not a knower, the masters of the school smother and deaden me with their science of the sublime and free world of the deep and the divine and the eternal,”—let the soul that “thought” has kept from _seeing_ and _hearing_ and _feeling_, so cry, and how childish, how ridiculously petty, how weak and pathological, will all schoolmasterism come to seem! Nature is also _Art_, genuine, true art. It is an inner nature, a soul-nature, a soul-life. This art-life which gushes forth like a spring from secret depths, this enraptures the heart glowing with Dionysiac enthusiasm, and steals over men like sweet images of a dream, which will not fade even from his waking soul. Then it sings in us in a wonderful way, in an unheard-of manner,—in jubilant bliss, aye, in heartbreaking lamentations, longing for death! Life smites the strings of our soul, life itself, and makes them resound in secret and hidden depths. It is this rich, overflowing life which mirrors all its colorful magnificence in the soul, and reveals to us its height and depth in dazzling light or midnight darkness. But even here, here most of all perhaps, even out of this art men have made a “school” and a schoolmasterism. Men try to measure according to rules—measure what most of all mocks rules. Rules for poetry, rules for song, rules for color, for light and shade, rules for the creation (copying?) of pencil and brush and chisel and square, rules, rules, ever rules—until one would think that art was for the sake of the rules of the school, and not _vice versa_. There was a time—and for the matter of that, there still is—when the born master had a slim chance and short shrift among the “learned” masters. Who did not know a “school” by whose name he could proudly name himself, thus guaranteeing his art to be artistic; who beheld the world with his own free eyes, unfitted with spectacles by some one of the “masters”; who with listening soul eavesdropped life, asking never what was “written in the law” of art’s scribes and pharisees upon the subject, let him set his house in order, for he must die and not live, at least he must be cast out of the synagogue, excluded from the artists’ guild, he must expect the “masters” to pounce upon him—at least with the hoary weapons of obloquy and ridicule and ostracism and starvation—until all the joy has gone out of his life. _Vers libre_—did not, does not, the “master” antecedently and dogmatically know how “rotten” that is? Ah, but what if that attitude of the finishedness and finality of art, especially in its form, should replace art and artists with schools and scholars? Are we to have only “masters” of schools, or also _Masters_ who belong to no school, and who cannot be tagged as scholars of another “master.”