The Steiner school.(Book Review)

George Steiner Lessons of the Masters. Harvard University Press, 8 pages, $19.95

A book about great teachers--by George Steiner? One's eyes narrow suspiciously. But no, he is in chastened mood. "Why have I been remunerated," he asks, "for what is my oxygen and raison d'etre?" Tactfully he avoids answering that question, evoking instead his weekly seminars at Geneva, where he and his students (now dispersed "on five continents") would study Phaedrus or The Tempest and he would "introduce (falteringly) The Brothers Karamazov" The university teacher, heir of Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha, thus enjoys "touches of grace and hope." Why, he later concedes, "even at a humble level--that of the schoolmaster--to teach, to teach well, is to be accomplice to transcendent possibility": for who knows whether that solemn little boy in the back row might not turn out to be a budding George Steiner?

Speaking as someone who has operated "at a humble level" for as long as Steiner was in Geneva, I may tell him that I, too, have taught Phaedrus and The Tempest--and the passage from Proust on the death of Bergotte which he also mentions. Not Karamazov, admittedly, but one can only do so much at a humble level. Even so, I cheer myself with the reflection that my students would not, as he does, believe Plato's Socrates as a character to be "comparable if not superior to" Falstaff, Hamlet, or Anna Karenina, or claim that the Platonic dialogues are "as intricately plotted as Henry James's" or think that Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is a novel to admire. In the customarily wide range of Steiner's survey, one figure eludes him. Shakespeare is silent, he thinks, about the master/disciple relationship. (He forgets, apparently, Falstaff's role as a kind of parodic Socrates to Prince Hal.) Of course, as Steiner says, Shakespeare was suspicious of academic authority; he never attended a university seminar, and had Hamlet gone to Geneva rather than Wittenberg he might have been spared much perplexity.

Amid the pomposity, portentousness, and vacuousness of Steiner's prose--"the sweat of a monument" as James Wood brilliantly describes it in his lethal essay on Steiner in The Broken Estate--some important points struggle for survival. Yes, a great teacher does have a quasi-seductive appeal to the intellect. Yes, a great teacher is ultimately lonely, because if he has been successful his pupils can do without him (think of the moving evaporation of Virgil from the Divine Comedy). Wittgenstein has a penetrating passage in Culture and Value:

 
   A teacher may get good, even astounding, results 
   from his pupils while he is teaching them 
   and yet not be a good teacher; because it may 
   be that, while his pupils are directly under his 
   influence, he raises them to a height which is 
   not natural to them, without fostering their 
   own capacities for work at this level, so that 
   they immediately decline again as soon as the 
   teacher leaves the classroom. Perhaps this is 
   how it is with me; I have sometimes thought 
   so. 

It was also true, I should say, of Leavis, who is often linked with Wittgenstein as a great twentieth-century teacher. And yes, the influence of great teaching is incommunicable; the dicta of Nadia Boulanger, one of the few women in a book whose title and incidental usages largely confine pedagogic greatness to males, are colorless, but it was her charisma, her physical presence, that mattered.

This is why Steiner's remarks about computer technology are as wrong as they could well be: