The record-union., 1894-09-08

her." which ran through fifty editions
few years ago. It is a better example
because it dealt with a higher subject
matter, and expressing simply and
beautifully as it did ideas on art, educa-
ton, politics and life, satisfied a nobler
intellectual demand. Indeed, it was so
seriously thoughtful that it could have
succeeded only in country as intellec-
tual as Germany, where for generations
the people have got in modified form the
ideas of the great philosophers, who have
influenced the civilization of the age.
All the more pity, therefore, that the
universities have no great thinkers, that
among the many great brains teaching in
them there are not some who will draw
conclusions and write tor the general
reader. But it is all science in the facul-
ties, and any man in them or out of
them who ventures TO theorlze is driven
from caste. The press conducted by the
men trained in the universities suffers
from the collegiate or academic relation
ship. Writers in all departments are
checked by the chilling influence of the
professors, and the thinkers are the
worlingmen and their leaders, and a
school of young literary men and dram
atists in Berlin.
This Berlin school, unfortunately,
though full of sable heads, is infected
with Schopenhauer's philosophy and
the ideas OF the French pathology. By
this latter phrase | mean the ideas that
are developed by emotional study of So
cial and human diseases, known in the
Summing fiction of France, England and
America. The young Berliners are put
ting their sociology, their psychology,
their pessimIsm and their criminal no.
tions on the stage and into books. The
people are untouched, except in so far as
a few of the socialist army can stand the
so-called 'naturalism." Realism" is
not a strong enough term, so the reform
ers have taken the more materialistic
phrase.
AS for the socialist and labor news
papers, they are very repulsive TO an in
telligent reader. Not because OF their
theories and purposes, but because of the
unsoundness, the apparently intentional
thickness of their reasoning. 1t would
seem as though all over the world the dis
contented can secure only the intellectual
trash and the logical gymnasts to write
for them. There are some very able lee
turers in the German universities, as
there are In our own, who are in SYM
pathy with labor and with the socialists
but they cannot reach the people who
should hear them. The rank and file get
the distorted interpretations or the small
minded men, whom, probably for their
violence and unscrupulous disregard of
facts and consistency, they prefer for
their authorities and mental guides
To be noticed in this letter remains
only the works of art. tie paintings and
sculptures that have been finished this
year. There is a decided tendency to
give plastic form to scientific ideas. In
the Munich exhibition are some exam
pies of this movement which may be a
good one, despite the disiavor of the
scientists. | will refer only to one picture,
that of Gatnel Max, the painter of Bava-
risn Madonnas. He has made a picture
of the man-ape, following a zoOlogist for
details, which represents family in the
transition period. Repulsive it is truly,
for the faces are human in expression,
hairless, but with animal features; the
bodies are white (hardly to have been eX--
pectedl, but the flesh is loose and in folds;
the limbs are long, like the apes, but
formed like those of man for human uses,
The family group consists of a father,
mother and child, resting in nook in
the woods.
Photographs of the picture have sold
rapidly all over Germany, a fact that
angers the professors, whose feelings
afford another illustration of my PROPOSE
ton. They not only dread thought, that
is the drawing of conclusions from the
results OF their laboratory investigations,
but they frOwn upon the thinking of
others. 1t is a confessed policy of the
universities of Germany to keep science
from their people. TO sever the academic
from the practical life. Their reason
may seem good, it is that unframed
thinkers make false and illogical use of
their facts. This is true in every coun-
try. But the more rational correction of
the fault would be for the trained think
ers to come out of their laboratories and
write for the people. Let them speak the