Humanism and America

Diverse and variegated as the texture of our contemporary life and literature is, a great part of it may be shown to have a fundamental unity. That unity lies in a certain fear and hopelessness,—occasioned by a mechanistic philosophy and ultimately owing, I think, to the misapplied and ill-digested implications of a popular scientific education. One meets everywhere some attempt to analyse and explain the life and destiny of man solely on the basis of his physique or environment, or on some other basis equally uncoloured by human imagination and idealisation. This attitude is not universal with us, nor is it even general, but it contains almost all that is original with us, and if we consider what is original as also characteristic, we can only postulate that the characteristic feature in our contemporary literature is the interpretation of life as a phase of merely animalistic existence.

Now, this admission that man in no way transcends the limits of purely physical life is an act of cowardice to which no previous generation has ever so thoroughly committed itself. This admission is directly contrary to the general spirit of Ancient philosophy, impossible to the serenity of the Middle Ages, repugnant to the exuberance of the Renaissance, unnatural to the Romanticism, however defined, of the early nineteenth century. And even during the faltering generations just preceding our own, there were still eloquent humanists able to show that whatever man’s circumstances may be, and whatever his origin may have been, man was yet able to form for himself an intellectual and spiritual life and destiny independent of origin and circumstance.

This courage of the past—this self-confidence of the past by which it was enabled to broaden the scope of its life and pass on to us a social and imaginative heritage by which every situation and relationship of our lives is rendered more beautiful—was not the result of accident. It was the result of long and untiring efforts in self-cultivation, and the records of these efforts are to be found in the great literatures which not only recorded, but inspired and motivated them. In those times the staple of education was the study of literature; and, for my present purposes, the important features of this study were, that it was thorough and exact, that it neglected no labour which might aid in the central purpose, and that, in requiring a certain common background in all students, it was eminently a social and even international thing.

To attain the same degree of courage and self-confidence, it would be necessary to us to make the same effort of self-cultivation. The quality of contemporary literature suggests that we are not exerting that effort; manners and excesses and failures in contemporary life equally suggest that we are not. And if we examine the habitual methods of contemporary teachers of literature, we find so many differences between these methods and those of the past that it is plain that our educators have all but lost sight of their central objects.

As early as 1882, in Literature and Science, Matthew Arnold set forth a rather singular prophecy, describing with great exactness much of our present situation. “As with Greek,” he said, “so with letters generally: they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but they will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place.”

It is essential to consider how far this prophecy has been realised, for it penetrates the very heart of our problem; it suggests the entire lack of a central emphasis which characterises even the literary education of our day. American education might very well be said to be passing through a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency, but by no manner of means might it be said that in American education letters had obtained or regained their leading place. Although the colleges swarm with students of literature, the greater part of these students have a more accurate knowledge of the problems of the natural sciences or of economics than they have of the problems and methods of literary study. As a plain matter of fact, a great many undergraduates choose to specialise in literature, and particularly in English literature, because they believe it a study easier than any other. And through a smattering of all the ologies which has been their education from early childhood, they interpret and condemn great masterpieces of which they have never learned the true significance, since they have never confronted soberly the old traditions that illuminate and sustain those masterpieces. It is largely because our education deals seriously with almost every subject except literature, that literature has lost its leading place; and it is because literature has lost its leading place that education has lost much of its inspiring power, and our contemporary literary innovators are characterised to such a degree by fear and hopelessness.

It is not unnatural, however, that popular opinion, which to-day influences even the teaching of literature, should consider scientific education so important, for the public sees its leaders in every field profoundly influenced by science. The leader of our political organisation, like most of our leaders, happens to be a scientist; most of our philosophers are scientists, and our magazines deal monthly with the concessions that our religious leaders are making to the new implications of science. It is not unnatural that science should be popularly considered an important study and the study of literature the recreation of an idle day. And it follows just as naturally that swarms of undergraduate students should have imposed upon the teaching of literature much of the dilettantism which this popular view suggests is inherent in it. The typical student of literature—of English literature, for example—may be known by four characteristics,—a fear of Spenser, a dislike of Milton, a hatred of Wordsworth, and a suppressed desire to write a musical comedy. This is the type of student that must be taught, and it easily follows that the teaching of him should come to lack the thoroughness and exactness, the desire to master ancillary subjects, and the common background, which I have enumerated above as having once been the ideals of literary study.

The place of these ideals is taken by a dilettantism which displays itself in two forms,—in individualism and in sciolism. The first, a shallow type of individualism, is directed by the theory that a student’s peculiar tastes are the ultimate criteria by which he should make his judgments, and that he must be seduced into a liking for literature by the application of whatever literary candy pleases his palate. The thought that a man should be somewhat adapted to his reading, and not his reading to him, is altogether alien to this theory, and the existence of common social ideals, which, if they are not present in the student, should be developed, is not suspected by its propounders.

It is to the adoption of this principle by many secondary-school teachers that we owe the presence in our colleges of the campus radicals who curse their fates and the restraints prohibiting them from living their own lives. The ordinary progress of students guided by such principles is to begin easily with something on the level, say, of Kipling, and gradually to work up to the high seriousness of the poetry of Oscar Wilde. The popularity and influence of the sort of contemporary literature which I have mentioned may be very well explained, I think, by the existence of this view in the minds of many of our educators.

The sciolism which is the second form of our literary dilettantism,—a shallowness which investigates only the superficialities of things, which delights in accepted definitions and phrases,—is largely involved in the manner in which our times have forsaken the study of the classics, as well as of the other literatures and other subjects without which the study of no one literature can be complete. No teacher of science would admit to his classes students unversed in mathematics; he would say that science without some mathematical knowledge was an impossibility. Now, a knowledge of the literature and customs of classical antiquity is just as necessary to the student of a modern literature as a mathematical knowledge is to the student of science. The teacher of literature, however, who demanded from his students this indispensable knowledge, would soon lecture to empty halls. Popular opinion, as reflected by those who are to be taught, is altogether on the side of those “other matters, far too many,” which have been crowded into education.

The teacher of literature may well turn out, in the end, to be the sole means by which society and literature can be raised from their present depression, and then only provided his influence be stricter and more humane. For a materialistic epoch such as ours, the only refuge and the only basis for further progress is in the idealistic humanity of the past; but the search of the past must not be such a frail and self-indulgent one as condemns before it understands. Whether we have outworn the ideals of history or whether they were projected into a realm of life beyond our present power of realisation, in either case they reflect the tendency directing all human achievement,—a tendency to rise to a plane uncircumscribed by the limits of physical existence. Accordingly, the teacher of any branch of our cultural heritage has within his hands the reins of destiny; slackly and half-heartedly he may lose them from his grasp, or by firmly holding them he may guide the future toward a new triumph of the human spirit. There is no sound where there are no ears, nor without the development of the inner mind and segregated human life, of which our literature has been both the motivation and the record, could there again be true community or beauty in the world.