Part 9
Goethe somewhere calls Wilhelm Meister his “beloved likeness (_sein geliebtes Ebenbild_).” In what sense? Does a man love his own likeness? Unless he suffer from hopeless self-complacency, should not the sight of it make him aware of his own shortcomings? Yes, of course, it should. And this very awareness of a need of improvement and completion, this consciousness of his own ego as a task, a moral, æsthetic, cultural obligation, becomes objective in the hero of the autobiographical novel, the epic of education. To this personage the creative ego acts as guide, philosopher, and friend--at once identical and superior--to an extent that makes Goethe once refer to his Wilhelm as “a poor dog.” The phrase bespeaks a parental tenderness, not only toward the poor fellow in his _dunklen Drange_ whom he created in his own image, but also toward himself. And thus, at the very heart of the autobiographic pathos there takes place the turn for the pedagogic. And this process of objectivation goes on in Wilhelm Meister through the introduction of the society of the Turm, which takes in hand his destiny and human development and leads him in mysterious ways. More and more plainly in the _Lehrjahre_ does the original idea of a personally conducted adventure in self-improvement tend toward the pedagogic; until in the _Travels_ it issues entirely in the social, yes, even in the political. At the end of the _Faust_ there is an unmistakable flashing-up in poetry of the same vision of the union of self and society in the educational process. For the Enlightened, who on earth “_immer strebend sich bemüht_”, is received on high by the youthful saved, who sing:
“_Wir wurden früh entfernt Von Lebechören; Doch dieser hat gelernt, Er wird uns lehren._”
Nobody has ever loved his own ego, nobody was ever egocentric, in the sense of conceiving of his own ego as a cultural task and toiling early and late in pursuance of it, without reaping, almost as though by accident, educational influence in the outer world, and the joy and dignity of a leader and former of youth. The harvest never comes save at the height of life, and the moment of his realization of it is the sublime moment in the life of the productive human being. He never foresees, or even suspects, the moment beforehand. The autobiographical “poor dog,” with his mind from his youth up wholly on the difficulties of ploughing his own furrow, or, in the religious phrase, on the saving and justification of his own soul, will not have imagined he can teach anything, to improve or to convert men. Yet the day comes when, still incredulous, still astonished, he realizes that he has been teaching while he learned--shaping, guiding, leading, training, putting his own stamp on youth, by the power of words, by that lofty instrument of culture which is Eros-filled and binds the hearts of men. And from the day of his realization this knowledge possesses his whole life with a certainty, a creative bliss which leaves far behind it all ordinary human joys of love and fatherhood--just as the life of the mind is wont to exceed all personal and sensual things in value, beauty, and splendour.
* * * * *
“I am reading Goethe. My mind teems,” Tolstoy wrote in his journal at the beginning of the sixties. He was then a man of some thirty years and had not long returned to Russia and begun his work as a preaching and practising pedagogue. What was he reading? Was it contact with German idealism and humanism that made his mind so to “teem”? It was an alien sphere to him. For in Tolstoy (otherwise than in Goethe), the origin of the pedagogic impulse was immediately social and ethical. A man of parts and attainments, said he, must share with those who lack such blessings before he can derive pleasure from them himself. The motive seems _a poor one_ to me; rationalizing and humanitarian, like all the conscious thought of the great artist just then, I find it deeply inferior to the beautiful humanity of Goethe, in whom the social ideal was an organic outgrowth of the cultural and educational. But what Tolstoy thought was usually smaller than what he was. And to come back to our starting-point: what was it made his mind “teem” when he read Goethe and at the same time set to work as single-handed schoolmaster and founder of a primary school to put into practice the pedagogic ideas that rumbled in his belly?
Or, rather, to experiment with them. For he had made up his mind to settle, by actual experiment, what it was that the people, and in particular youth, wanted to be taught; it had not been settled, and that it had to be settled was his primary pedagogical thesis. “The people,” he said, “this most interested party in the whole situation, party and judge in one, listens quietly to our more or less ingenious exposition as to the best way of preparing and presenting its mental fodder. It is not disturbed; for it perfectly knows that in the great business of its mental development it will never take a false step, or accept anything that is false; and that all efforts to force it into paths unsuited to it, for instance German paths, will be like water on a duck’s back.” One must recognize, Tolstoy declares in writing and controversy, that the German type of school is a desirable one; that is a fact for which history vouches. But, even so, one may as a Russian hesitate to enter the lists in favour of a primary school which does not yet exist there. What historical argument can be brought for the assertion that Russian schools must be like those in the rest of Europe? The people, he says, need education, and every human being seeks it unconsciously. The more highly cultivated classes, society, and government officials, seek to extend the benefits of their knowledge and to educate the less educated masses. One would suppose that such a concurrence of the needs of both classes, the giving as well as the receiving, would suffice. But no. The masses steadily oppose all efforts made in their behalf to educate them, so that these are often entirely futile. Whose is the fault? Which is more justified: the opposition, or the system against which it is directed? Must the opposition be broken or the system altered? The latter, Tolstoy decides, is the case. “Shall we not,” he asks, “confess honourably and openly that we do not, cannot, know what the needs of the coming generations will be; but that we feel none the less bound to investigate? That we will not charge the masses with ignorance because they will not accept our education; but rather accuse ourselves of both ignorance and arrogance if we go on trying to educate them on our own lines? Let us at last cease to see hostility in the resistance of the people to our system; and find in it the expression of the people’s will, which alone should guide us. Let us at last accept the fact, so clearly evinced by the whole history of pedagogics, that if the educating class are to know what is good and what bad, the class to be educated must have full power to register dissatisfaction, and opportunity to reject a system which they instinctively find unsatisfying; that, in short, _freedom_ is the sole criterion of educational methods.”
“The sole criterion of education is freedom, the sole method experience, experimentation.” This is Tolstoy’s first and highest pedagogic maxim. According to him, the school should be at once a means of education and an experiment performed on the rising generation, an experiment productive of ever new results. It should, in other words, be an educational laboratory, where the experiment of pedagogic science seeks to create a firm basis for itself. To do this, it is necessary that it function under circumstances that ensure the value of its results--that is, in freedom. The school as it is, Tolstoy declares, enfeebles the children by distorting their mental faculties. During the most precious period of development it wrenches the child out of the family circle, robs him of the joy of freedom, and makes of him a jaded, suppressed creature, upon whose face rests an expression of weariness, fear, and boredom, while with his lips he repeats strange words in a language he does not know. But if we give the people freedom during their training, then we also give them the chance to speak out on the score of their necessities, and furthermore to choose among the kinds of knowledge offered. Philosophers from Plato to Kant have unanimously striven to free the school from the fetters of tradition. They have sought to discover wherein the intellectual needs of man consist, and to build up new schools on these more or less correctly envisaged needs. Luther demands that the masses shall study the Scripture from the original text, and not from the commentaries of the Fathers. Bacon advises the study of nature from nature herself and not from the works of Aristotle. Rousseau wants to teach life _from life_, as he conceives it, and not from outworn experience. All philosophy stands for freeing the school from the idea of instructing the younger generation in that which the older generation held to be science; and in favour of the idea of teaching them what they themselves need. And we can see by the history of pedagogic science that every step forwards consists in greater natural _rapport_ between pupil and teacher, in less compulsion and greater facilitation of the process of learning.
Tolstoy, then, an anarchistic pedagogue, sets his face against discipline. “The school in which there is less compulsion,” he says, “is better than the one in which there is more. The method which can be introduced without increased disciplinary strain is good; one which requires greater severity is surely wrong. Take a school like mine and try to carry on conversations about tables and corners of rooms or shove little dice to and fro. A frightful disorder will reign at once, and it will be absolutely necessary to restore order. But tell them an interesting story or set them an interesting task, or let someone write on the board and the others correct, and _let them all out of their benches_, and they will all be busy, and there will be no mischief, and no increased discipline will be necessary. We may safely say that this way is good.”
“The children bring nothing with them,” thus Tolstoy describes the procedure at Yasnaya Polyana, “neither primers nor copy-books. There are no tasks to take home. They need not remember anything--nothing of what they did the day before. They need carry nothing, either in their hands or in their heads. They bring nothing with them but their receptive natures and the conviction that school will be just as jolly today as it was yesterday; they only think of the instruction when it has begun. No one who comes late is ever scolded, and they never come late, except some of the older ones, whose fathers occasionally keep them to work. When that happens, they run as fast as they can to school and get there breathless.”
Lucky village children of Yasnaya Polyana! But it is comprehensible that Tolstoy tries to make the school at least pleasant for his pupils; his faith in its educational value is weak, and he makes in the end no secret of his conviction--which he declares he derived from personal observation in the schools of Paris, Marseilles, and other cities of western Europe--that the greater part of popular education is gained, not from school, but from life; and that free public instruction, by means of lectures, clubs, books, exhibitions, and so on, remains far superior to any teaching in schools. But be that as it may; what interests us here is not the rightness or wrongness of Tolstoy’s ideas, but rather what is characteristic in them; and characteristic they certainly are, in the highest degree, and from every point of view, not only in a personal sense, but also as a sign, even as an augury of his time.
What strikes one first of all, then, is a note that sounds in clearest contradiction to certain other of his doctrines: to the pacifistic and antinational ones, to the thesis of democratic equality he preached in his latter days. It is the national note. He emphasizes the right of the Russian people to an education suited to their genius, independently of the foreign spirit. His root-and-branch Russianism, at this time still quite unregenerate, denies the right of the upper and official classes, with their west-European liberal education, to force upon the masses an education not suited to their actual needs. Here he is turning against Peter the Great, who created these official classes and gave them their orientation toward liberalism and the west. Tolstoy’s educational ideas are all extreme anti-“Petrinic,” anti-western, anti-progressive. He openly declares that the educated class is not capable of giving the masses their proper training, conceiving, as it does, that the well-being of the people lies in the direction of civilization and progress. What speaks out of Tolstoy’s mouth, what rules his thinking, is Moscow. It is that leaning toward Asia which so alarmed Turgeniev and others like him in Tolstoy’s writings and which here is elevated to a pedagogic principle. His anarchism, his faith in the anarchistic principle as the single reasonable basis of communal human life; his doctrine that absolute freedom makes all discipline superfluous--all these are part of it, and it and they are expressed in Tolstoy’s prescription to “let all the children out of the benches” and free them from every oppressive sense of duty.
This “_letting all the children out of the benches_”--a picturesque and stimulating formula--is a perfect symbol for Tolstoy’s social and political (or, rather, his anarchistic, antipolitical) views. His famous letter to Czar Alexander III develops these most concisely. The new Czar’s father had been murdered on the first of March 1881; and Tolstoy wrote begging him to exercise clemency toward the murderers. He here sets down for the Emperor, in words so compelling that one almost wonders at their not prevailing, the two _political_ expedients which had been applied up to date against increasing political disorder: first, force and terror; and second, liberalism, constitution, parliament. Both these have finally shown themselves impotent. There remains, however, a third expedient, which is not of a political nature and which has at least the advantage of having never yet been tried. It consists in the fulfilment of the divine will regardless of consequences, without any cautious reservations of policy; quite simply in love, forgiveness, the requital of evil with good; in mildness, in non-resistance against evil, in freedom.... In a word, Tolstoy advises the Czar to “let all the children out of the benches”; he counsels anarchy--I am not using the word in a derogatory sense, but quite objectively, to specify a definite social and political gospel of salvation.
The Asiatic bias of this great Russian genius has already been shown to be a mixture of various psychical elements: oriental passivity, religious quietism, and an unmistakable tendency to Sarmatian wildness. Here, in this anarchistic theory, it lies down with quite different company: with the revolutionary ideals of western Europe, with the educational and political conceptions of Rousseau and his pupil Pestalozzi, in both of whom there is present the element of wildness, the return to nature--in short, the anarchistic element in another form and under other colours. Here, then, we are arrived at the common factor in the education of our two protagonists--but with a difference. On the educational side, Goethe fell away from his allegiance to Rousseau. Pedagogic Rousseauianism, as preached and practised by its founder, revolted him. Furiously, even desperately, he rejected it, and the anarchical individualism of the revolutionary education.
Boisserée tells how Goethe expressed to him his distress on the score of Pestalozzi and his system. For its original purpose and in its original setting, where Pestalozzi had only the children of the people in mind, the poor who lived in their isolated huts in Switzerland and could not send their children to school, it might be a capital idea. But it became the most destructive one in the world so soon as it ceased to confine itself to elementary teaching and went on to language, art, the general field of knowledge and power, which of course presupposed a _previous tradition_.... And then the insubordination this cursed kind of education aroused: look at the impudence of the little school-urchins, who feel no awe of any stranger, but rather put him in a fright instead. All respect gone, everything done away with that makes human beings human beings in their relations with each other. “What should I have been,” cried Goethe, “if I had not always been obliged to show respect for others? And these men, in their madness and frenzy, to reduce everything to terms of the single individual and be simply gods of self-sufficiency! They think to educate a nation which shall stand against the barbaric hordes, just as soon as the latter shall have mastered the elementary tools of understanding, which Pestalozzi has made it so very easy for them to do.”
Tradition, reverence--which “makes human beings human beings in their relations with each other”--conformity of the ego within a noble and estimable community; do you not feel the nearness of the Pedagogic Province? Let me recall a moment that dream so wise and splendid, at once austere and blithe, in which can be traced much of the humanism of the eighteenth century, much of the spirit of the _Zauberflöte_, of Sarastro and the “moving toward good with one’s hand in a friend’s”; and which at the same time contains so much that is new and bold, and, humanly speaking, advanced that it cannot be called less revolutionary than Tolstoy’s educational ideas. Only, of course, the anarchistic flavour is utterly lacking; while its conception of humanity and human dignity, culture and civilization, is so consonant with solemn regulation and gradation, with such a pronounced sense of reverence, of traditions, symbols, mysteries, and rhythm, with such a symmetrical, almost choreographic restraint in its freedom, that I may be permitted to call it statesmanlike in the best and finest sense, by way of pointing the contrast to Tolstoy’s “letting the children out of the benches.” However, the boys and youths of Goethe’s dream-province do not sit glued to their benches either, at least we do not see them thus. The basis of their education is quite in the Pestalozzan style: it is husbandry. And their training goes forward in the open air, work and play constantly accompanied by singing. We are told, quite explicitly, what its essence is: “Wise men lead the boys to find out themselves what is fitted for them; and shorten the by-ways into which man will often too readily turn aside.” Every well-marked bent to a pursuit is fostered and cultivated, for “to know and practise one thing rightly gives higher culture than half-way performance of a hundred things.” But if the education is thus adapted to the individual, it is not thereby in the very least individualistic--so little, in fact, that respect for convention is insisted upon, and regarded as a conspicuous characteristic of genius; for genius understands that art is called art just because it is not nature; and easily accommodates itself to paying respect to the conventions, in the view that they represent “an agreement arrived at by the superior elements of society, whereby the essential and indispensable is regarded as the best.” That is hostility toward the voluntary, with a vengeance; and the Head is at pains to define and interpret it by a musical parallel. “Would a musician,” he asks, “let a pupil make a wild attack on the keyboard or invent intervals to please himself? No, the striking thing is that nothing is left to the choice of the learner. The element in which he is to work is fixed, the tool he must use put into his hand, even the way he shall use it is prescribed--I mean the change of fingers, in order that one get out of the other’s way and make the path plain for its successor; until by dint of this regulated co-operation and thus alone the impossible at last becomes the possible.”--It is not by chance, I insist, that the Heads of the Province draw their parallel from the field of music: is she not truly the most spirited symbol for that regulated co-operation of manifold elements toward an end and goal which is culturally noble and worthy of humanity? In the Pedagogic Province song presides over all the activities, everything else is linked with it and communicated by it. “The simplest pleasures as well as the simplest tasks are animated and impressed by song; yes, even our instruction in morals and religion is communicated in this wise.” Even the elements of knowledge, reading, writing, reckoning, are derived from song, note-writing, and putting text beneath, and from observing the basic measures and notation--in short, as agriculture is the natural, so music is the spiritual element of education, “for from it level paths run out in all directions.”
Another great German and shaper of German destiny comes to mind here: Luther’s view of music as an instrument of education was very like Goethe’s. “_Musicam_,” he says, “I have always loved. One should accustom youth to this art, for it makes fine, capable people. A schoolmaster who cannot sing I will not look at.” And in the schools under his influence there was almost as much singing as in the Pedagogic Province--whereas no one would know whether they sang in Tolstoy’s school or not. To the wanderer through the Pedagogic Province it seems as though none of its inhabitants did anything of his own power, but as though a mysterious spirit animated them through and through, leading them on toward one single great goal. This spirit is the spirit of music, of culture, of “regulated co-operation,” whereby alone at length “the impossible”--that is to say, the state as work of art--becomes possible; it is a spirit remote from and hostile to all barbarism; one would like to be allowed to call it a German spirit.
The salutation in three degrees, whose meaning, the threefold reverence, is kept secret from the boys themselves, because mystery and respect for the mysterious is a moral and civilizing influence; the insistence upon modesty and decorum; the lining up and standing at attention of the young human being in face of the world, and his honourable comradeship with his kind; the enhancing of his own honour through the honours he renders; all this militarism so highly imbued with the spirit and with art--how far it is from the rational radicalism of Tolstoy’s Christianity, with its heart of wildness! Is it anyway credible that, in essentials, a remarkable likeness subsists between the educational conceptions of our two geniuses?