The Schoolmaster
George Burman Foster
Thehistory of the world has not known a greater movement than that which seized the hearts of men when the old culture was borne to its grave,and a new fresh Spring-life,—the Christ-life, as it came to be called,—of humanity, welled up from hidden and mysterious sources of power. In the commerce of thought diverse folk-spirits were cross-fertilized and bounds once held to be insurmountable were transcended as vision grew wider. Customs came to be more human. Man himself grew greater, deeper, freer. Man learned to practice virtues which hitherto he had hated as vices: mercifulness, meekness, peaceableness. Man prayed to a new God who made his sun to shine upon the evil and the good. He evercreated sacreder names for his God. Taking his cue from the adorable will of this new God he framed ever more earnest and more sacred rules of life. These were radical and revolutionary novelties to the old culture, which speedily scented the dangers menacing it, and as speedily dispatched executioners to the rescue. In the language of its old theology, the language of St. Augustine, this was called the war of the Kingdom of the World against the Kingdom of God. Any well-informed scholar can recall what were said to be the hindrances which the Kingdom of God had at first to overcome, and how today these hindrances still offer the same resistance; degenerate paganism, with its powers of unbelief, and with its supremacy of the “flesh”; judaism, apostate from God, with its priests and scribes.
It is not within the scope of my task to inquire how far this traditionalschemaof the upheavals at the tumultuous beginnings of our era coincide with the facts. Only one consideration concerns me at this time, and that one is not open to question: change as the phenomena of history may, thelawsof those phenomena remain ever the same. Accordingly, even the resistances which time’s new unfolding life has to surmount, ever return—usually under a changed name, indeed,—and they will continue to do so as long as there is a history of human culture in the life of the world.
Passing on, now, to speak of the forces which the most modern prophet of a new culture,Friedrich Nietzsche, looks upon as the most grievous hindrances to anew kind of man, we shall surely expect to see first of all, quite other faces than those which the pious fathers of the old church saw in the foes of thecivitas die; still, we shall re-discover, significantly enough, many an old acquaintance behind the strange re-modeled mask. As in that old day, so in ours, we shall perceive in these foes of a new life, nothing of their hostility to life. In part, they appear quite harmless; in part, they are the universally dined and wined celebrities of the day at whom the masses stare as the special pioneers of our culture, and in whom the masses applaud the bearers and promoters of the best achievements of our culture. It would be certainly a very one-sided and unhistorical way of looking at things were we to hold those particular individuals, who did duty in the olden days in synagogues of the scribe’s learning, primarily responsible for the warfare which ancient Christianity had to sustain against the dominant religious parties, especially against the scribes and their followers. The war was not waged againstpersons, but against asystem. The synagogue was theschoolof the Jews; the scribes were themastersin that school. Viewed from this side, Christianity seemed to be rebellion against the authority of the school, and an emancipation of humanity from the influence which the toasted masters of the school exercised over spirits.
Approaching the problem, then, as to how far such an emancipation would be serviceable today, one need scarcely say that one does not at all have in mind the institutions which, in a narrower sense, we now have come to call “schools.” As, for broad gauge philosophers, the concept priesthood is by no means identical with a definite office, the so-calledclerical office, so what we understand by school and its masters, in Nietzsche’s sense, embraces a much wider circle than we are wont to think. There are schoolmasters in all vocations and callings and positions, not alone among scholars, but also among artists, politicians, laborers and merchants. We find them in the household and in the nursery; for schoolmaster-ism is acertain kind of spirit, and it is this kind of spirit which, under various names, Nietzsche pursues with his bitterest scorn and ridicule; which he stigmatizes as the most perilous hindrance in the path of the new culture.
We modern men must concede that Nietzsche is right at this point; that mastery on the part of “school” signifies decay, stuntedness, of the very human essence itself.
School givesknowledge. In all knowledge, man confronts nature. Man elaborates nature in his thoughts, and thus lifts himselfabovenature. With his rules, he becomes master of nature. But, now, if a man abides in his school, a time comes, irremediably, when he is estranged from nature, estranged from life. His knowledge grows, indeed, his world of thought enlarges; but the “thoughts” which he calls his “knowledge” narrow and cramp him! The more he learns to work exclusively with his thoughts, the more he mislearns whence he derives his thoughts. He thinks about things, but he no longer finds his way into things, right into the innermost life of things. He thinksafter, notwith, not before. He thinks the alien, not his own. He knows names, not souls. Yes, life is so great, so infinite; and the school, our knowledge of life, is so paltry, so limited! Once man stood with his soul in this big wide world. Intimations of its abysses, unfathomable and awful, haunted him. Once man felt his hot cheeks fanned by the breezes of an eternal life of the world, by a divine breath that breathed and blew through the world. Once on some calm crest where mountain kissed sky, one of those blissful moments came over him when he felt himself so small, so great, so alone, so companioned,—inwardly seized by the miracle and mystery of life surrounding him, pervading him, at once bowing him down and lifting him up. Now all this is changed. Now he hears voices, loud, raucous, zealous, parading their wisdom as regards this august wealth of God. They speak, these voices, so wisely and cleverly, concerning that which no man’s wisdom and sagacity has ever plumbed. They out-trump each other with their oceanic learnedness. But once yet again let the soul take a deep breath, and cry, “I am a man, not a scholar. I dare to be a man, not a knower, the masters of the school smother and deaden me with their science of the sublime and free world of the deep and the divine and the eternal,”—let the soul that “thought” has kept fromseeingandhearingandfeeling, so cry, and how childish, how ridiculously petty, how weak and pathological, will all schoolmasterism come to seem!
Nature is alsoArt, genuine, true art. It is an inner nature, a soul-nature, a soul-life. This art-life which gushes forth like a spring from secret depths, this enraptures the heart glowing with Dionysiac enthusiasm,and steals over men like sweet images of a dream, which will not fade even from his waking soul. Then it sings in us in a wonderful way, in an unheard-of manner,—in jubilant bliss, aye, in heartbreaking lamentations, longing for death! Life smites the strings of our soul, life itself, and makes them resound in secret and hidden depths. It is this rich, overflowing life which mirrors all its colorful magnificence in the soul, and reveals to us its height and depth in dazzling light or midnight darkness.
But even here, here most of all perhaps, even out of this art men have made a “school” and a schoolmasterism. Men try to measure according to rules—measure what most of all mocks rules. Rules for poetry, rules for song, rules for color, for light and shade, rules for the creation (copying?) of pencil and brush and chisel and square, rules, rules, ever rules—until one would think that art was for the sake of the rules of the school, and notvice versa. There was a time—and for the matter of that, there still is—when the born master had a slim chance and short shrift among the “learned” masters. Who did not know a “school” by whose name he could proudly name himself, thus guaranteeing his art to be artistic; who beheld the world with his own free eyes, unfitted with spectacles by some one of the “masters”; who with listening soul eavesdropped life, asking never what was “written in the law” of art’s scribes and pharisees upon the subject, let him set his house in order, for he must die and not live, at least he must be cast out of the synagogue, excluded from the artists’ guild, he must expect the “masters” to pounce upon him—at least with the hoary weapons of obloquy and ridicule and ostracism and starvation—until all the joy has gone out of his life.Vers libre—did not, does not, the “master” antecedently and dogmatically know how “rotten” that is? Ah, but what if that attitude of the finishedness and finality of art, especially in its form, should replace art and artists with schools and scholars? Are we to have only “masters” of schools, or alsoMasterswho belong to no school, and who cannot be tagged as scholars of another “master.”
Nature, life, this is alsoreligion, genuine, true religion at least. We have not created it in us yet—this overpowering longing and striving to surrender ourselves to another, a higher. To be sure, we have received it as a heritage from our mother. At first a flood of love and longing flowed through our souls from her eyes and heart. But her gift to us was in turn a gift to her. In that gift all love’s beams focused, gathered together, from all the ends of the earth and the eternities. In that gift all life was wedded to the waking spirit—all life, sleeping and dreaming, found its existence. And as this life awoke in us, we called it “inspiration,” we felt that a Stronger had come upon us, against which we could do nothing; we called it happiness, heart, love, God—the name was noise and sound—and yet it was all feeling, veiled in heavenly glow.
Then the name became everything. On this name scribes exercisedtheir wits. They wrote it in their books and taught it in their schools. Then the schoolmasters became the lords of faith. What was once original life was now to be taught and learned—forgetting that while the psychology, or history, or philosophy of religion can be taught,religioncannot be, any more than you can teach grass to grow, or flowers to bloom, or birds to sing, or lovers to love. So, religion came to be a thing of grades, like the “grades” of a school—the more grades, the more religion! At last the scholar in turn becomes a master! Verily, nowhere in the world has schoolmasterism done so much harm as in religion. No scoff of the scoffer, and no sword of the executioner, has dealt so deep and deadly wounds upon the religious life, as has the folly of the wise and the understanding who press their school knowledge and their school system upon men as religious faith, and so overspin the entrance to the garden of the heart with their spider-webs that no one can find the path any more to its bloom and fragrance.
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 innovels 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 havemen, 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 altogetherimitationalinstitutions,afterwhich 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 isourfault, 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 thatour 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.