e with me! There you are
servants, retainers, tools, eclipsed by higher natures; your own
peculiar characteristics never have free play; you are tied down,
chained down, like slaves; yea, like automata: here, with me, you will
enjoy the freedom of your own personalities, as masters should, your
talents will cast their lustre on yourselves alone, with their aid you
may come to the very front rank; an innumerable train of followers
will accompany you, and the applause of public opinion will yield you
more pleasure than a nobly-bestowed commendation from the height of
genius.' Even the very best of men now yield to these temptations: and
it cannot be said that the deciding factor here is the degree of
talent, or whether a man is accessible to these voices or not; but
rather the degree and the height of a certain moral sublimity, the
instinct towards heroism, towards sacrifice--and finally a positive,
habitual need of culture, prepared by a proper kind of education,
which education, as I have previously said, is first and foremost
obedience and submission to the discipline of genius. Of this
discipline and submission, however, the present institutions called by
courtesy 'educational establishments' know nothing whatever, although
I have no doubt that the public school was originally intended to be
an institution for sowing the seeds of true culture, or at least as a
preparation for it. I have no doubt, either, that they took the first
bold steps in the wonderful and stirring times of the Reformation, and
that afterwards, in the era which gave birth to Schiller and Goethe,
there was again a growing demand for culture, like the first
protuberance of that wing spoken of by Plato in the _Phaedrus_, which,
at every contact with the beautiful, bears the soul aloft into the
upper regions, the habitations of the gods."

"Ah," began the philosopher's companion, "when you quote the divine
Plato and the world of ideas, I do not think you are angry with me,
however much my previous utterance may have merited your disapproval
and wrath. As soon as you speak of it, I feel that Platonic wing
rising within me; and it is only at intervals, when I act as the
charioteer of my soul, that I have any difficulty with the resisting
and unwilling horse that Plato has also described to us, the
'crooked, lumbering animal, put together anyhow, with a short, thick
neck; flat-faced, and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red
complexion; the mat