heir real importance, and feels himself ready to
undertake any class of useful work, however degrading. He now seeks
consolation in hasty and incessant action so as to hide himself from
himself. And thus his helplessness and the want of a leader towards
culture drive him from one form of life into another: but doubt,
elevation, worry, hope, despair--everything flings him hither and
thither as a proof that all the stars above him by which he could have
guided his ship have set.

"There you have the picture of this glorious independence of yours, of
that academical freedom, reflected in the highest minds--those which
are truly in need of culture, compared with whom that other crowd of
indifferent natures does not count at all, natures that delight in
their freedom in a purely barbaric sense. For these latter show by
their base smugness and their narrow professional limitations that
this is the right element for them: against which there is nothing to
be said. Their comfort, however, does not counter-balance the
suffering of one single young man who has an inclination for culture
and feels the need of a guiding hand, and who at last, in a moment of
discontent, throws down the reins and begins to despise himself. This
is the guiltless innocent; for who has saddled him with the
unbearable burden of standing alone? Who has urged him on to
independence at an age when one of the most natural and peremptory
needs of youth is, so to speak, a self-surrendering to great leaders
and an enthusiastic following in the footsteps of the masters?

"It is repulsive to consider the effects to which the violent
suppression of such noble natures may lead. He who surveys the
greatest supporters and friends of that pseudo-culture of the present
time, which I so greatly detest, will only too frequently find among
them such degenerate and shipwrecked men of culture, driven by inward
despair to violent enmity against culture, when, in a moment of
desperation, there was no one at hand to show them how to attain it.
It is not the worst and most insignificant people whom we afterwards
find acting as journalists and writers for the press in the
metamorphosis of despair: the spirit of some well-known men of letters
might even be described, and justly, as degenerate studentdom. How
else, for example, can we reconcile that once well-known 'young
Germany' with its present degenerate successors? Here we discover a
need of culture which, so to speak, has