No More Learning

If we could only learn
better to study history as a means to life! We
would gladly grant the super-historical people their
superior wisdom, so long as we are sure of having
more life than they: for in that case our unwisdom
would have a greater future before it than their
wisdom. To make my opposition between life and
wisdom clear, I will take the usual road of the short
summary.
A historical phenomenon, completely understood
and reduced to an item of knowledge, is, in relation
to the man who knows it, dead: for he has found
out its madness, its injustice, its blind passion, and
especially(the earthly and darkened horizon that
was the source of its power for history. This power
has now become, for him who has recognised it,
powerless; not yet, perhaps, for him who is alive.
History regarded as pure knowledge and allowed
to sway the intellect would mean for men the final


## p. 16 (#32) ##############################################

16
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
A
balancing of the ledger of life. Historical study
is only fruitful for the future if it follow a powerful
life-giving influence, for example, a new system of
culture; only, therefore, if it be guided and domin-
ated by a higher force, and do not itself guide and
dominate.
History, so far as it serves life, serves an un-
historical power, and thus will never become a pure
science like mathematics. The question how far
life needs such a service is one of the most serious
questions affecting the well-being of a man, a people
and a culture. For by excess of history life becomes
maimed and degenerate, and is followed by the
degeneration of history as well.
II.
The fact that life does need the service of history
must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of
history hurts it; this will be proved later. History
is necessary to the living man in three ways: in
relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism
and reverence, his suffering and his desire for de-
liverance. These three relations answer to the three
kinds of history—so far as they can be distinguished
—the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical.
History is necessary above all to the man of
action and power who fights a great fight and needs
examples, teachers and comforters; he cannot find
them among his contemporaries. It was necessary
in this sense to Schiller; for our time is so evil,
Goethe says, that the poet meets no nature that


## p. 17 (#33) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 17
will profit him, among living men. Polybius is
thinking of the active man when he calls political
history the true preparation for governing a state;
it is the great teacher, that shows us how to bear
steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us
of what others have suffered. Whoever has learned
to recognise this meaning in history must hate to
see curious tourists and laborious beetle-hunters
climbing up the great pyramids of antiquity. He \
does not wish to meet the idler who is rushing -flbn*^**'
through the picture-galleries of the past for a new
distraction or sensation, where he himself is looking
for example and encouragement. To avoid being
troubled by the weak and hopeless idlers, and those
whose apparent activity is merely neurotic, he looks
behind him and stays his course towards the goal
in order to breathe. His goal is happiness, not
perhaps his own, but often the nation's,or humanity's
at large: he avoids quietism, and uses history as a
weapon against it. For the most part he has no
hope of reward except fame, which means the ex-
pectation of a niche in the temple of history, where
he in his turn may be the consoler and counsellor
of posterity. For his orders are that what has once
been able to extend the conception " man " and give •
it a fairer content, must ever exist for the same
office. The great moments in the individual battle"-\ •
form a chain, a high road for humanity through
the ages, and the highest points of those vanished /
moments are yet great and living for men; and /
this is the fundamental idea of the belief in humanity, j
that finds a voice in the demand for a " monumental"
history. ^
"Vol. 11. b


## p. 17 (#34) ##############################################

16
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
balancing of the ledger of life. Historical study
is only fruitful for the future if it follow a powerful
life-giving influence, for example, a new system of
culture; only, therefore, if it be guided and domin-
ated by a higher force, and do not itself guide and
dominate.
History, so far as it serves life, serves an un-
historical power, and thus will never become a pure
science like mathematics. The question how far
life needs such a service is one of the most serious
questions affecting the well-being of a man, a people
and a culture. For by excess of history life becomes
maimed and degenerate, and is followed by the
degeneration of history as well.
II.
The fact that life does need the service of history
must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of
history hurts it; this will be proved later. History
is necessary to the living man in three ways: in
relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism
and reverence, his suffering and his desire for de-
liverance. These three relations answer to the three
kinds of history—so far as they can be distinguished
—the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical.
History is necessary above all to the man of
action and power who fights a great fight and needs
examples, teachers and comforters; he cannot find
them among his contemporaries. It was necessary
in this sense to Schiller; for our time is so evil,
Goethe says, that the poet meets no nature that



## p. 17 (#35) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 17
will profit him, among living men. Polybius is
thinking of the active man when he calls political
history the true preparation for governing a state;
it is the great teacher, that shows us how to bear
steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us
of what others have suffered. Whoever has learned
to recognise this meaning in history must hate to
see curious tourists and laborious beetle-hunters
climbing up the great pyramids of antiquity. He r
does not wish to meet the idler who is rushing -*/*»»*-***-
through the picture-galleries of the past for a new
distraction or sensation, where he himself is looking
for example and encouragement. To avoid being
troubled by the weak and hopeless idlers, and those
whose apparent activity is merely neurotic, he looks
behind him and stays his course towards the goal
in order to breathe. His goal is happiness, not
perhaps his own, but often the nation's,or humanity's
at large: he avoids quietism, and uses history as a
weapon against it. For the most part he has no
hope of reward except fame, which means the ex-
pectation of a niche in the temple of history, where
he in his turn may be the consoler and counsellor
of posterity. For his orders are that what has once
been able to extend the conception " man " and give \ ■
it a fairer content, must ever exist for the same
office. The great moments in the individual battle~"-\
form a chain, a high road for humanity through
the ages, and the highest points of those vanished I
moments are yet great and living for men; and /
this is the fundamental idea of the belief in humanity, 1
that finds a voice in the demand for a " monumental" 1
history. v^
"Vol. 11. b


## p. 18 (#36) ##############################################

18 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
But the fiercest battle is fought round the demand
for greatness to be eternal. Every other living thing
cries no. "Away with the monuments," is the watch-
word. Dull custom fills all the chambers of the
world with its meanness, and rises in thick vapour
round anything that is great, barring its way to
immortality, blinding and stifling it. And the way
passes through mortal brains! Through the brains
of sick and short-lived beasts that ever rise to the
surface to breathe, and painfully keep off annihila-
tion for a little space. For they wish but one thing:
to live at any cost. Who would ever dream of
any "monumental history" among them, the hard
torch-race that alone gives life to greatness? And
yet there are always men awakening, who are
strengthened and made happy by gazing on past
greatness, as though man's life were a lordly thing,
and the fairest fruit of this bitter tree were the
knowledge that there was once a man who walked
sternly and proudly through this world, another
who had pity and loving-kindness, another who
lived in contemplation,—but all leaving one truth
behind them, that his life is the fairest who thinks
least about life. The common man snatches greedily
at this little span, with tragic earnestness, but they,
on their way to monumental history and im-
mortality, knew how to greet it with Olympic
laughter, or at least with a lofty scorn; and they
went down to their graves in irony—for what had
they to bury? Only what they had always treated
as dross, refuse, and vanity, and which now falls
into its true home of oblivion, after being so long
the sport of their contempt. One thing will live,


## p. 19 (#37) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 19
the sign-manual of their inmost being, the rare
flash of light, the deed, the creation; because
posterity cannot do without it. In this spiritualised
form fame is something more than the sweetest
morsel for our egoism, in Schopenhauer's phrase:
it is the belief in the oneness and continuity of the
great in every age, and a protest against the change
and decay of generations.
What is the use to the modern man of this
"monumental" contemplation of the past, this pre-
occupation with the rare and classic? It is the
knowledge that the great thing existed and was
therefore possible, and so may be possible again.
He is heartened on his way; for his doubt in weaker
moments, whether his desire be not for the impos-
sible, is struck aside. Suppose one believe that no
more than a hundred men, brought up in the new
spirit, efficient and productive, were needed to give
the deathblow to the present fashion of education
in Germany; he will gather strength from the
remembrance that the culture of the Renaissance
was raised on the shoulders of such another band
of a hundred men.
And yet if we really wish to learn something
from an example, how vague and elusive do we
find the comparison! If it is to give us strength,
many of the differences must Be neglected, the in-
dividuality of the past forced into a general formula
and all the sharp angles broken off for the sake of
correspondence. Ultimately, of course, what was
once possible can only become possible a second
time on the Pythagorean theory, that when the
heavenly bodies are in the same position again, the I


## p. 20 (#38) ##############################################

20 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
. J events on earth are reproduced to the smallest detail;
so when the stars have a certain relation, a Stoic
and an Epicurean will form a conspiracy to murder
Caesar, and a different conjunction will show
another Columbus discovering America. Only if
the earth always began its drama again after the
fifth act, and it were certain that the same inter-
action of motives, the same deus ex mackina, the
same catastrophe would occur at particular intervals,
could the man of action venture to look for the
whole archetypic truth in monumental history, to
see each fact fully set out in its uniqueness: it
would not probably be before the astronomers
became astrologers again. Till then monumental
history will never be able to have complete truth;
it will always bring together things that are in-
compatible and generalise them into compatibility,
will always weaken the differences of motive and
occasion. Its object is to depict effects at the
expense of the causes—" monumentally," that is, as
examples for imitation: it turns aside, as far as it
may, from reasons, and might be called with far less
exaggeration a collection of " effects in themselves,"
than of events that will have an effect on all ages.
The events of war or religion cherished in our
popular celebrations are such "effects in them-
selves "; it is these that will not let ambition sleep,
and lie like amulets on the bolder hearts—not the
real historical nexus of cause and effect, which,
rightly understood, would only prove that nothing
quite similar could ever be cast again from the
dice-boxes of fate and the future.
As long as the soul of history is found in the


## p. 21 (#39) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 21
great impulse that it gives to a powerful spirit, as
long as the past is principally used as a model for
imitation, it is always in danger of being a little
altered and touched up, and brought nearer to -
fiction. Sometimes there is no possible distinction
between a "monumental" past and a mythical - 'V
romance, as the same motives for action can be
gathered from the one world as the other. If this
monumental method of surveying the past domin-
ate the others,—the antiquarian and the critical,—
the past itself suffers wrong. Whole tracts of it
are forgotten and despised; they flow away like a
dark unbroken river, with only a few gaily coloured
islands of fact rising above it There is something
beyond nature in the rare figures that become
visible, like the golden hips that his disciples attri-
buted to Pythagoras. Monumental history lives ]
by false analogy; it entices the brave to rashness,
and the enthusiastic to fanaticism by its tempting
comparisons. Imagine this history in the hands—
anci the head—of a gifted egoist or an inspired
scoundrel; kingdoms will be overthrown, princes
murdered, war and revolution let loose, and the
number of "effects in themselves"—in other words,
effects without sufficient cause — increased. So
much for the harm done by monumental history
to the powerful men of action, be they good or
bad; but what if the weak and the inactive take it
as their servant—or their master!
Consider the simplest and commonest example,
the inartistic or half artistic natures whom a monu-
mental history provides with sword and buckler.
They will use the weapons against their hereditary


## p. 22 (#40) ##############################################

22 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
enemies, the great artistic spirits, who alone can
learn from that history the one real lesson, how to
live, and embody what they have learnt in noble
action. Their way is obstructed, their free air
darkened by the idolatrous — and conscientious
—dance round the half understood monument of
a great past. "See, that is the true and real art,"
we seem to hear: "of what use are these aspiring
little people of to-day? " The dancing crowd has
apparently the monopoly of "good taste ": for the
creator is always at a disadvantage compared with
the mere looker-on, who never put a hand to the
work; just as the arm-chair politician has ever had
more wisdom and foresight than the actual states-
man. But if the custom of democratic suffrage
and numerical majorities be transferred to the
realm of art, and the artist put on his defence
before the court of aesthetic dilettanti, you may take
your oath on his condemnation; although, or rather
because, his judges had proclaimed solemnly the
canon of "monumental art," the art that has
"had an effect on all ages," according to the
official definition. In their eyes no need nor inclina-
tion nor historical authority is in favour of the
art which is not yet "monumental" because it is
contemporary. Their instinct tells them that art
can be slain by art: the monumental will never be
reproduced, and the weight of its authority is invoked
from the past to make it sure. They are connois-
seurs of art, primarily because they wish to kill art;
they pretend to be physicians, when their real idea is
to dabble in poisons. They develop their tastes to
a point of perversion, that they may be able to show


## p. 23 (#41) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 23
a reason for continually rejecting all the nourish-
ing artistic fare that is offered them. For they do
not want greatness, to arise: their method is to say,
"See, the great thing is already here! " In reality
they care as little about the great thing that is
already here, as that which is about to arise: their
lives are evidence of that. Monumental history is
the cloak under which their hatred of present power
and greatness masquerades as an extreme admira-
tion of the past: the real meaning of this way of
viewing history is disguised as its opposite; whether
they wish it or no, they are acting as though their
motto were, "let the dead bury the—living. "
Each of the three kinds of history will only
flourish in one ground and climate: otherwise it
grows to a noxious weed. If the man who will
produce something great, have need of the past,
he makes himself its master by means of monu-
mental history: the man who can rest content with
the traditional and venerable, uses the past as an
"antiquarian historian ": and only he whose heart
is oppressed by an instant need, and who will cast
the burden off at any price, feels the want of
"critical history," the history that judges and
condemns. There is much harm wrought by
wrong and thoughtless planting: the critic without
the need, the antiquary without piety, the knower
of the great deed who cannot be the doer of it, are
plants that have grown to weeds, they are torn
from their native soil and therefore degenerate.
*


## p. 24 (#42) ##############################################

24 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
III.
Secondly, history is necessary to the man of
conservative and reverent nature, who looks back
to the origins of his existence with love and trust;
through it, he gives thanks for life. He is careful
to preserve what survives from ancient days, and
will reproduce the conditions of his own upbringing
for those who come after him; thus he does life a
service. The possession of his ancestors' furniture
changes its meaning in his soul: for his soul is
rather possessed by it. All that is small and
limited, mouldy and obsolete, gains a worth and
inviolability of its own from the conservative and
reverent soul of the antiquary migrating into it,
and building a secret nest there. The history of
his town becomes the history of himself; he looks
on the walls, the turreted gate, the town council,
the fair, as an illustrated diary of his youth, and
sees himself in it all—his strength, industry, desire,
reason, faults and follies. "Here one could live,"
he says, " as one can live here now—and will go
on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be
uprooted in the night. " And so, with his "we," he
surveys the marvellous individual life of the past
and identifies himself with the spirit of the house,
the family and the city. He greets the soul of his
people from afar as his own, across the dim and
troubled centuries: his gifts and his virtues lie in
such power of feeling and divination, his scent of
a half-vanished trail, his instinctive correctness in
reading the scribbled past, and understanding at


## p. 25 (#43) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 2$
once its palimpsests—nay, its(polypsests. Goethe?
stood with such thoughts before the monument of >
Erwin von Steinbach: the storm of his feeling rent
the historical cloud-veil that hung between them,
and he saw the German work for the first time
"coming from the stern, rough, German soul. "
This was the road that the Italians of the Renais-
sance travelled, the spirit that reawakened the
ancient Italic genius in their poets to " a wondrous
echo of the immemorial lyre," as Jacob Burckhardt
says. But the greatest value of this antiquarian
spirit of reverence lies in the simple emotions of
pleasure and content that it lends to the drab,
rough, even painful circumstances of a nation's or
individual's life: Niebuhr confesses that he could
live happily on a moor among free peasants with
a history, and would never feel the want of art.
How could history serve life better than by
anchoring the less gifted races and peoples to the
homes and customs of their ancestors, and keeping
them from ranging far afield in search of better,
to find only struggle and competition? The
influence that ties men down to the same com-
panions and circumstances, to the daily round of
toil, to their bare mountain-side,—seems to be
selfish and unreasonable: but it is a healthy
unreason and of profit to the community; as
every one knows who has clearly realised the
terrible consequences of mere desire for migration
and adventure,—perhaps in whole peoples,—or who
watches the destiny of a nation that has lost con-
fidence in its earlier days, and is given up to a
restless cosmopolitanism and an unceasing desire


## p. 26 (#44) ##############################################

26 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
for novelty. The feeling of the tree that clings to
its roots, the happiness of knowing one's growth to
be not merely arbitrary and fortuitous, but the in-
heritance, the fruit and blossom of a past, that does
not merely justify but crown the present—this is
what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical
sense.
These are not the conditions most favourable to
reducing the past to pure science: and we see here
too, as we saw in the case of monumental history,
that the past itself suffers when history serves life
and is directed by its end. To vary the metaphor,
the tree feels its roots better than it can see rhem:
the greatness of the feeling is measured by the
greatness and strength of the visible branches.
The tree may be wrong here; how far more wrong
will it be in regard to the whole forest, which it
only knows and feels so far as it is hindered or
helped by it, and not otherwise! The antiquarian
sense of a man, a city or a nation has always a
very limited field. Many things are not noticed
at all; the others are seen in isolation, as through a
microscope. There is no measure: equal import-
ance is given to everything, and therefore too much
to anything. For the things of the past are never
viewed in their true perspective or receive their
just value; but value and perspective change with
the individual or the nation that is looking back
on its past. . , . .
There is always the danger here, that everything
ancient will be regardecTas equally venerable, and
everything without this respect for antiquity, like
a new spirit, rejected as an enemy. The Greeks


## p. 27 (#45) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 27
themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art
by the side of the freer and greater style; and later,
did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the
cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste.
If the judgment of a people harden in this way, and
history's service to the past life be to undermine a
further and higher life; if ihejiistorical sense no
longer preserve life, but mummify it: then the
tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards,
and at last the roots themselves wither. Anti-
quarian history degenerates from the moment that
it "ho longer gives a soul and inspiration to the
fresh life of the present. The spring of piety is
dried up, but the learned habit persists without it
and revolves complaisantly round its own centre.
The horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector
raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. He
breathes a mouldy air; the antiquarian habit may
degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual
need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for
everything old: he often sinks so low as to be
satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the
scraps that fall from the bibliographical table.
Even if this degeneration do not take place, and
the foundation be not withered on which anti-
quarian history can alone take root with profit to
life: yet there are dangers enough, if it become too
powerful and invade the territories of the other
methods. It only understands how to preserve life,
not to create it; and thus always undervalues the
present growth, having, unlike monumental history,
no certain instinct for it. Thus it hinders the"
L
mighty impulse to a new deed and paralyses the


## p. 27 (#46) ##############################################

26
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
for novelty. The feeling of the tree that clings to
its roots, the happiness of knowing one's growth to
be not merely arbitrary and fortuitous, but the in-
heritance, the fruit and blossom of a past, that does
not merely justify but crown the present—this is
what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical
sense.
These are not the conditions most favourable to
reducing the past to pure science: and we see here
too, as we saw in the case of monumental history,
that the past itself suffers when history serves life
and is directed by its end. To vary the metaphor,
the tree feels its roots better than it can see them :
the greatness of the feeling is measured by the
greatness and strength of the visible branches.
The tree may be wrong here; how far more wrong
will it be in regard to the whole forest, which it
only knows and feels so far as it is hindered or
helped by it, and not otherwise! The antiquarian
sense of a man, a city or a nation has always a
very limited field. Many things are not noticed
at all; the others are seen in isolation, as through a
microscope. There is no measure: equal import-
ance is given to everything, and therefore too much
to anything. For the things of the past are never
viewed in their true perspective or receive their
just value ; but value and perspective change with
the individual or the nation that is looking back
on its past.
There is always the danger here, that everything
ancient will be regarded as equally venerable, and
everything without this respect for antiquity, like
a new spirit, rejected as an enemy. The Greeks


## p. 27 (#47) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY.
27
themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art
by the side of the freer and greater style; and later,
did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the
cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste.
If the judgment of a people harden in this way, and
history's service to the past life be to undermine a
further and higher life ; if the historical sense no
longer preserve life, but mummify it: then the
tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards,
and at last the roots themselves wither. Anti-
quarian history degenerates from the moment that
it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the
fresh life of the present. The spring of piety is
dried up, but the learned habit persists without it
and revolves complaisantly round its own centre.
The horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector
raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. He
breathes a mouldy air ; the antiquarian habit may
degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual
need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for
everything old: he often sinks so low as to be
satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the
scraps that fall from the bibliographical table.
Even if this degeneration do not take place, and
the foundation be not withered on which anti-
quarian history can alone take root with profit to
life: yet there are dangers enough, if it become too
powerful and invade the territories of the other
methods. It only understands how to preserve life,
not to create it; and thus always undervalues the
present growth, having, unlike monumental history,
no certain instinct for it. Thus it hinders the
mighty impulse to a new deed and paralyses the


## p. 27 (#48) ##############################################

26
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
for novelty. The feeling of the tree that clings to
its roots, the happiness of knowing one's growth to
be not merely arbitrary and fortuitous, but the in-
heritance, the fruit and blossom of a past, that does
not merely justify but crown the present-this is
what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical
sense.
These are not the conditions most favourable to
reducing the past to pure science: and we see here
too, as we saw in the case of monumental history,
that the past itself suffers when history serves life
and is directed by its end. To vary the metaphor,
the tree feels its roots better than it can see them :
the greatness of the feeling is measured by the
greatness and strength of the visible branches.
The tree may be wrong here; how far more wrong
will it be in regard to the whole forest, which it
only knows and feels so far as it is hindered or
helped by it, and not otherwise ! The antiquarian
sense of a man, a city or a nation has always a
very limited field. Many things are not noticed
at all; the others are seen in isolation, as through a
microscope. There is no measure: equal import-
ance is given to everything, and therefore too much
to anything. For the things of the past are never
viewed in their true perspective or receive their
just value; but value and perspective change with
the individual or the nation that is looking back
on its past.
- There is always the danger here, that everything
ancient will be regarded as equally venerable, and
everything without this respect for antiquity, like
a new spirit, rejected as an enemy. The Greeks


## p. 27 (#49) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY.
27
themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art
by the side of the freer and greater style; and later,
did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the
cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste.
If the judgment of a people harden in this way, and
history's service to the past life be to undermine a
further and higher life ; if the historical sense no
longer preserve life, but mummify it: then the
tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards,
and at last the roots themselves wither. Anti-
quarian history degenerates from the moment that
it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the
fresh life of the present. The spring of piety is
dried up, but the learned habit persists without it
and revolves complaisantly round its own centre.
The horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector
raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. He
breathes a mouldy air ; the antiquarian habit may
degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual
need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for
everything old: he often sinks so low as to be
satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the
scraps that fall from the bibliographical table.
Even if this degeneration do not take place, and
the foundation be not withered on which anti-
quarian history can alone take root with profit to
life: yet there are dangers enough, if it become too
powerful and invade the territories of the other
methods. It only understands how to preserve life,
not to create it; and thus always undervalues the
present growth, having, unlike monumental history,
no certain instinct for it. Thus it hinders the
mighty impulse to a new deed and paralyses the


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26
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
for novelty. The feeling of the tree that clings to
its roots, the happiness of knowing one's growth to
be not merely arbitrary and fortuitous, but the in-
heritance, the fruit and blossom of a past, that does
not merely justify but crown the present-this is
what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical
sense.
These are not the conditions most favourable to
reducing the past to pure science: and we see here
too, as we saw in the case of monumental history,
that the past itself suffers when history serves life
and is directed by its end. To vary the metaphor,
the tree feels its roots better than it can see them :
the greatness of the feeling is measured by the
greatness and strength of the visible branches.
The tree may be wrong here; how far more wrong
will it be in regard to the whole forest, which it
only knows and feels so far as it is hindered or
helped by it, and not otherwise! The antiquarian
sense of a man, a city or a nation has always a
very limited field. Many things are not noticed
at all; the others are seen in isolation, as through a
microscope. There is no measure: equal import-
ance is given to everything, and therefore too much
to anything. For the things of the past are never
viewed in their true perspective or receive their
just value ; but value and perspective change with
the individual or the nation that is looking back
on its past.
**There is always the danger here, that everything
ancient will be regarded as equally venerable, and
everything without this respect for antiquity, like
a new spirit, rejected as an enemy. The Greeks


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY.
27
themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art
by the side of the freer and greater style; and later,
did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the
cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste.
If the judgment of a people harden in this way, and
history's service to the past life be to undermine a
further and higher life ; if the historical sense no
longer preserve life, but mummify it: then the
tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards,
and at last the roots themselves wither. Anti-
quarian history degenerates from the moment that
it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the
fresh life of the present. The spring of piety is
dried up, but the learned habit persists without it
and revolves complaisantly round its own centre.
The horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector
raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. He
breathes a mouldy air ; the antiquarian habit may
degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual
need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for
everything old: he often sinks so low as to be
satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the
scraps that fall from the bibliographical table.
Even if this degeneration do not take place, and
the foundation be not withered on which anti-
quarian history can alone take root with profit to
life: yet there are dangers enough, if it become too
powerful and invade the territories of the other
methods. It only understands how to preserve life,
not to create it; and thus always undervalues the
present growth, having, unlike monumental history,
no certain instinct for it. Thus it hinders the
mighty impulse to a new deed and paralyses the


## p. 28 (#52) ##############################################

28 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
doer, who must always, as doer, be grazing some
piety or other. The fact that has grown old
carries with it a demand for its own immortality.
For when one considers the life-history of such an
ancient fact, the amount of reverence paid to it
for generations—whether it be a custom, a religious
creed, or a political principle,—it seems presump-
tuous, even impious, to replace it by a new fact,
and the ancient congregation of pieties by a new
piety.
Here we see clearly how necessary a third way
of looking at the past is to man, beside the other
^k. ,i i* two. This is the " critical" way; which is also in
the service of life. Man must have the strength
to break up the past; and apply it too, in order to
live. He must bring the past to the bar of
judgment, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally
condemn it. Every past is worth condemning:
this is the rule in mortal affairs, which always
contain a large measure of human power and
human weakness. It is not justice that sits in
judgment here; nor mercy that proclaims the
verdict; but only life, the dim, driving force that
insatiably desires—itself. Its sentence is always
unmerciful, always unjust, as it never flows from a
pure fountain of knowledge: though it would
generally turn out the same, if Justice herself
delivered it. "For everything that is born is
worthy of being destroyed: better were it then
that nothing should be born. " It requires great
strength to be able to live and forget how far
life and injustice are one. Luther himself once
said that the world only arose by an oversight of
'


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 29
God; if he had ever dreamed of heavy ordnance,
he would never have created it. The same life
that needs forgetfulness, needs sometimes its
destruction; for should the injustice of some-
thing ever become obvious—a monopoly, a caste,
a dynasty for example—the thing deserves to
fall. Its past is critically examined, the knife
put to its roots, and all the "pieties" are grimly
trodden under foot. The process is always
dangerous, even for life; and the men or the
times that serve life in this way, by judging and
annihilating the past, are always dangerous to
themselves and others. For as we are merely the
resultant of previous generations, we are also the
resultant of their errors, passions, and crimes: it
is impossible to shake off this chain. Though we
condemn the errors and think we have escaped
them, we cannot escape the fact that we spring
from them. At best, it comes to a conflict between
our innate, inherited nature and our knowledge,
between a stern, new discipline and an ancient
tradition; and we plant a new way of life, a new
instinct, a second nature, that withers the first. It
is an attempt to gain a past a posteriori from
which we might spring, as against that from which
we do spring; always a dangerous attempt, as it
is difficult to find a limit to the denial of the past,
and the second natures are generally weaker than
the first. We stop too often at knowing the good
without doing it, because we also know the better
but cannot do it. Here and there the victory is
won, which gives a strange consolation to the
fighters, to those who use critical history for the


## p. 30 (#54) ##############################################

30 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
sake of life. The consolation is the knowledge
that this "first nature" was once a second, and
that every conquering "second nature" becomes
a first.
IV.
This is how history can serve life. Every man
and nation needs a certain knowledge of the past,
whether it be through monumental, antiquarian,
or critical history, according to his objects, powers,
and necessities. The need is not that of the mere
thinkers who only look on at life, or the few who
desire knowledge and can only be satisfied with
knowledge; but it has always a reference to the
end of life, and is under its absolute rule and
direction. This is the natural relation of an age,
a culture and a people to history; hunger is its
source, necessity its norm, the inner plastic power
assigns its limits. The knowledge of the past is
only desired for the service of the future and the
present, not to weaken the present or undermine a
living future. All this is as simple as truth itself,
and quite convincing to any one who is not in the
toils of " historical deduction. "
And now to take a quick glance at our time!
We fly back in astonishment. The clearness,
naturalness, and purity of the connection between
life and history has vanished; and in what a maze
of exaggeration and contradiction do we now see
the problem! Is the guilt ours who see it, or have
life and history really altered their conjunction
and an inauspicious star risen between them?


## p. 31 (#55) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 31
Others may prove we have seen falsely; I am
merely saying what we believe we see. There is
such a star, a bright and lordly star, and the con-
junction is really altered—by science, and the
demand for history to be a science. Life is no
more dominant, and knowledge of the past no
longer its thrall: boundary marks are overthrown
and everything bursts its limits. The perspective
of events is blurred, and the blur extends through
their whole immeasurable course. No generation
has seen such a panoramic comedy as is shown by
the " science of universal evolution," history; that
shows it with the dangerous audacity of its motto—
"Fiat Veritas, pereat vita. "
Let me give a picture of the spiritual events in
the soul of the modern man. Historical knowledge
streams on him from sources that are inexhaustible,
strange incoherencies come together, memory opens
all its gates and yet is never open wide enough,
nature busies herself to receive all the foreign
guests, to honour them and put them in their
places. But they are at war with each other:
violent measures seem necessary, in order to escape
destruction one's self. It becomes second nature
to grow gradually accustomed to this irregular
and stormy home-life, though this second nature
is unquestionably weaker, more restless, more
radically unsound than the first. The modern
man carries inside him an enormous heap of
indigestible knowledge-stones that occasionally
rattle together in his body, as the fairy-tale has it.
And the rattle reveals the most striking charac-
teristic of these modern men, the opposition of


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32 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
something inside them to which nothing external
corresponds; and the reverse. The ancient nations
knew nothing of this. Knowledge, taken in excess
". ■ without hunger, even contrary to desire, has no
more the effect of transforming the external life;
and remains hidden in a chaotic inner world that
the modern man has a curious pride in calling his
"real personality. " He has the substance, he says,
and only wants the form; but this is quite an
unreal opposition in a living thing. Our modern
culture is for that reason not a living one, because
it cannot be understood without that opposition.
In other words, it is not a real culture but a kind
of knowledge about culture, a complex of various
thoughts and feelings about it, from which no
\ decision as to its direction can come. Its real
/ motive force that issues in visible action is often
/ no more than a mere convention, a wretched
imitation, or even a shameless caricature. The
man probably feels like the snake that has
swallowed a rabbit whole and lies still in the sun,
avoiding all movement not absolutely necessary.
The "inner life" is now the only thing that
matters to education, and all who see it hope that
the education may not fail by being too indigest-
ible. Imagine a Greek meeting it; he would
observe that for modern men "education" and
"historical education" seem to mean the same
thing, with the difference that the one phrase is
longer. And if he spoke of his own theory, that
a man can be very well educated without any
history at all, people would shake their heads and
I; think they had not heard aright. The Greeks,


## p. 33 (#57) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 33
the famous people of. a past still near to us, had
the " unhistorical sense" strongly developed in the
period of their greatest power. If a typical child
of his age were transported to that world by some
enchantment, he would probably find the Greeks
very "uneducated. " And that discovery would
betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture
to the laughter of the world. For we moderns
have nothing of our own. We only become worth
notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with
foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and
sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an
ancient Greek who had strayed into our time
would probably call us. But the only value of
an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, 1
not in what is written outside, in the binding or
the wrapper. Aad_so the whole of modern culture
is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints
something like this on the cover: "Manual of
internal culture for external barbarians. " The
opposition of inner and outer makes the outer
side still more barbarous, as it would naturally
be, when the outward growth of a rude people
merely developed its primitive inner needs. For
what means has nature of repressing too great
a luxuriance from without? Only one,—to be
affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside
and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And
so we have the custom of no longer taking real
things seriously, we get the feeble personality on
which the real and the permanent make so little
impression. Men become at last more careless
and accommodating in external matters, and the
VOL. II. C


## p. 34 (#58) ##############################################

34 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
considerable cleft between substance and form is
widened; until they have no longer any feeling for
barbarism, if only their memories be kept con-
tinually titillated, and there flow a constant stream
of new things to be known, that can be neatly
packed up in the cupboards of their memory.
The culture of a people as against this barbarism,
can be, I think, described with justice as the
"unity of artistic style in every outward expres-
sion of the people's life. " This must not be mis-
understood, as though it were merely a question
of the opposition between barbarism and "fine
style. " The people that can be called cultured,
must be in a real sense a living unity, and not be
miserably cleft asunder into form and substance.
If one wish to promote a people's culture, let him
try to promote this higher unity first, and work
for the destruction of the modern educative system
for the sake of a true education. Let him dare to
consider how the health of a people that has been
destroyed by history may be restored, and how it
may recover its instincts with its honour.
I am only speaking, directly, about the Germans
of the present day, who have had to suffer more
than other people from the feebleness of personality
and the opposition of substance and form. "Form"
generally implies for us some convention, disguise
or hypocrisy, and if not hated, is at any rate not
loved. We have an extraordinary fear of both the
word convention and the thing. This fear drove
the German from the French school; for he wished
to become more natural, and therefore more German.
But he seems to have come to a false conclusion


## p. 35 (#59) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 35
with his "therefore. " First he ran away from his
school of convention, and went by any road he
liked: he has come ultimately to imitate voluntarily
in a slovenly fashion, what he imitated painfully
and often successfully before. So now the lazy
fellow lives under French conventions that are
actually incorrect: his manner of walking shows it,
his conversation and dress, his general way of life.
In the belief that he was returning to Nature, he
merely followed caprice and comfort, with the
smallest possible amount of self-control. Go
through any German town; you will see conven-
tions that are nothing but the negative aspect of
the national characteristics of foreign states. Every-
thing is colourless, worn out, shoddy and ill-copied.
Every one acts at his own sweet will—which is not
a strong or serious will—on laws dictated by the
universal rush and the general desire for comfort.
A dress that made no head ache in its inventing
and wasted no time in the making, borrowed from
foreign models and imperfectly copied, is regarded
as an important contribution to German fashion.
The sense of form is ironically disclaimed by the
people—for they have the "sense of substance":
theyare famous for their cult of "inwardness:"
"But there is also a famous danger in their " in-
wardness": the internal substance cannot be
seen from the outside, and so may one day take
the opportunity of vanishing, and no one notice its
absence, any more than its presence before. One
may think the German people to be very far from
this danger: yet the foreigner will have some
warrant for his reproach that our inward life is too


## p. 36 (#60) ##############################################

36
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
-vr
weak and ill-organised to provide a form and
external expression for itself. It may in rare cases
show itself finely receptive, earnest and powerful,
richer perhaps than the inward life of other peoples:
but, taken as a whole, it remains weak, as all its
fine threads are not tied together in one strong
knot. The visible action is not the self-manifes-
tation of the inward life, but only a weak and crude
attempt of a single thread to make a show of
representing the whole. And thus the German is
not to be judged on any one action, for the indi-
vidual may be as completely obscure after it as
before. He must obviously be measured by his
thoughts and feelings, which are now expressed in
his books; if only the books did not, more than
ever, raise the doubt whether the famous inward
life is still really sitting in its inaccessible shrine.
It might one day vanish and leave behind it only
the external life,—with its vulgar pride and vain
servility,—to mark the German. Fearful thought!
—as fearful as if the inward life still sat there,
painted and rouged and disguised, become a play-
actress or something worse; as his theatrical
experience seems to have taught the quiet observer
Grillparzer, standing aside as he did from the
j main press. "We feel by theory," he says. "We
ihardly know any more how our contemporaries
give expression to their feelings: we make them use
gestures that are impossible nowadays. Shake-
soeare has spoilt us moderns. "
This is a single example, its general application
perhaps too hastily assumed. But how terrible it
would be were that generalisation justified before


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 37
our eyes! There would be then a note of despair in
the phrase, "We Germans feel by theory, we are
all spoilt by history;"—a phrase that would cut
at the roots of any hope for a future national
culture. For every hope of that kind grows from
the belief in the genuineness and immediacy of
German feeling, from the belief in an untarnished
inward life. Where is our hope or belief, when its
spring is muddied, and the inward quality has
learned gestures and dances and the use of cosmetics,
has learned to express itself "with due reflection in
abstract terms," and gradually to lose itself? And
how should a great productive spirit exist among
a nation that is not sure of its inward unity and is
divided into educated men whose inner life has
been drawn from the true path of education, and
uneducated men whose inner life cannot be ap-
proached at all? How should it exist, I say, when
the people has lost its own unity of feeling, and knows
that the feeling of the part calling itself the educated
part and claiming the right of controlling the
artistic spirit of the nation, is false and hypocritical?
Here and there the judgment and taste of indi-
viduals may be higher and finer than the rest, but
that is no compensation: it tortures a man to have
to speak only to one section and be no longer in
sympathy with his people. He would rather bury
his treasure now, in disgust at the vulgar patronage
of a class, though his heart be filled with tenderness
for all. The instinct of the people can no longer
meet him half-way; it is useless for them to stretch
their arms out to him in yearning. What remains
but to turn his quickened hatred against the ban,


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38 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
strike at the barrier raised by the so-called culture,
and condemn as judge what blasted and degraded
him as a living man and a source of life? He takes
a profound insight into fate in exchange for the
godlike desire of creation and help, and ends his
days as a lonely philosopher, with the wisdom of
disillusion. It is the painfullest comedy: he who
sees it will feel a sacred obligation on him, and say
to himself,—" Help must come: the higher unity in
the nature and soul of a people must be brought
back, the cleft between inner and outer must again
disappear under the hammer of necessity. " But
to what means can he look? What remains to him
now but his knowledge? He hopes to plant the
feeling of a need, by speaking from the breadth of
that knowledge, giving it freely with both hands.
From the strong need the strong action may one
day arise. And to leave no doubt of the instance
I am taking of the need and the knowledge, my
testimony shall stand, that it is German unity in
its highest sense which is the goal of our endeavour,
far more than political union: it is the unity of the
German spirit and life after the annihilation of the
antagonism between form and substance, inward
life and convention.
V.
An excess of history seems to be an enemy to
the life of a time, and dangerous in five ways.
Firstly, the contrast of inner and outer is empha-
sised and personality weakened. Secondly, the
time comes to imagine that it possesses the rarest


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 39
of virtues, justice, to a higher degree than any
other time. Thirdly, the instincts of a nation are
thwarted, the maturity of the individual arrested
no less than that of the whole. Fourthly, we get
the belief in the old age of mankind, the belief, at
all times harmful, that we are late survivals, mere
Epigoni. Lastly, an age reaches a dangerous con-
dition of irony with regard to itself, and the still
more dangerous state of cynicism, when a cunning
egoistic theory of action is matured that maims and
at last destroys the vital strength.
To return to the first point: the modern man
suffers from a weakened personality. The Roman
of the Empire ceased to be a Roman through the
contemplation of the world that lay at his feet; he
lost himself in the crowd of foreigners that streamed
into Rome, and degenerated amid the cosmopolitan
carnival of arts, worships and moralities. It is the
same with the modern man, who is continually
having a world-panorama unrolled before his eyes
by his historical artists. He is turned into a
restless, dilettante spectator, and arrives at a con-
dition when even great wars and revolutions cannot
affect him beyond the moment. The war is hardly
at an end, and it is already converted into thousands
of copies of pointed matter, and will be soon served
up as the latest means of tickling the jaded palates
of the historical gourmets. It seems impossible for
a strong full chord to be prolonged, however
powerfully the strings are swept: it dies away
again the next moment in the soft and strength-
less echo of history. In ethical language, one never
succeeds in staying on a height; your deeds are


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4-0 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
sudden crashes, and not a long roll of thunder.
One may bring the greatest and most marvellous
thing to perfection; it must yet go down to Orcus
unhonoured and unsung. For art flies away when
you are roofing your deeds with the historical awn-
ing. The man who wishes to understand everything
in a moment, when he ought to grasp the unintel-
ligible as the sublime by a long struggle, can be
called intelligent only in the sense of Schiller's
epigram on the "reason of reasonable men. "
There is something the child sees that he does
not see; something the child hears that he does
not hear; and this something is the most important
thing of all. Because he does not understand it,
his understanding is more childish than the child's
and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of
/J*1* the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face,
and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling
the knots. He has lost or destroyed his instinct;
he can no longer trust the "divine animal" and
let the reins hang loose, when his understanding
fails him and his way lies through the desert.
His individuality is shaken, and left without any
sure belief in itself; it sinks into its own inner
being, which only means here the disordered chaos
of what it has learned, which will never express
itself externally, being mere dogma that cannot
turn to life. Looking further, we see how the
banishment of instinct by history has turned men
to shades and abstractions: no one ventures to
show a personality, but masks himself as a man
of culture, a savant, poet or politician.
If one take hold of these masks, believing he


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 41
has to do with a serious thing and not a mere
puppet-show—for they all have an appearance of
seriousness—he will find nothing but rags and
coloured streamers in his hands. He must
deceive himself no more, but cry aloud, "Off with
your jackets, or be what you seem! " A man of
the royal stock of seriousness must no longer be
a Don Quixote, for he has better things to do
than to tilt at such pretended realities. But he
must always keep a sharp look about him, call
his " Halt! who goes there? " to all the shrouded
figures, and tear the masks from their faces. And
see the result! One might have thought that
history encouraged men above all to be honest,
even if it were only to be honest fools: this used
to be its effect, but is so no longer.