are already in the way to overcome and to heal this school malady. The malady does not inhere in the school as such, but in the false evaluation which we of today attribute to it, and in the dominion which the school exercises over human spirits, by virtue of this false appraisal. We think we can read if we have learned to read in school. But this learning to read has yet to begin! Whoever does not begin it his own self, will never truly learn it at all. We call our schools educational institutions and yet they are altogether imitational institutions, after which the true human education first begins. We do not think of this, that this man whose knowledge still tastes of his school, whose art shows his school, is still stuck in his school, and has not made proper use of his school—which is to apply it; especially to overcome it! Or, rather we think still less! We rest on the laurels of our school, and if we won them we think that we have carried off the warrior’s prize of life. But it is our fault, not the school’s, if the school narrows rather than broadens our vision; if it binds us to its rules instead of releasing us from them. Where are the men who still learn after school, nay, who first begin then to learn what after all is the main thing of all learning—how they can become greater, freer men, independent personalities? How does it come that all stirring and moving of the modern spirit is at the same time an insurrection against some kind of school? How does it come that all creative, path-breaking spirits can begin to create, to live, only when they have snapped the fetters of some school? And how does it come that great discoveries of unknown islands of the human have never been made within, but only without, the schools? Most of all, how does it come that a Christ can speak with power only when he has learned not to speak as the scribes and schoolmasters? The answer in every case is that we are accustomed to expect of the school what, according to its very nature, it cannot do, namely: to give life, to create life. Therefore, it is all-important that we keep the path open, wide open, to the fountain of life in the abyss of the human heart, in the unfathomableness of the world, so that we too may learn to speak with power and not as the scribes; so that our schools may not be diseases to be overcome, for many never overcome during an entire life—but a staff with which we may learn to walk until we shall need staff no more, because our feet have grown strong to bear us on our way during the brief years of our pilgrimage.
My Friend, the Incurable
VI.
Choleric Comments on Cacophonies
On the G String
We are sailing in a gondola along exotic shores. Crystal castles, dewy meadows, weeping cypresses, glowing craters.... We pass through the dreamy regions of Shelley and Keats, we envisage the gigantic cosmos of Shakespeare, of Dante, of Milton, of Goethe, we perceive in a haze the purple-crimson crucifixion of Nietzsche, the cruel gloom of Dostoyevsky, the dizzy abysses of Poe, the all-human chaos of Whitman....
We sail on—but ah, our picturesque gondolier! He is so excited, so restless, so loud—we are forced to turn our eyes from the grandiose landscape and follow bewildered our conscientious cicerone. In his anxiety lest we fail to notice the passing “places of importance,” our industrious guide shrieks and yells, wriggles and gesticulates, beats upon our senses, pricks and tickles, and all this he performs to the accompaniment of a mellow mandolin, so sweet, so touching, so exasperating.
We are weary.