Humanism and America

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HUMANISM AND AMERICA ESSAYS ON THE OUTLOOK OF MODERN CIVILISATION _Edited
by_ NORMAN FOERSTER FARRAR AND RINEHART INCORPORATED PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY FARRAR AND RINEHART PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED _Preface_ “Life’s a long headache in a noisy
street,” sang the poet Masefield in _The Widow in the Bye Street_ seventeen
years ago. Since then, we have all come to live in Main rather than Bye
Street, and our headache has grown apace despite the best efforts of the
physicians of the age. The noise and whirl increase, the disillusion and
depression deepen, the nightmare of Futility stalks before us in the
inevitable intervals when activity flags. Heroically or mock-heroically we
distrust or reject such stimulants and anodynes as religion, moral
conventions, the dignity of manners, the passion for beauty, and even our
recent faith in democracy, in liberalism, in progress, in science, in
efficiency, in machinery. At length revolt and scepticism themselves have
ceased to be interesting. The modern temper has produced a terrible
headache. In vain does our Chief Executive assure us that “we have reached
a higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the
history of the world.” Like Mr. Punch when it was announced that the
government would soon be broadcasting intelligence by radio, we wonder
“Where will the government get it?” All governments, all nations, are
to-day in this predicament. The alleged Americanisation of Europe appears
to signify, at bottom, that tendencies native to Europe are being worked
out most thoroughly in the United States and are therefore making the
United States the model of twentieth-century Europe. At the same time
Europe knows that the model is, to speak very gently, inadequate. For a
good many years our own writers have deplored the condition of civilisation
in the United States, with exaggeration but essential truth. But they have
generally made of revolt and scepticism ends rather than beginnings of
wisdom. For materialistic complacency they have substituted a smart
superiority resting on the most dubious foundations. Their feebleness in
constructive power is very patent. They are part of the disease--symptoms
not remedies. Our “intellectual atmosphere,” however, is now rapidly
changing, is becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons,
oppressed with the stale scepticism of the post-war period, are beginning
to grow sceptical of that scepticism, and are looking for a new set of
controlling ideas capable of restoring value to human existence. Certain
forces are making for order and for new objectives. They are not strong
forces, they can scarcely be called movements, but they are receiving a
hearing and they contain the promise of growth. One of these forces is
known as “humanism,” which is rapidly becoming a word to conjure with. In
its broadest signification, it denotes a belief that the proper study of
mankind is man, and that this study should enable mankind to perceive and
realise its humanity. But the study of mankind is capable of yielding all
manner of results, so that, for a long time to come, we may expect the word
denoting this study to carry a large variety of meanings. Since man may be
conceived as living on three planes, the natural, the human, and the
religious, the content of the middle term will frequently tend to be
invaded by that of the extremes. Thus, many persons who call themselves
humanists, in this naturistic era from which we have not yet emerged, are
unwittingly naturists yearning stoically for adaptation to the universe or
mystically for a fusion of the human and the natural. Such persons might
call themselves, paradoxically, humanistic naturists. In the interest of
clearness, as it seems to me, the word humanism should be confined to a
working philosophy seeking to make a resolute distinction between man and
nature and between man and the divine. The most fruitful approximation to
such a distinction, in the twentieth century, has been the work of two
American scholar-critics, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. The
characteristic thought of Irving Babbitt was already adumbrated in 1895 in
an address at the University of Wisconsin on “The Rational Study of the
Classics,” published two years later in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and in 1908
included in his book on _Literature and the American College_. This book
contains in essence, one may almost say, everything in the series of
volumes in which he has since applied his humanistic standards to various
aspects of modern life and thought. With a tenacity of purpose unexampled
in an age shifting aimlessly from one enthusiasm and disillusionment to
another, with an effect growing more massive as he has worked out his ideas
in such fields as æsthetics, literary criticism, ethics, psychology,
education, and politics, with a remarkable power of relating his sense of
permanent values to an historical sense (so that his books are in one view
works of history, and in another, doctrinal inductions from facts), with a
vast accumulation of learning that has been thoroughly assimilated, and
with a mode of expression notable for weighty vigour, earnestness,
brilliant ridicule, and an instinct for ruinous quotation, Professor
Babbitt has done more than any one else to formulate the concept of
humanism and gain for it an ever-widening hearing. A great teacher as well
as writer, lecturing to students at Harvard for some thirty-five years, he
has done much to shape the minds and purposes of a whole generation of
young men, and thus to render possible the continuance of his task in the
future. Paul Elmer More, after a brief experience as teacher of Sanskrit
and Classical literature, entered criticism through the avenue of
journalism, becoming literary editor of the _Independent_ and the New York
_Evening Post_ and editor of the _Nation_. Through his relation with
contributors to the _Nation_, in particular, he exerted a powerful
influence upon the higher critical activity of the country, an influence
extended more widely through his long series of _Shelburne Essays_,
beginning in 1904, in which he united in fine balance a profound and
far-ranging scholarship, unusual psychological insight, an humanistic point
of view, and a gift of firm, luminous, urbane but penetrating writing.
Undervalued because of their hostility to the popular tendencies of the
epoch, these essays will one day be generally recognised, I believe, as the
highest accomplishment in literary criticism in the whole of American
literature. The fundamental unity in the work of our two leading humanistic
thinkers may be seen by comparing, say, the conclusion of Mr. Babbitt’s
_Masters of Modern French Criticism_ and the “Definitions of Dualism” at
the close of the eighth series of _Shelburne Essays_, or the introduction
to _Democracy and Leadership_ and the first essay in the _New Shelburne
Essays_, Volume I. The main difference, perhaps, lies in emphasis; while
Mr. Babbitt has been first and last concerned with building up a sound
conception of individualism, Mr. More has been progressively absorbed in
the study of the duality of human nature. His strong religious bent in this
study led, in the years following his retirement from journalism, to the
writing of _The Greek Tradition_, in five volumes, on the relation of
Platonic and Hellenistic to Christian thought--a monumental work, the full
significance of which can scarcely be estimated in its own time. In a book
recently crowned by the French Academy, _Le Mouvement humaniste aux
États-Unis_, Louis J. A. Mercier, professor of French at Harvard, restricts
his account to Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and W. C. Brownell. In a
broad view of the “movement” the late Mr. Brownell doubtless merits a
conspicuous place. Entering criticism, like Mr. More, by way of journalism,
Brownell performed valuable service through his acute non-provincial book
on _French Traits_ as far back as 1888, and through his perennial
insistence on high standards in literature and the fine arts. Never a
humanist in the strict doctrinal sense, before his death he inclined to
respond to the humanitarian optimism of America. The tendency toward
humanitarianism, emotional sympathy with divine or undivine average
humanity, appeared more strikingly in the post-war writings of Stuart P.
Sherman. A student under Professor Babbitt, a contributor to the _Nation_
under Mr. More, Sherman became the author of two books written in a
vigorous and accomplished style and permeated with humanistic principles,
one on Matthew Arnold conceived as a Victorian humanist, and one _On
Contemporary Literature_ conceived as a chaos of naturalism. Then, carried
away by admiration of Wilsonian idealism and hatred of “Prussian
autocracy,” and by an uncritical devotion to Emerson, he drifted from his
humanistic position into an ever vaguer faith in the common man, and at
length, as a literary journalist in New York, into a rather indulgent
impressionism. In the field of the fine arts, the most humanistic writer
has been Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., of Princeton. Among others who published
significant books in various fields, prior to 1928, are P. H. Frye,
Sherlock Bronson Gass, Robert Shafer, Percy H. Houston, and W. F. Giese. By
1928 something like a movement could indeed be discerned: books began to
multiply, and periodicals were printing series of articles--the _Forum_ and
the _Bookman_ in America, the _Criterion_ (edited by T. S. Eliot) and the
_Nineteenth Century and After_ in England. Whether the movement will
continue to develop, whether it will succumb to disunion and vagueness, or
be submerged by a narrow conventionalism of one sort or other, it would be
idle to predict. Though we have in America the semblance of a new movement,
humanism itself is not new. It was new, I conceive, when human wisdom was
new. It was comparatively new in ancient Greece, Judea, India, and China.
It was rather old by the time of the Renaissance, when the word humanist
came into currency. In one way or another, its doctrine and discipline have
been clarified by persons as various as Homer, Phideas, Plato, Aristotle,
Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakspere, Milton,
Goethe; more recently, by Matthew Arnold in England and Emerson and Lowell
in America: a strange assortment of names, no doubt, but also an indication
of the inner diversity as well as the central unity of the humanist ideal.
For into the aim of human perfection enter many elements, no less than that
central order which is the fruit of discipline. Yet, if humanism is never
new, it must constantly confront new problems in time and place. In the
Renaissance, its great foe was mediæval otherworldliness; to-day its great
foe is thisworldliness, obsession with physical things and the instincts
that bind us to the animal order--in a word, the many forms of naturism
that have all but destroyed humane insight, discipline, and elevation. In a
given age, humanism may have the task of urging the claims of beauty; in
another age the claims of science, or of conduct. It may have one problem
in France, and another across the Channel. So long as America tends to set
the pattern for the twentieth century, so long will the greatest problem of
humanism lie here in the United States. This relativity of humanistic needs
will perhaps go far toward explaining the special traits of the movement in
America and the corresponding special lines of attack by its naturistic
opponents. Romantics, realists, and sceptics are daily attacking on four
fronts: humanists, it is held, are academic, un-American, reactionary, and
Puritanic. Humanists are said to be academic. If this means that they are
all university teachers, it is obviously not true. If it means that they
are not interested in the present, it is obviously not true. If it means
that they are interested in theory and not in practical affairs, it is not
true, for what specially concerns them is the relation of theory and
practice. They can scarcely be convicted of displaying what Stuart P.
Sherman, who knew American academic life from the inside, termed “the
professorial vices of pedantry, indolence, timidity, and intellectual
quietism, which is a euphemism for the sluggish tolerance of men without
philosophic conviction or intellectual purpose.” If it means that our
humanists have been more interested than the workaday journalist critics in
concrete knowledge and in general ideas, then indeed they may be termed
academic. They perceive that when a new movement of thought and life is to
be got under way, the first stage is naturally one of acquiring and
organising knowledge--particularly neglected knowledge. This was clear to
Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell in our little New England renaissance; it
was clear to Lessing, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers in Germany; it was
clear to the humanists of the Renaissance throughout Europe. Let us
remember that the first of all universities was Plato’s “Academy,” the
object of which was to attain a wisdom deeper than that of the
market-place. Let us remember that “mere” theories are often high
explosives, destructive of the prevailing practical life of the
market-place, as witness Locke and Rousseau and the German thinkers from
Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche. Humanists are said to be un-American.
According to those who cultivate the nationalist conception, a valid new
criticism, new literature, new culture must spring from our American
experience, not from imported ideas. They forget the lesson of the past
that cultural movements have two sexes, so to speak, one native and one
foreign, and that the native expresses itself in the main unconsciously
under the incitement of the foreign. The native for the most part takes
care of itself, the foreign must be sedulously cultivated. In the
Renaissance a humanism imported from Italy fructified the native genius of
most of Europe. Later, England, for example, drew upon France and then
Germany; Germany upon France and England; France upon Spain and England;
the United States upon England and Germany. Unlike some of his followers
our Walt Whitman himself finally perceived the need of America’s
assimilation of foreign culture--even from “all former lands” beginning
with ancient India and Greece. It is doubtful whether a _real_ American
culture could ever spring from our own experience; it is certain that it
could be _caused_ to spring from our own experience by a happy use of
foreign culture. Humanists are supposed to be reactionary. According to
those who pride themselves on living in the present if not in the future,
humanists want “to return to Buddha and the Bho Tree, to Socrates and the
ilex.” Being, in the main, historically educated men, however, humanists
are well aware that a return to the past is impossible. On the other hand,
they are also aware that, as cultural movements must draw upon foreign
supplies, so they must also draw upon past culture. If a present age
appears to be bad, it can be changed only by the introduction of forces not
vitally existing in that age, and since the future is always a blank, these
forces can be found only through a reinterpretation of the past. Thus, to a
large extent the Renaissance was rendered possible through the “revival of
learning” by the humanists, and the romantic movement of the late
eighteenth century was in part a “return” to the Middle Ages and the
national past. Even the typical modernist, in his efforts to escape being a
Victorian or a Puritan, is plainly bent on “returning” to the primitive.
This brings us to the last and most frequent charge: that humanists are
Puritans in disguise. It is hard to answer. Nobody knows what a Puritan is,
and when he is disguised such a person is not easy to deal with. Even
Professor Percy Gardner, a leading English authority on Greek art, ventures
to speak of the “puritanism” of the Dorians. While in America humanists are
attacked as Puritan, in France they are attacked as Catholic, and Mr. T. S.
Eliot has been attacked as both. Even though American historians do not
agree as to what the distinguishing virtues and vices of the
seventeenth-century Puritans were, it may be suggested that one of their
plainest virtues was the possession of a certain faith, now extinct. Their
successors, wanting this faith, cannot well be said to have even the
Puritan defects of that virtue. Sometimes those dire opposites of the
humanists, the promoters of Uplift, are called Puritans. For my part, I
think of our Uplifters rather as misguided humanitarians, followers not of
Calvin but rather of that other Genevan, Rousseau. What the naturists are
really driving at, when they fight this phantom Puritan, this Feathertop,
is regimentation or discipline. Now, humanism does wish to emphasise
discipline, whenever, as to-day, it needs to be emphasised. It has no
desire to measure conduct quantitatively, according to the familiar
formula, as three-fourths of life, but it does desire to show that the
quality of all life is higher or lower according as our power of vital
restraint is exercised. Humanism conceives that the power of restraint is
peculiarly human, and that those who throw down the reins are simply
abandoning their humanity to the course of animal life or the complacency
of vegetables. It conceives, further, that the attainment of the ideal of
completeness of life, of a human nature rounded and perfect on all its
sides, is fatally frustrated at the start unless the ideal of centrality or
self-control is introduced as the regulating principle. The substitution of
_intensity_ as the regulating principle, which is proposed by many
modernists such as Aldous Huxley, provides for quantity but not quality of
life, and tends to defeat the ideal of completeness, because certain parts
of human nature, if not disciplined, will always thrive at the expense of
other parts. This fact was glimpsed even by Walter Pater, notwithstanding
his doctrine of the intense moment, when he wrote: “For us of the modern
world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by
so many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience,
the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far
harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life.
Yet, no less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.”
Many other modernists reject the ideal of completeness itself as making for
a dull uniformity, and propose instead the ideal of diversity. Life is
“full of a number of things,” one of them prattles, remembering his
_Child’s Garden_, but forgetting that humanism itself aims at
diversity--not by urging men to be queerly “different,” each in his own
infantile way, but by urging them to develop with mature reasonableness the
diversities latent within themselves and thus to work toward a many-sided
human type. Humanism believes, with Goethe, that “every one must form
himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general
idea of which all mankind are constituents.” There have been enough
humanists in the world to prove that in fact (and not only in theory) this
image of a dull humanistic uniformity is merely another scarecrow. It is
not the humanists, certainly, who look forward to a millennium in which all
men and women will be superbly alike! If they speak more of the past than
of the future, it is because the wisdom of the ages is on record and the
wisdom of the future a hope devoid of useful content. But they unreservedly
agree with critics who protest that “beyond anything that has yet been said
by the academic humanists, there is work for the humane imagination to do.”
This does not exhaust the attacks on the humanists. They are reproached by
romanticists for being romantic, but I let that pass. More sensibly, they
are ridiculed by irreligionists for being religious, but I let that pass
also. Something should be said, however, of still another attack--the
objection, by impressionists, that they employ words and phrases as
catchwords and labels in disregard of the elusiveness of truth. To offer
this objection, surely, is to object to the use of language itself. If
words are not more or less arbitrary labels for things and ideas and the
relationship of things and ideas, all language is pure nonsense. When Mr.
Van Wyck Brooks fifteen years ago, in _America’s Coming-of-Age_, called for
“catchwords” as well as a “programme,” he showed a sounder instinct than he
and his followers have displayed since: they have found no programme, and
are increasingly averse to catchwords. No doubt the truth _an sich_ is
hopelessly elusive, but the attainment of provisional or human truth is the
reward of courage and labour. We cannot afford to shirk the task of
achieving a reasonably clear and consistent terminology, even though every
definition is by nature an affirmation that tends to shut out some portion
of absolute truth. Whenever words become too hard and exclusive, humanism
is concerned with reconsidering their frontiers; but whenever, as to-day,
they become so vague and fluid as to imperil human communication, humanism
aims to achieve a clear relation of labels to thought. If the object of
this book, on the one hand, is to indicate the fundamental needs of America
as the dominant world power and inadequate model of civilisation in the
twentieth century, on the other hand its object is to inquire into the
fundamental needs of humanism--to work toward a set of definitions and a
terminology neither too rigid nor too loose, to consider the requirements
of humanism in the various activities of modern thought and life, to
determine the special tasks that confront humanism in this latest moment of
time, and to enlist the interest and efforts of that “rather considerable
leaven of intelligent people” who, as the _Forum_ has said editorially,
“cannot view with indifference the general decay of standards and the
resultant chaos into which our intellectual and moral life has been
plunged.” The publication of a symposium addressed to this public was first
proposed, years ago, by Percy H. Houston, and to him as well as to G. R.
Elliott and Robert Shafer, advisory editors in this undertaking, cordial
thanks are due for many valuable suggestions, although I am alone
responsible for the form which the book has finally assumed. The
contributors are for the most part between thirty and forty-five years of
age (perhaps three or four are over, and three or four under these limits).
One-third of them, as it happens, hold or have held important editorial
positions. The academic group comprises several professors of English
literature, one of French and comparative literature, one of the fine arts
(also director of an art museum), and one of physics (also dean of a
graduate school). The youngest contributor, a student and athlete,
represents that rapidly growing part of the rising generation which is
turning from aimless revolt to the quest of standards. In consequence of a
diversity in occupations, as well as in temperament and personality, the
authors of the book display numerous divergencies in outlook, in emphasis,
and especially in tone. While all of them, for example, are lovers of the
law of measure or “Golden Mean,” some of them seek the way of quiet
firmness or “sweet reasonableness,” even in this blatant age, while others
conceive that modern excesses must be “Scorch’d by a flaming speech on
moderation.” As the reader will soon perceive, the contributors agree in
certain broad, fundamental opinions. Without exception they have sought to
work their way free of the dogmatic incrustations that threaten to corrode
even what is sound in characteristically modern thought. None of them, I
think, can be suspect of a secret attraction to those pseudo-scientific and
humanitarian short-cuts to truth and morality that lead in fact to pure
scepticism and anarchy. All of them perceive that a naturistic humanism is
finally a paradox. Some of them might be termed “pure” or “mere” humanists,
others are religious humanists. Each has been free to speak his own mind,
and is responsible only for what he has himself said. If the reader chances
to conceive, as I personally do, that Irving Babbitt is at the centre of
the humanistic movement, some of the other authors will appear to be near
the periphery, although they too may seem near the centre from some other
point of view. The authors of this symposium, in a word, have no desire to
form a closed school, or party, or cult, or religion. They would agree that
the _ism_ in humanism is at present a necessary evil. They are here
temporarily assembled for the sole end of offering suggestions toward that
new integration of values which may yet justify modernity. Norman Foerster.
_January, 1930._ _Contents_ PAGE PREFACE: _Norman Foerster_ v THE
PRETENSIONS OF SCIENCE: _Louis Trenchard More_ 3 HUMANISM: AN ESSAY AT
DEFINITION: _Irving Babbitt_ 25 THE HUMILITY OF COMMON SENSE: _Paul Elmer
More_ 52 THE PRIDE OF MODERNITY: _G. R. Elliott_ 75 RELIGION WITHOUT
HUMANISM: _T. S. Eliot_ 105 THE PLIGHT OF OUR ARTS: _Frank Jewett Mather,
Jr._ 113 THE DILEMMA OF MODERN TRAGEDY: _Alan Reynolds Thompson_ 127 AN
AMERICAN TRAGEDY: _Robert Shafer_ 149 PANDORA’S BOX IN AMERICAN FICTION:
_Harry Hayden Clark_ 170 DIONYSUS IN DISMAY: _Stanley P. Chase_ 205 OUR
CRITICAL SPOKESMEN: _Gorham B. Munson_ 231 BEHAVIOUR AND CONTINUITY:
_Bernard Bandler II_ 258 THE WELL OF DISCIPLINE: _Sherlock Bronson Gass_
268 COURAGE AND EDUCATION: _Richard Lindley Brown_ 285 A LIST OF BOOKS 291
_The essence of Elizabethan as of other humanisms is the understanding of
man and the definition of the sphere of properly human activity. The
philosophical mind of Shakespeare’s age began the work of reflection by
cleaving the universe along three levels. On the lowest level is the
natural world, which is the plane of instinct, appetite, animality, lust,
the animal passions or affections; on this level the regulation is by
necessary or natural law. On the middle level is the human world, which is
regulated and, in a sense, created by the will and knowledge of man;
working upon the natural world; but governed by reason, the special human
faculty; and illuminated more or less from the level above. On the third
level is the supernatural world, which is the plane of spiritual beings,
and the home of eternal ideas._ --STUART P. SHERMAN: “ON CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE.” HUMANISM AND AMERICA _The Pretensions of Science_ LOUIS
TRENCHARD MORE I Since the time when the Whigs of England fastened the
specific title of _Pretender_ on the son and grandson of James II, the word
has retained in our speech a sinister significance. For us a pretender is
one who makes a false claim to a title. But in speaking of the pretensions
of science, humanists do not mean precisely this. No humanist would deny
that science has a legitimate field of its own when investigating the
phenomena of the objective world and attempting to find law and order in
the flux of events. Nor would he deny that it has added much to our
security and power and has increased our opportunities for a richer life
and character. Science has its legitimate pretensions to power; but false
claims are now being advanced on all sides under the shelter of its name,
and it is these false claims which the humanist is concerned to expose.
While our modern pretenders are unfortunately far greater in number than
the two descendants of James, they do fall into two classes. The first
includes those men of science who are not content to work in their limited
field, but are really metaphysicians who have created a fictitious world of
the imagination made out of æthers, electrons, and mathematical symbols,
and have confused it in their own and others’ minds with the sensible world
of brute fact. This class does comparatively little direct harm, as it
merely creates some confusion in the orderly domain of science; but,
indirectly, it has given a stimulus and specious authority to the
pseudo-scientists. The second class comprises those who are claiming that
the phenomena of the subjective world also lie in the field of science and
have imposed on the age the pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology.
They would have us believe that all truth is scientific and that the
conclusions of self-examination are but guess-work. By mere verbal
analogies they have linked the study of man’s intellectual and spiritual
nature to the physical world of mechanical matter and motion. It is the
false claims of these pseudo-sciences which must be exposed and renounced
in order that humanism may come again into its own as the arbiter of
character. As in the Middle Ages canting simulation of goodness, as well as
honest virtue, was covered by the word religion, so to-day vague
speculation, as well as accurate experimentation, is proclaimed as science.
By a curious throw-back we are apparently using the word “science” in the
primitive sense of “all knowledge,” as the Greeks used it. And they, in
spite of their acumen, had not been able to differentiate between the two
equally valid methods of learning by objective experimentation and by
personal experience. We have seemingly forgotten that one of the greatest
achievements of the Renaissance was to discover this difference of method
and to limit “science” strictly to the investigation of objective
phenomena. Even Descartes, who attempted to create a purely mechanical
world, excluded the processes of thought as something foreign to the
scientific method. It was the biologists of the nineteenth century,
intoxicated with the delusion that the magic word evolution was a key to
unlock all the mysteries of the universe, who foisted on the world the idea
that man is but a complicated physical and chemical machine, and who sought
to discredit the dualistic philosophy of the Renaissance physicists. And of
all the biologists, Huxley, the militant propagandist, was the one who did
the most to degrade humanism into the pseudo-sciences of psychology and
sociology. He first correctly emphasised the fact that there is but one
scientific method which is best exemplified by the subject of mechanics.
But--and in this lies the source of his mischief to clear thinking--_he
then defined science as merely organised common sense_. One has only to
analyse this definition to discover its speciousness and its confusion of
thought. His definition has been almost universally accepted, although it
undoes all the lessons taught us by the religious thinkers of the Middle
Ages and the scientific experimentalists of the Renaissance; and its effect
has been to drive theoretical science back into the hypothetical
metaphysics of the Greeks. It is merely a truism to say that our contact
with the objective and subjective worlds is based, directly or indirectly,
on our sense-perceptions; and, to be intelligibly transmitted from one
person to another, such data must be common to many individuals. Also, it
is an inevitable tendency of the mind to organise all facts or to link them
together. Thus Huxley really classes all sound knowledge as science. But,
since this sound knowledge, according to him, can be attained only by
following the method of mechanics, which is the interpretation by the mind
of the spatial and temporal relations between sensible bodies, his
inference is clear that the phenomena of consciousness, the individual
mind, and our social relations, are to be interpreted as problems of matter
and motion. Yet what, actually, is the process of exact science? The answer
to this question should show us whether or not the term does have any
precise and limited significance, and whether or not fundamental confusion
must result from the attempt to make it synonymous with all knowledge.
Exact science, then, is first of all based on the naïve belief in an
objective and real world whose events are connected in an orderly and
prescribed manner, and occur independently of our thought or will. The
phenomena of this objective world appeal to us through our sense-organs by
some form of action, which we call energy, and are interpreted by our
minds. We speak of this interpretation as observation; but to be scientific
we must also select the phenomena to be observed, in order that we may
classify their similarities and their dissimilarities. In the course of
time, we have found such precision in many of our classifications and such
regularity in the past actions of phenomena, that we are able to predict
future events. Those predictions, which from past experience we find to
have been accurately verified, we formulate as laws. For example, we have
observed the actions of so many falling bodies that we have formulated the
law of gravitation. It would be an error to say that a body fell,
yesterday, because of this law; that event was simply one of the observed
facts from which the law was deduced; but it is quite proper to predict
that such a body will fall, to-morrow, in accordance with the law of
gravitation. To sum up, the scientific method is limited to experimental
observation and the formulation of laws; its value lies in the fact that,
by its cultivation, we have done much to allay our apprehensions for the
future and thus have abated the edge of superstition; and we also have
vastly increased our power over our environment, or, in the much
misunderstood aphorism of Francis Bacon, we have found science to be
valuable for its fruits. In a general way, we may say that the scientist
should follow in his investigations the phenomena of the objective world
only until their special forms of energy are absorbed by our nervous
system. It is in the province of the humanist to study the phenomena of the
subjective world after these stimuli have been translated into emotion and
thought. If a scientific prediction, or law, is to be something more than a
vague statement of what will probably occur, we feel the necessity of
measuring the quantity of the event; that is, our minds are not satisfied
until we are able to express it mathematically. Since the only measurable
attributes, concerning which our opinion of more or less is definite, are
geometrical lengths, the aim of all science is, and must be, to express its
laws in the language of mechanics; for that subject alone deals exclusively
with simple, sensible masses and their geometrical relations in space. We
have then the paradox that while mathematics is the goal of science, in
that it is the ideal method, or language of expression, it is not itself a
science since it is concerned with subjective ideas and is not limited by
the restrictions of sensible bodies. Modern men of science may rebel
against this fact; but even the newer, and more dubious, of the
pseudo-sciences are forced to substantiate their claims with the support of
factitious mathematical formulæ and tables and to simulate the mechanistic
method. The inevitable tendency of science is to investigate all phenomena
quantitatively, and to view the whole universe as a vast and measurable
machine. If the phenomena of life are to be classed as an exact science, it
is necessary to postulate that the living organism, also, is a machine,--a
thing of various material parts, acting on each other by mechanical forces.
Such a postulate is pure _fiat_, for we have found no common factors
between what we call vital actions and mechanical and physical forces.
Biology is, at best, confined to the discovery of qualitative
classifications, and the mutual chemical and physical reactions of the
organism; and life is so complex and so variable that very few of its
phenomena can be predicted with any accuracy. For example, the so-called
law of heredity is often cited, but we have made scarcely any progress
towards predicting variations in even an immediately succeeding generation.
Even if a general law of progressive evolution were granted to have been
established, no one could foretell by it the future variations of any
species. If the scientific method is badly strained when applied to even
the simplest forms of life, it completely fails when used to elucidate the
phenomena of the mind. The fundamental definition of science excludes the
processes of consciousness from its field, for it assumes that objective
phenomena are to be interpreted by the mind. If we attempt to study the
mind objectively, then we come face to face with the absurd paradox of a
thing investigating itself by means of I itself. And the gibe cast at the
scientific psychologists, that they propose to study the mind by first
denying its existence, is only too well founded. The possibility of a
scientific method is based on a rational interpretation of objective
phenomena. Psychology, as a science, would be a solemn version of _Alice
Through the Looking Glass_ in which real persons are viewed and analysed by
their images, or rather by some other intelligence, such as a dog or an
inhabitant of Mars. The futility of such a process should be apparent if we
recollect that an animal’s mental processes can themselves be estimated and
expressed only as a vaguer and more rudimentary sort of human mind. II Our
modern idea that science embraces all kinds of knowledge is, as I have
mentioned before, a curious reversion to the Greeks. In spite of the fact
that they formulated the great deductive laws of physics, such as cause and
effect, conservation of matter, etc., and developed an extraordinarily
fruitful science of geometry, they remained indifferent to the experimental
method. They developed almost no apparatus for experimentation, established
no standards of measurement, and their arithmetical symbols were so awkward
that only the simplest calculations could be made. They never succeeded in
disentangling subjective and objective ideas. Plato could anticipate the
modern conception of natural law in his aphorism that God geometrises, but
at the same time he vaguely identified the human soul with the stars and
endued the universe with life. Democritus pictured the world as an
aggregation of atoms, differing only in size, shape, and motion; yet he
also tacitly ascribed to them a will or desire to move which was only less
pronounced than in those finer particles which constituted the souls of
men. Also the four classic elements,--earth, water, air, and fire,--which
combined in different proportions to form all material bodies, were
actuated by the animistic principle that each element sought its own place.
One could multiply these examples of classical thought which confused
mechanical forces with the vital attributes of will and desire. The failure
of the Greeks to develop an objective and experimental method was
intensified by the domination of the Christian religion during the Middle
Ages. The emphasis of thought was placed on the problems of human
character. At a time when men were taught that our environment was a trap
set by the powers of evil to allure our souls to eternal damnation, there
could be little stimulus to study the laws of nature or to apply them to
increase our interest in a temporal life. It is customary for historians to
condemn the Church for having crushed science, but no concerted opposition
was necessary in a society which saw no advantage in gathering its fruits.
It was an axiom that truth was the direct consequence of intuition and
revelation, that God had revealed in the Bible, and through His living
Church, all the knowledge necessary for man’s guidance in a transitory
state. To neglect such a certainty for the perceptions of our fallible and
sinful senses, and to construct a world from them according to our reason,
would be to fall into the sin of the pride of the intellect. Furthermore,
in a society small in numbers and in area, where the greater number were
believed to have been created to minister to the comfort of the few, little
need was felt for mechanical power and industry. The only science which
seemed to be worth cultivating was one which was believed to foretell human
events and to affect our spiritual life. It had been generally accepted
from ancient times that the stars influenced our lives and foretold the
future. Such knowledge was eagerly sought by a society which was
principally concerned with religion and was, at the same time, a prey to
superstitious fear. It is not surprising that astrology was seriously
cultivated. If we grant the postulate that the stars do affect us, then we
must admit that astrology was a true science. The positions and the motions
of the planets and stars were observed and recorded as accurately as
possible, and deductions were made according to rules and laws believed to
have been verified by experience. Nor does it seem to me much more
credulous to believe that our character is determined by the relative
positions of the planets, than to assume, as do Mr. Watson and the modern
behaviourists, that our thoughts are caused by the relative positions and
motions of the material atoms which happen to compose the substance of our
brains. The astrologists had, at least, the great advantage of dealing with
real bodies which we can observe, while these psychologists have for their
use only the hypothetical and machine-made atoms of the chemist which they
can never hope to observe. There is little to choose between the
superstition that the planets foretell our characters and the superstition
that atoms constitute thought; both lead to equally foolish and irrational
practices. And there is the less excuse for the psychologist, since he has
had the benefit of a longer past experience than had the astrologer to
convince him of the futility of identifying mind and matter. The only other
science which aroused popular interest was alchemy. The basis of this
subject was the postulate that all matter was composed of the four elements
combined in various proportions. By the use of chemical reagents, the
combinations of these elements could be altered and a given substance be
thus changed into another. Alchemy is generally associated with the attempt
to transmute metals and, in particular, to change lead into gold, because
the natural cupidity of their patrons made it advisable for the alchemists
to hold that prospect before them in order to obtain a livelihood. In
principle, alchemy is but little different from modern chemistry. Our most
recent theory still holds that the difference between lead and gold is due
only to the numerical relations of a single element, the electron. The
difference between chemistry and alchemy does not lie in either their
fundamental hypotheses or their methods, but in our vastly superior
technique of experimentation and accumulated knowledge. The nature of the
modern electronic atom is essentially as fictitious as was the nature of
the mediæval elements. Besides exciting the hope of wealth, alchemy was
important as an aid to health and longevity. Since health required that the
four elements of the body should be preserved in their proper balance,
illness, and even death, were but the temporary or permanent loss of their
right proportions. Alchemists, convinced of this truth, were led to seek
for a sovereign substance, the philosopher’s stone, which would have the
power to restore this disturbed balance and give to its fortunate owner
permanent health and life. It is a mistake to suppose that the Church
oppressed these sciences--many of its most orthodox fathers and saints
eagerly studied them. The abuses due to the rampant charlatanry of many of
their practitioners were repressed, but their serious doctrines were fused
into the religion of the time much as, in our day, the clergy have tried to
harmonise Christianity and biological evolution. In fact, as we shall see,
the most determined opposition which the new Copernican theory of the solar
system had to overcome was the fusion of Christian dogma with Aristotelian
astrology and alchemy. It was natural that the first fruits of the new
science of the Renaissance should have been in astronomy and mechanics. The
accumulated observations of the astrologers had vastly increased the
complexity of the Ptolemaic system, and the discrepancies between the
observed and calculated positions of the planets had become glaringly
evident. When the great treatise of Copernicus was finally published as he
lay on his death-bed, it is altogether probable that no one suspected that
it marked the beginning of a new philosophy. He had merely proved that the
calculations of astronomers were greatly simplified by assuming that the
sun, instead of the earth, was the fixed centre of the solar system, and
that the earth and other planets revolved about it in circular orbits. It
must remain a mooted question whether Copernicus believed that his
discovery was only a mathematical device; his book states explicitly that
he, as a Catholic, still subscribed to the belief that the earth was
actually the fixed centre of the universe as the Church and the
Aristotelians both taught to be a necessary article of faith. At all
events, it was not until Galileo some sixty years later invented the
telescope and turned it on the heavens, that men saw the significance of
the discovery. The eye of the telescope penetrated the depths of the solar
system. It proved that the planets were not pure celestial matter but were
mere masses like the earth. Their brilliance was not a divine fire but
ordinary sunlight reflected from their dull surfaces; they, like the earth,
were inanimate bodies revolving about the sun and the Copernican system
became a fact instead of a mathematic device. It is not extravagant to
assert that, with the acceptance of Copernican astronomy, the whole
mediæval conception of nature gave place to a reliance on experimental
evidence. The work of Galileo in founding the science of mechanics was
fatal to the mysticism of the contemporary alchemists. Instead of the
elements with their natural places, their likes and dislikes, their
hierarchy of nobility, and their subserviency to planetary influences, he
laid down the universal principle that all natural actions were due to
mechanical forces whose only function was to alter the motions of bodies
and whose amount was measurable in mathematical symbols. His significant
work for us was an uncompromising war waged against the scientific
dogmatism of the Aristotelians on the clear-cut issue that knowledge of the
objective world could be obtained only by experimental evidence, and not by
subjective preconceptions. Understood rightly, he had reinstated the
Platonic dualism of two worlds, one of matter, and the other of the mind or
spirit. It is significant that during Galileo’s lifetime, so swift was the
movement, Descartes saw the trend of the new science and its inevitable
effect on philosophy and religion. In his _Système du Monde_, he pictured a
universe of matter and motion and nothing else,--a machine. From matter he
tried to strip every sensible attribute except extension, or its mere
geometrical position and extent. All phenomena became for him merely phases
of motion. With the courage of his conviction, he even tried to imagine
plants and animals to be mechanically acting automata. One thing only he
could not include in this mechanism,--and that was _thought and
consciousness_. The cosmogony of Descartes has long since crumbled to dust,
but the gap he made between the subjective and objective worlds has never
been closed in spite of incessant later attempts. And these early creators
of science, as something distinct from humanism, were quite conscious that
they were engaged in a revolution which could end only with the overthrow
of the dogmatic science of the Middle Ages, sheltered by the authority of
Aristotle and the Bible. Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Bacon all declared
explicitly that the old order must pass. From their day to ours, we have
more and more regarded the universe as a machine, a combination of inert
matter and moving forces, acting not as we may desire, but according to
invariable laws which we have personified as Nature. Man was left, by the
physicists, as a unique outsider who could interpret this machine in terms
of his sensations and mind, but could neither alter nor avoid its fateful
operation. Only one step further was needed to identify all science with
mechanics and to compress the scientific method within the limits imposed
by mechanical laws. This fundamental principle was Newton’s discovery of
the universal attraction of matter. According to this law, a single kind of
force, depending only on the amount of matter and the distance between
bodies, operated to hold the stars in their paths and to cause all the
chemical and physical activities of atoms. With its discovery, the
mechanistic theory was complete and dominant, and science had, in
principle, gone as far as it can ever go. But, what is even more important,
Newton grasped in his early years the fact that the scientific method is
limited to the experimental investigation of objective phenomena, those
which can be classified, measured geometrically, and formulated in laws
which predict future events. He held with absolute consistency and
restraint that what is once accomplished by this method is permanent. The
experimental laws of gravitation, of the pressure of gases, and all others
of like nature, are true within the limits of accuracy of our observation
and measurement. If these improve, such laws do not fail, their
mathematical expression is merely made more precise. They belong to the
permanent acquisitions of the mind. III To attempt to explain the nature of
matter, or heat, or light, the mechanism by which they act, or the method
by which their energy is translated into sensation and thought, this,
however, is to pass into the realm of metaphysics, or what Newton
excellently called hypothesis. All such speculations are, at best,
transitory, and, instead of predicting new lines of work, they lag behind
the sure and steady advance of experimentation; they are constantly being
revised to explain new phenomena after they are discovered. A convincing
illustration of this criticism can be found in the history of the
hypotheses of the nature of light. Physicists commonly assert that the
corpuscular hypothesis retarded the advance of the subject of light for a
century; their answer was to replace it by an equally metaphysical
hypothesis of mechanical waves in an æther. After incessantly patching up
this new conception during the next century, they are again returning to a
corpuscular hypothesis, even more metaphysical and incomprehensible than
its prototype. It seems impossible for us to learn that the trouble does
not arise from the weakness of any particular variety, but lies in the
nature of hypothesis, itself. We have created fictitious æthers, atoms, and
electrons which bear no resemblance to sensible bodies; light is
alternately a stream of corpuscles, or waves, or quanta of energy, or even
a mathematical symbol; space is declared to be impenetrable except along
certain curves; and time is confused with space. What one age proposes as a
great advance is flung aside by the next which makes a new hypothesis whose
only fate is to be rejected. So far have these speculations been carried
that the dogma is seriously maintained that a false scientific hypothesis
is valuable because in some mysterious way it leads to the discovery of
truth. As we have advanced in sober experimental science, these hypotheses
have become more and more abstruse and more and more dogmatic until the
most recent of these dreamers, Whitehead, Eddington, Einstein, have
pictured a phantasmagoria, instead of a world, as non-sensical as the
hallucinations of the mediæval monk driven mad by the fevers of asceticism.
Such models of the structure of matter may, indeed, be useful to give
substance to our thought and a language for our ideas. They have something
of the same sort of relation to real objects that portraits do to living
persons. But there is this important point to be remembered. A skilful
painter has seen and studied the person and can make so faithful a likeness
as to create the illusion of reality. But the man of science is attempting
to picture things which can never be seen, for atoms lie in the realm of
the infinitely small, whose very existence is problematical. Models of
atoms, of æthers, or of space have about the same degree of authenticity as
the posthumous portrait of a person whom no one then alive had ever seen.
Men of science are too prone to confuse the thing and the model in their
own minds, and they have certainly been so careless in their teaching that
even very highly educated laymen accept these hypotheses as facts. Is it
not true that the world pretty generally takes the hypothetical explanation
of gravitation by Einstein, which involves the concept of a fictitious
space of more than three dimensions and the fusion of time with space, to
be equally as scientific, and therefore equally as true, as the
experimental law of the attraction of bodies? Do not many accept as a
demonstrated fact one or another of the many hypotheses advanced by
biologists to explain the cause of the observed variations in species? And
having failed to distinguish between scientific fact and fiction, we have
incorporated this mass of speculation into our philosophy of life and
especially into our religion. We are worse confused than the Deists of the
eighteenth century who believed that the mind of God could be defined by
learning the facts and laws of Nature; we now propose that the intellectual
and spiritual attributes of Man be framed in the hypotheses of dogmatic
Science. That the scientific method, as evolved from physics and chemistry,
is not applicable to the problems of life has been the settled conviction
of virtually all the investigators in those sciences. In fact, in order to
achieve their results they have had to assume that life is a perturbation
which cannot be included in a mechanical and mathematical world, and that
so far as possible sense-perceptions must be excluded as criteria of laws.
However, it has not been so clear to many of them that the mechanical
method imposes definite, and rather narrow, limitations even upon the study
of physical and chemical problems. These limitations were clearly defined
in the seventeenth century during the protracted controversy between Newton
on the one side, and Hooke and Huygens on the other, as to the nature of
light and the _modus operandi_, or mechanism, of its transmission. The
question involved was clear-cut; and it will pay to discuss it in some
detail because it settled once for all, I think, the distinction between
science and humanism. Theoretical physics, from the very beginning, has
been a synthesis of phenomena in terms of mechanics; that is, in terms of
substance and motion. For example, the physical properties of heat, sound,
and light are expressed by the same mathematical formulæ which express the
motion of a wave in water. To distinguish between them, we assign different
names to the substances involved, as a molecule of air, a corpuscle of
light, or an æther. But whatever names we may give to them, or however we
may try to distinguish them, we assign to all of them the common attribute
of mass, or inertia, which is the only essential coefficient in a
mechanical equation. And we use for all these different phenomena the same
formula of motion, the quotient of the distance by the time. These
quantities, mass and motion, when combined give us the law of mechanical
energy, and our synthesis rests on the single fact that heat, sound, and
light may be changed into mechanical motion, and may be produced by it.
This energy is then their common and mutable factor. But the objective
phenomena of heat, light, and sound are cognisable to us through three
separate sense-organs and are perceived as temperature, sight, and tone.
These sensations are fundamentally different and, in fact, to confuse any
of them with another is one of the surest indications of insanity. Thus the
world as depicted by the physicist does not correspond with our world of
sensation; nor does he attempt to do more than to discuss a restricted set
of attributes, and not even those which really distinguish heat, light,
etc., as such. Newton, in his earliest published work, made evident this
essential difference between the fields of physics and psychology. By means
of a prism he refracted a beam of white sunlight into a continuous
spectrum. He then placed a screen, containing a narrow slit, behind the
prism in such a way as to permit only a very thin ray from the spectrum to
pass on, and through, a second prism fastened parallel to the first prism.
(I call it a homogeneous light ray to distinguish it from its psychological
analogue, colour.) No matter what portion of the spectrum was used for the
second prism, there was no further change of colour; the ray merely
suffered a second angular deviation equal to that produced by the first
refraction. He also recombined the whole spectrum by a reversed prism and
obtained a single ray parallel to the original ray and pure white in
colour. As a result of his experiments, he announced the following law: a
primary ray of light is one which has a definite and specific angle of
refraction by a prism, and each such primary ray is, to the eye, a primary
colour. White is therefore a mixture of an indefinitely large number of
primary rays, each possessing a different angle of deviation when passed
through a prism; and when so separated each primary ray is seen by the eye
as a primary colour. The experiments of Newton were accepted as correct by
Huygens and Hooke, probably the two most eminent physicists of the time.
But they objected to his definition of a primary colour and to his
conclusions. They had found previously, by their own experiments, that
certain pairs of complementary colours, such as a certain red and a certain
blue, gave to the eye the same sensation of white as did clear sunlight.
They had defined them as the two primary colours which, by different
proportions of mixture, would produce all other colours, including white.
They therefore objected that it was unnecessary and cumbersome to assume an
infinite number of primary rays when two were quite sufficient. By no
process of reasoning could these two opinions be either reconciled or
controverted. They involved fundamentally different criteria. White
produced by the combination of a continuous spectrum and the white produced
by a combination of red and blue were one and the same to Hooke and Huygens
because their criterion of identity was the sensation of sight, and it must
be the same for all psychologists who deal with subjective light. To
Newton, the two whites were altogether different. The one examined by a
prism gives a continuous spectrum, and the other gives two separated bands
of blue and red. What, then, to the physicist is a fundamental
dissimilarity is to the psychologist complete identity. How then can
psychological sensations be studied by physical methods? To show that this
is not an isolated case, but that this gulf runs between the entire fields
of physics and psychology, I can give an artificial example. While I
deprecate the pseudo-scientific pictures, now fashionable, of the state of
prehistoric man and of the condition of the earth before its habitability,
I am able to imagine a world in which the eye had never developed, so that
all life was blind. I am sure the word colour would never have been coined
in such a world and that there could be no psychology of sight, but I also
know that the blind race could develop a physical science of light because
very many of its phenomena can be, and are now exclusively, studied by such
apparatus as thermometers and electric galvanometers which can be read by
touch. Or, to cite an everyday example, is not the mere fact, that the
sensation produced by pepper on the tongue cannot be distinguished from
that of heat, sufficient to make us hesitate before trying to study the
sensations objectively, to synthesise the objective and subjective worlds,
or to try to investigate them by the same method? The history of physics,
since the time of Maxwell, shows a record of vain efforts to reconstruct a
materialistic monism. These attempts have failed because they involved a
supposititious æther and atom which could no longer satisfy the growing
body of experimental facts about radiant energy. After Maxwell predicted
the existence of electro-magnetic radiation, an æther or atom possessing
the ordinary attributes of matter became an absurdity. But our childish, or
at least youthful, reluctance to admit our limitations is so great that we
proceeded to repeat the hypothetical method once more by substituting an
energiastic monism. Unmindful of Pascal’s dictum that man cannot
investigate the world of either the infinitely small or the infinitely
large, we are replacing a material atom and æther by Planck’s hypothesis of
discrete and disembodied _quanta_, or atoms, of energy. Already there have
arisen four insuperable difficulties. The hypothesis affirms action without
specifying something to act, unless the word _energy_ is given all the
physical attributes of matter. In which case a _quantum_ of radiant energy
is merely our old friend, a corpuscle of light, masquerading under a new
name. Again, it substitutes the principle of discontinuity of action for
continuity, and one is puzzled to know from what the _quantum_ originates
and in what it ends. And again, it creates the dilemma that light is
simultaneously corpuscular and vibrational, since without the latter
quality none of the phenomena of interference is explicable. Lastly, it
drifts into a pure philosophy of idealism. My discussion would not be
complete without a reference to the theory of relativity. It is significant
that the earliest serious critique of Newtonian physics was made by Bishop
Berkeley. With the greatest ingenuity and skill, he pointed out that
objects can become known to us only _by_ the mind and that since light,
sound, and motion are interpreted by the mind as essentially different,
they cannot be synthesised by any experimental and objective process. So
far Berkeley’s critique is thoroughly valid. He proceeded, however, to make
the _non-sequitur_ that objects exist only _in_ the mind. If we accept this
postulate, the logic of idealism is irrefutable; few, however, will accept
it. Idealism fails because it ignores brute fact, and we accept the answer
of Dr. Johnson who made his objection by merely kicking a large stone in
his path. Einstein also began with a critique of Newtonian dynamics to
prove that the conclusions we can draw from electrodynamics are as limited
and as relative as those from mechanics. From this denial of our ability to
obtain real or absolute knowledge he, like Berkeley, has proceeded to
construct a positive philosophy of the absolute. Relativity, as it has now
been interpreted by such disciples as Whitehead and Eddington, is merely
idealism under a new guise. The objective world of sensation and experience
is illusion, and truth exists only in a set of subjective mathematical
formulæ of cosmic _events_. The relativists openly rejoice that mathematics
has come into its own kingdom and is no longer to be the handmaiden of
physics, no longer to be restricted by the limitations of the
sense-perceptions. Euclidean geometry, which is limited to the three
dimensions of tactual space, has been replaced by a geometry of
hyper-space, the properties of which no one can be cognisant of. Subjective
time is eliminated, and objective time is conflated with space. They, too,
deny the validity of the senses, as did the mediæval schoolman, and picture
a topsy-turvy world. They are labouring under the delusion that the
limitations of logic can be avoided by the simple substitution of
mathematical symbols for words, forgetting that mathematical symbols are as
meaningless as words when they are detached from facts. They fail to see
that the equation is but a form of the syllogism. One can trace all through
their argument the old and familiar fallacy of the ambiguous middle. They
are quite reckless, as it suits their convenience, in confusing physical
space of three dimensions with mathematical space of an unlimited number;
neither do they distinguish time as a subjective sequence of events from
time as a measurable component of velocity. The relativists are as rash as
those sociologists who see a real connection between physical energy of
motion and mental energy of thought and so deceive themselves with the
notion that they are scientific. A note of uncertainty is beginning to show
itself, however, for thoughtful physicists are seeing the _impasse_ into
which their unbridled hypotheses have led them. Abstruse mathematical
analysis is again proving to us, what Pascal, Newton, Lagrange, and
philosophy had demonstrated in a simpler way, that the mechanistic method
can, at best, only picture an objective world as it seems to us, and not as
it is. As a recent physicist confesses: “The physicist thus finds himself
in a world from which the bottom has dropped clean out; as he penetrates
deeper and deeper it eludes him and fades away by the highly
unsportsmanlike device of just becoming meaningless. No refinement of
measurement will avail to carry him beyond the portals of this shadowy
domain which he cannot even mention without logical inconsistency. A
_bound_ is thus forever set to the curiosity of the physicist. What is
more, the mere existence of this bound means that he must give up his most
cherished convictions and faith. The world is not a world of reason,
understandable by the intellect of man, but as we penetrate ever deeper,
the very law of cause and effect, which we had thought to be a formula to
which we could force God himself to subscribe, ceases to have meaning.”[1]
The answer to this naïve confession is simple enough: there never was a
_bottom_ to his hypothetical world, as he could have foreseen if he had
acquainted himself with the warning of the more profound men of science,
philosophers, and humanists. The writer adds that this failure, now proved,
“must forever keep the physicist humble.” But there is no cause for him to
think lowly of himself for what he has accomplished and for what he may
achieve. He should, rather, be modest and restrict himself to what can be
done legitimately by the scientific method. I fear, however, that in spite
of such occasional confessions, the physicists are neither humble nor
modest, but are merely bewildered. The false pretensions of science must be
wholly abandoned, and the problems of our destiny be examined by a wise
judgment drawn from human experience, before we can hope for a sane and
humanistic philosophy. FOOTNOTES [1] “The New Vision of Science,” by
Professor P. W. Bridgman, _Harper’s Magazine_, 1929. _Humanism: An Essay at
Definition_ IRVING BABBITT I The art of defining is so indispensable that
one needs to define the limits of definition itself. A very eminent
humanist, Erasmus, showed his awareness of these limits when he complained
of the attempts of the theologians of the Reformation to formulate deity
that every definition was a disaster. Though the humanist does not seek to
define God and is in general chary of ultimates, he is wont in more mundane
matters to put the utmost emphasis on definition. This Socratic emphasis
would seem especially needed at a time like the present which has probably
surpassed all previous epochs in its loose and irresponsible use of general
terms. Unless this tendency is corrected, the day may come when, outside of
words that stand for the measurements of science or the objects of sense,
communication between men will be well-nigh impossible. The exchange of
ideas regarding those aspects of life that fall outside the merely
quantitative and material may become as difficult as economic exchanges
would be with coins that have no definite value. This growing debasement of
the intellectual coinage may be illustrated from the word humanism itself.
The boundaries of a genuine humanism are broad and flexible. It is plain,
however, that the word is being appropriated for points of view that cannot
be brought within these boundaries, however generously extended. As a
preliminary to pointing out some of the more serious of the resulting
confusions it would seem desirable to build up the historical background.
For what a word actually has meant should surely throw light on what it
ought to mean. As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in
the Italy of the fifteenth century, and later in other European countries,
to the type of scholar who was not only proficient in Greek and Latin, but
who at the same time inclined to prefer the humanity of the great classical
writers to what seemed to him the excess of divinity in the mediævals. This
contrast between humanity and divinity was often conceived very
superficially. However, the best of the humanists were not content with
opposing a somewhat external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian
elegance to the scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught a
glimpse of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best. They
were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their faculties
in this world rather than at an other-worldly felicity. Each faculty, they
held, should be cultivated in due measure without one-sidedness or
over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic or that of the specialist.
“Nothing too much” is indeed the central maxim of all genuine humanists,
ancient and modern. In a world of ever-shifting circumstance, this maxim is
not always of easy application. Whoever has succeeded in bridging the gap
between the general precept and some particular emergency has to that
extent achieved the fitting and the decorous. Decorum is simply the law of
measure in its more concrete aspects. For every type of humanist decorum
is, in Milton’s phrase, the “grand masterpiece to observe.” Actually this
observation may rest on deep insight, as it did in the case of Milton
himself, or it may degenerate into empty formalism. The adjustment of which
I have spoken between the variable and the permanent elements in human
experience requires spiritual effort and most men are spiritually indolent.
For genuine adjustment they tend to substitute outer conformity so that
decorum itself finally comes to seem a mere veneer, something that has no
deep root in the nature of things. Moreover the notions of decent behaviour
to which men have conformed at any particular period have always been more
or less local and relative. It is easy to take the next step and assume
that they have been _only_ local and relative, an assumption subversive not
merely of decorum but of humanism itself. Humanism, one of our modernists
has argued, may have done very well for other times and places, but under
existing circumstances, it is at best likely to prove only a “noble
anachronism.” A similar objection to humanism is that it has its source in
a psychology of “escape,” that it is an attempt to take flight from the
present into a past that has for the modern man become impossible. But
humanism is not to be identified with this or that body of traditional
precepts. The law of measure on which it depends becomes meaningless unless
it can be shown to be one of the “laws unwritten in the heavens” of which
Antigone had the immediate perception, laws that are “not of to-day or
yesterday,” that transcend in short the temporal process. The final appeal
of the humanist is not to any historical convention but to intuition. It
does not follow that the humanist is ready to abandon history to the
relativist. The main conventions that have prevailed in the past reveal
important identities as well as differences. These identities cannot be
explained as due to their common derivation from some previous convention.
The Chinese made an independent discovery of the law of measure.[2] An
important task, indeed, that awaits some properly qualified scholar,
preferably a Chinese, is a comparison of Confucian humanism with occidental
humanism as it appears, for example, in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle. The
announcement was made recently in the press that a Harvard astronomer had
discovered the “centre of the universe” (more strictly the centre of our
galactic system). In the meanwhile the far more important question is being
neglected whether human nature itself has any centre. One’s faith in the
existence of such a centre increases when one finds the best commentary on
Pascal’s dictum that the great man is he who combines in himself opposite
virtues and occupies all the space between them, in a Confucian book the
very title of which, literally rendered, means the “universal norm” or
“centre.”[3] Here and elsewhere the Confucian books reveal a deep and
direct insight into the law of measure. Legge’s translation of the Chinese
word for decorum (_li_) as “the rules of propriety” has been rightly
censured as unduly prim and formalistic; though it must be admitted that a
formalistic element is very marked at times even in the older Confucian
writings. Practically the assertion of a “universal centre” means the
setting up of some pattern or model for imitation. The idea of imitation
goes even deeper than that of decorum, but is an idea that humanism shares
with religion. Humanism, however, differs from religion in putting at the
basis of the pattern it sets up, not man’s divinity, but the something in
his nature that sets him apart simply as man from other animals and that
Cicero defines as a “sense of order and decorum and measure in deeds and
words.”[4] It dwells on the danger of any attempt to pass too abruptly to
the religious level; it holds, if I may be pardoned for quoting myself,
that the world would have been a better place if more persons had made sure
they were human before setting out to be superhuman. The virtue that
results from a right cultivation of one’s humanity, in other words from
moderate and decorous living, is poise. Perfect poise is no doubt
impossible: not even Sophocles succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing
it whole. The difference is none the less marked between the man who is
moving towards poise and the man who is moving away from it. Since the
break with the somewhat artificial decorum of the eighteenth century most
men have been moving away from it. It would not be easy to argue with any
plausibility that the typical modernist is greatly concerned with the law
of measure; his interest, as a glance at our newspapers should suffice to
show, is rather in the doing of stunts and the breaking of records, in
“prodigies, feats of strength and crime,”[5] the very topics that,
according to the traditional report, Confucius banished from his
conversation. “Let us confess it,” says Nietzsche, speaking not merely for
the rank and file but for the leaders, “proportionateness is foreign to
us.” It is foreign to us because we no longer refer our experience to any
centre. With the growth of the naturalistic temper, the normal has come to
have less appeal than the novel. The pursuit of poise has tended to give
way to that of uniqueness, spontaneity, and above all intensity. “The last
remnant of God on earth,” says Nietzsche himself, “are the men of great
longing, of great loathing, of great satiety.” Once grant that there is no
constant element in life and one might agree with Walter Pater that a man’s
highest ambition should be “to burn with a hard gem-like flame,” to get “as
many pulsations as possible into the given time.”[6] Æsthetic
perceptiveness is an excellent thing, but thus to set it up as an end in
itself is almost at the opposite pole from humanism. Yet Pater has been
called a humanist. One might so regard him if one accepted his view that
the distinctive humanistic trait is an all-embracing curiosity.[7] Humanism
appears primarily, not in the enlargement of comprehension and sympathy,
desirable though this enlargement may be, but in the act of selection, in
the final imposition on mere multiplicity of a scale of values. Matthew
Arnold, with his striving for centrality, has far better claims to be
regarded as a humanist than Pater--and that in spite of his inadequacy on
the side of religion. The model that Arnold sets up for imitation in the
name of culture is a constant corrective of everything that is one-sided
and out of proportion. “I hate,” he says, speaking not only for himself but
for all true humanists, “all over-preponderance of single elements.” II We
have seen thus far that the word humanist has two main meanings--an
historical meaning in its application to the scholars who turned away from
the Middle Ages to the Greeks and Romans, and a psychological meaning, as
one may say, that derives directly from the historical one: humanists in
this latter sense are those who, in any age, aim at proportionateness
through a cultivation of the law of measure. Keeping this definition in
mind, we should now be prepared to deal with the confusions in the use of
the word of which I spoke at the beginning. These confusions have arisen
from its misapplication to various types of naturalists and
supernaturalists, especially the former. For example, the eminent
orientalist, M. Sylvain Lévi, has in a recent book used the term humanism
in speaking of persons as far apart as Buddha and Rousseau.[8] Buddha, it
is true, had his humanistic side: he recommended that one follow a _via
media_ between asceticism and self-indulgence. But, unlike Confucius, he is
in his primary emphasis not humanistic, but religious. The association of
humanism with Rousseau is especially unjustifiable. Rousseau was, in the
current sense of the word, a highly vital individual, but he cannot be
properly regarded as either religious or humanistic. He attacked both
humanism and religion in their traditional forms, and instead of working
out some modern equivalent for these forms, helped to usher in the era of
free naturalistic expansion in the midst of which we are still living. He
was above all for free temperamental expansion. He was himself emotionally
expansive to a degree that was incompatible not only with artificial but
with real decorum. He encouraged the humanitarian hope that brotherhood
among men may be based on emotional overflow. In general the most serious
confusion in the use of the word humanist has arisen from its appropriation
by the humanitarians. Walt Whitman was, for instance, highly Rousseauistic
in his notion of brotherhood. We should therefore know what to think of the
assertion of Mr. Lewis Mumford that Walt Whitman was a true humanist; also
of the assumption of the term by the left-wing Unitarians and other
Protestants who have been moving towards humanitarianism.[9] The
humanitarian has favoured not only temperamental expansion; he has also, as
a rule, favoured the utmost expansion of scientific knowledge with a view
to realising the Baconian ideal. Perhaps indeed the chief driving power
behind the humanitarian movement has been the confidence inspired in man by
the progressive control physical science has enabled him to acquire over
the forces of nature. It goes without saying that the humanist is not
hostile to science as such but only to a science that has overstepped its
due bounds, and in general to every form of naturalism, whether
rationalistic or emotional, that sets up as a substitute for humanism or
religion. In the case of such encroachments there is not only a quarrel
between the naturalist and the humanist, but a quarrel of first principles.
When first principles are involved the law of measure is no longer
applicable. One should not be moderate in dealing with error. I have
pointed out elsewhere the danger of confounding the humanistic attitude
with that of the Laodicean.[10] The reason for the radical clash between
the humanist and the purely naturalistic philosopher is that the humanist
requires a centre to which he may refer the manifold of experience; and
this the phenomenal world does not supply. In getting his centre the
humanist may appeal primarily to tradition, or as I have said, to
intuition. In the latter case he will need to submit to a searching
Socratic dialectic the word intuition itself--to distinguish between
intuitions of the One and intuitions of the Many. Otherwise he will run the
risk of not being a modern but only a modernist. The contrast between
modern and modernist is not unlike that between Socrates and the sophists.
Both modern and modernist are under compulsion to accept in some form the
ancient maxim that man is the measure of all things.[11] Only, the measure
of the modern is based on a perception of the something in himself that is
set above the flux and that he possesses in common with other men; whereas
the perception with which the modernist is chiefly concerned, to the
subversion of any true measure whatsoever, is of the divergent and the
changeful both within and without himself. The present menace to humanism,
it has been said, is less from its enemies than from those who profess to
be its friends. Thus Mr. F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford proclaims himself a
humanist, and at the same time seeks to show that the true humanist was not
Socrates but that precursor of recent “flowing” philosophers, Protagoras.
It should be noted that many of our votaries of change and mobility are
more emotional than Protagoras or any other Greek sophist. They tend to
make, not their own thoughts, but their own feelings the measure of all
things. This indulgence in feeling has been encouraged by the
sentimentalists who have discovered in feeling not only the
quintessentially human element, but, as I said in speaking of Rousseau, the
ultimate ground of fraternal union. In our own time, partly perhaps as a
result of the psycho-analytical probing of the sources of the emotional
life in the subconscious, there is a growing distrust of the
sentimentalist. To be sure, one may, according to the psycho-analyst, turn
the emotions to good account by a process of “sublimation.” Why not escape
still more completely from one’s complexes and infantile survivals by
adjusting oneself to the cosmic order that is revealed to the scientific
investigator in his laboratory? One may thus cease to be ego-centric and
become truly mature and disinterested. This is the attitude that Mr. Walter
Lippmann recommends in _A Preface to Morals_, and it is this attitude that,
by a flagrant misuse of the word, he terms “humanism.” It is well that a
man should adjust himself to the reality of the natural order and, as a
preliminary, should strive to be objective in the scientific sense; but
humanism calls for an adjustment to a very different order that is also
“real” and “objective” in its own way. It insists in short that there is a
“law for man” as well as a “law for thing,” and is in this sense dualistic.
Mr. Lippmann’s attempt to base ethics on monistic postulates is, from
either a religious or humanistic point of view, a revival of the stoical
error. Yet he would have us believe that any one who has become
disinterested after the scientific fashion has got the equivalent not only
of humanism but of “high religion.” By thus dissimulating the gap between
the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of the laboratory, he is flattering
some of the most dangerous illusions of the present time. He escapes from
the main humanitarian tendency to give to feeling a primacy that does not
belong to it, only to encourage its other main tendency to accord to
physical science a hegemony to which it is not entitled. It is self-evident
that humanitarianism of the scientific or utilitarian type, with its
glorification of the specialist who is ready to sacrifice his rounded
development, if only he can contribute his mite to “progress,” is at odds
with the humanistic ideal of poise and proportion. The religious
pretensions of humanitarianism of this type are even more inacceptable, at
least if one understands by religion anything resembling the great
traditional faiths. The Baconian has inclined from the outset to substitute
an outer for an inner working--the effort of the individual upon
himself--that religion has, in some form or other, always required. The
result has been to encourage the acquisitive life and also the pursuit of
material instead of spiritual “comfort.” A typical example of this
utilitarian trend is Professor T. N. Carver’s _Religion Worth Having_, in
which he so exalts the “productive life” that religion is all but
identified with thrift. At this rate it may soon be possible to get one’s
religion securely tucked away in a safe-deposit drawer! One should,
however, be grateful to Professor Carver for not having called himself a
humanist. It does not seem possible to supply from the sentimental or
Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement the elements that are,
religiously speaking, absent from its utilitarian side. The nature to which
the Rousseauist invites one to return, is, as I have sought to show
elsewhere, only a projection of the idyllic imagination. In the state of
nature or some similar state thus projected, in other words in Arcadia, man
is “good.” Practically this has meant that there is in the natural man an
altruistic impulse that may prevail over his egoism. The upshot of this
myth of man’s natural goodness has been to discredit the traditional
controls, both humanistic and religious. Humility, conversion, decorum, all
go by the board in favour of unrestricted temperamental overflow. The
crucial question is whether the immense machinery of power that has
resulted from the efforts of the utilitarians can be made, on this basis of
unlimited expansion, to serve disinterested ends. Everything converges
indeed on both sides of the humanitarian movement upon the idea of service.
If it can be shown that there has been no vital omission in the passage
from the service of God to the service of man, one may safely side with all
the altruists from the third Earl of Shaftesbury to John Dewey.
Unfortunately a formidable mass of evidence has been accumulating (the
Great War was for many a convincing demonstration) that, in the natural man
as he exists in the real world and not in some romantic dreamland, the will
to power is more than a match for the will to service. The benefits that
have ensued from the major concentration upon the natural order that has
been under way since the Renaissance have been numerous and dazzling. We
are still celebrating these benefits under the name of progress. It is no
longer possible, however, to allay the suspicion that the price which has
been paid for progress of this type has been a growing superficiality in
dealing with the still more important problems of the human order. “Nothing
is more certain,” says Burke in a well-known passage, “than that our
manners, our civilisation, and all the good things which are connected with
manners and with civilisation, have, in this European world of ours,
depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both
combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.” The
whole debate would seem to narrow down to the question whether it is
possible to secure on utilitarian-sentimental lines a valid equivalent for
Burke’s two principles. As for the “spirit of a gentleman,” its decline is
so obvious as scarcely to admit of argument. It has even been maintained
that in America, the country in which the collapse of traditional standards
has been most complete, the gentleman is at a positive disadvantage in the
world of practical affairs; he is likely to get on more quickly if he
assumes the “mucker pose.”[12] According to William James, usually taken to
be the representative American philosopher, the very idea of the gentleman
has about it something slightly satanic. “The prince of darkness,” says
James, “may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but, whatever the God of
earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.” As for the “spirit of
religion,” I have already glanced at its humanitarian substitute. The
humanitarian maintains that the spirit that appears in Christianity will,
if disengaged from mere dogma, be found to be something very similar to his
own spirit of service. One should at least be able to understand the
position of the person who has become convinced that there is a
supernatural element in genuine Christianity, lost in the passage from the
old dispensation to the new, for which mere altruism is no substitute, and
who therefore takes his stand on the side of tradition. Dogmatic and
revealed religion, he argues, was alone capable of rescuing the ancient
world from a decadent naturalism. It alone affords an avenue of escape from
the analogous situation that confronts the world to-day. III The relation
of the humanist to this religious traditionalist can scarcely be defined
too carefully. Between the humanist and the humanitarian, I have said,
there is a clash of first principles. Between the humanist and the
authentic Christian, on the other hand, there is room for important
co-operation. To be sure, many of the leaders of the early Church were
satisfied with nothing short of a stark supernaturalism and inclined to
reject the genuinely humanistic elements of the ancient civilisation along
with its naturalistic errors. But the orthodox attitude has, in spite of
the difficulties of reconciling otherworldliness with a merely secular
wisdom, come to be one of friendliness to the classical humanities.[13] Mr.
T. S. Eliot is probably close to this attitude when he maintains that
humanism is of very great value, but only in subordination to the
historical Church. As an independent doctrine, at least in any large way,
it is, he maintains, ineffective. A broad survey of the past does not,
however, confirm the view that humanism is thus either precarious or
parasitical. The two most notable manifestations of the humanistic spirit
that the world has seen, that in ancient Greece and that in Confucian
China, did not have the support of Christianity or any other form of
revealed religion. Take again the humanism of seventeenth-century France:
the ideal of the finely poised gentleman who “does not plume himself on
anything” was often allied with Christianity (“devout humanism”), but it
was also found among the free-thinkers (“libertines”) who were hostile to
every form of belief in the supernatural. In general, why should not the
humanist, it may be asked, devote himself quietly to his own task--that of
effecting an adjustment between the law of measure and the ever-novel
emergencies of actual living, and at the same time refuse to take sides too
decisively in the great debate between the naturalists and the
supernaturalists? If pressed too hard by the supernaturalists in
particular, why should he not reply in the words of Pope: “Presume not God
to scan; The proper study of mankind is man”? One must, however, admit an
element of truth in the assertion of Plato that things human cannot be
properly known without a previous insight into things divine. Another
thinker, Pascal, who had this religious insight in a high degree, though
combined with a form of dogma peculiarly alien to most modern men, declared
that unless man has the support of the supernatural, unless in short he
attains to true humility, he will fall fatally either into the stoic pride
or else, through the intermediary stage of scepticism, into the epicurean
relaxation. The whole question bristles with difficulties: one thinks of
the immense and, on the whole, salutary influence that two Roman humanists,
Cicero and Horace, have exercised on occidental culture, though, to adopt
Pascal’s classification, the humanism of Cicero leaned unduly to the
stoical side, that of Horace to the epicurean. Yet I believe that the
humanist will finally be forced to recognise that there is truth in
Pascal’s contention, that he will have to take sides in the debate between
naturalists and supernaturalists, however much he may deplore the frequent
failure of both of these fell antagonists to do justice to the immense
range of human experience that is subject primarily to the law of measure.
For my own part, I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the
supernaturalists. Though I see no evidence that humanism is necessarily
ineffective apart from dogmatic and revealed religion, there is, as it
seems to me, evidence that it gains immensely in effectiveness when it has
a background of religious insight. One is conscious of such a background,
for example, in Sophocles, who ranks high among occidental humanists, as
well as in Confucius, the chief exponent of the humanistic idea in the
Orient. The phrase religious insight is in itself vague. Is it not possible
to give the phrase a definite content without departing from the critical
attitude? One may be helped to such a definition by asking oneself what
element has tended to fall out of the life of the modern man with the
decline of the traditional disciplines. According to Mr. Walter Lippmann,
the conviction the modern man has lost is that “there is an immortal
essence presiding like a king over his appetites.” But why abandon the
affirmation of such an “essence” or higher will, to the mere
traditionalist? Why not affirm it first of all as a psychological fact, one
of the immediate data of consciousness, a perception so primordial that,
compared with it, the deterministic denials of man’s moral freedom are only
a metaphysical dream? One would thus be in a position to perform a swift
flanking movement on the behaviourists and other naturalistic psychologists
who are to be regarded at present as among the chief enemies of human
nature. One might at the same time be in a fair way to escape from the
modernist dilemma and become a thoroughgoing and complete modern. The
philosophers have often debated the question of the priority of will or
intellect in man. The quality of will that I am discussing and that rightly
deserves to be accounted superrational, has, however, been associated in
traditional Christianity not primarily with man’s will, but with God’s will
in the form of grace. The theologians have indulged in many unprofitable
subtleties apropos of grace. One cannot afford, however, as has been the
modern tendency, to discard the psychological truth of the doctrine along
with these subtleties. The higher will must simply be accepted as a mystery
that may be studied in its practical effects, but that, in its ultimate
nature, is incapable of formulation. Herein the higher will is not
peculiar. “All things,” according to the scholastic maxim, “end in a
mystery” (_Omnia exeunt in mysterium_). The man of science is increasingly
willing to grant that the reality behind the phenomena he is studying not
only eludes him, but must in the nature of the case ever elude him. He no
longer holds, for example, as his more dogmatic forebears of the nineteenth
century inclined to do, that the mechanistic hypothesis, valuable as it has
proved itself to be as a laboratory technique, is absolutely true; its
truth is, he admits, relative and provisional. The person who declines to
turn the higher will to account until he is sure he has grasped its
ultimate nature is very much on a level with the man who should refuse to
make practical use of electrical energy until he is certain he has an
impeccable theory of electricity. Negatively one may say of the higher
will, without overstepping the critical attitude, that it is not the
absolute, nor again the categorical imperative; not the organic and still
less the mechanical; finally, not the “ideal” in the current sense of that
term. Positively one may define it as the higher immediacy that is known in
its relation to the lower immediacy--the merely temperamental man with his
impressions and emotions and expansive desires--as a power of vital control
(_frein vital_). Failure to exercise this control is the spiritual
indolence that is for both Christian and Buddhist a chief source, if not
the chief source, of evil. Though Aristotle, after the Greek fashion, gives
the primacy not to will but to mind, the power of which I have been
speaking is surely related to his “energy of soul,” the form of activity
distinct from a mere outer working, deemed by him appropriate for the life
of leisure that he proposes as the goal of a liberal education. Happiness,
which is for him the end of ends, is itself, he tells us, “a kind of
working.” Here is a difference, one may note in passing, between a true
humanist like Aristotle and the epicurean who also has his doctrine of
moderation and so often sets up as a humanist. It is no doubt well, as the
epicurean urges, so to indulge in present pleasures that they may not be
injurious to future ones. To employ the trivial illustration, it is well to
avoid overeating at dinner lest one impair one’s appetite for supper. But
the meaning of the Aristotelian working is that one should not be content
with transitory pleasure at all, but should be striving constantly to rise
from a lower to a higher range of satisfactions. The energy of soul that
has served on the humanistic level for mediation appears on the religious
level in the form of meditation. Religion may of course mean a great deal
more than meditation. At the same time humanistic mediation that has the
support of meditation may correctly be said to have a religious background.
Mediation and meditation are after all only different stages in the same
ascending “path” and should not be arbitrarily separated. This question
comes up especially in connection with the rôle of enthusiasm. Humanism is
not primarily enthusiastic, whereas religion is. There is a touch of
enthusiasm even in Aristotle, in general one of the coolest and most
detached of thinkers, when he comes to the passage from the humanistic to
the religious level. “We should not,” he says, “pay heed to those who bid
us think as mortals, but should, as far as may be, seek to make ourselves
immortal.” At the same time it must be admitted that even a true religious
enthusiasm is hard to combine with poise and that this true enthusiasm has
many counterfeits. “For one inspired, ten thousand are possessed,” wrote
the Earl of Roscommon, having in mind the religious zealots of the English
seventeenth century. The neo-classic gentleman was therefore as a rule
distinctly unfriendly to the enthusiast. The humanist, however, should not
deny enthusiasm but merely insist on defining it. He cannot afford to be an
enthusiast in Rousseau’s sense; on the other hand, he should not neglect
the truth of Rousseau’s saying that “cold reason has never done anything
illustrious.” Though one should, in my judgment, side with the oriental as
against Aristotle and the Greeks in giving priority to the higher will over
mind,[14] especially if one attaches importance to the supreme religious
virtue, humility, it yet remains true that this will must be exercised
intelligently. Granted that the existence in man of a power of control may
be affirmed, quite apart from any dogma, as a psychological fact, the
individual must nevertheless go beyond this fact if he is to decide rightly
how far he needs to exercise control in any particular instance: in short,
he needs standards. In getting his standards the humanist of the best type
is not content to acquiesce inertly in tradition. He is aware that there is
always entering into life an element of vital novelty and that the wisdom
of the past, invaluable though it is, cannot therefore be brought to bear
too literally on the present. He knows that, though standards are
necessary, they should be held flexibly and that, to accomplish this feat,
he must make the most difficult of all mediations, that between the One and
the Many. The chief enemies of the humanist are the pragmatists and other
philosophers of the flux who simplify this problem for themselves by
dismissing the One, which is actually a living intuition, as a metaphysical
abstraction. Whatever reality man achieves in his dealings with either the
human or the natural order, is dependent, I have tried to show elsewhere,
on the degree to which he establishes a correct relationship between the
part of himself that perceives, the part that conceives, and the part that
discriminates. The part that conceives, that reaches out and seizes
likenesses and analogies, may be defined as imagination; the part that
discriminates and tests the unity thus apprehended from the point of view
of its truth may be defined as analytical reason; the part that perceives
is, in the case of the humanist, primarily concerned with the something in
man that is set above the phenomenal order and that I have already defined
as a power of control. One may say therefore that standards result from a
co-operation between imagination and reason, dealing with the more
specifically human aspects of experience, and that these standards should
be pressed into the service of the higher will with a view to imposing a
right direction on the emotions and expansive desires of the natural man.
The supreme goal of ethical endeavour, as Plato pointed out long ago, is
that one should come to like and dislike the right things. IV Humanism,
even humanism of the distinctly individualistic type I have been outlining,
may, as I have already suggested, work in harmony with traditional
religion. In that case there must be a careful determination of boundaries.
Though humanism and religion both lie on the same ascending path from the
naturalistic flux, one must insist that each has its separate domain. It is
an error to hold that humanism can take the place of religion. Religion
indeed may more readily dispense with humanism than humanism with religion.
Humanism gains greatly by having a religious background in the sense I have
indicated; whereas religion, for the man who has actually renounced the
world, may very conceivably be all in all. On the other hand, the man who
sets out to live religiously in the secular order without having recourse
to the wisdom of the humanist is likely to fall into vicious
confusions--notably, into a confusion between the things of God and the
things of Cæsar. The Catholic Church has therefore been well inspired in
rounding out its religious doctrine with the teaching of Aristotle and
other masters of the law of measure. It can scarcely fail to recognise that
the position of the positive and critical humanist is sound _as far as it
goes_. It follows that the Catholic and the non-Catholic should be able to
co-operate on the humanistic level. A like co-operation should be possible
between the humanist and the members of other Christian communions who have
not as yet succumbed entirely to humanitarianism. I have tried to show that
the weakness of humanitarianism from both the humanistic and the religious
point of view is that it holds out the hope of securing certain spiritual
benefits--for example, peace and brotherhood--without any ascent from the
naturalistic level. The positive and critical humanist would seem to have a
certain tactical superiority over the religious traditionalist in dealing
with the defects of the humanitarian programme. In the battle of ideas, as
in other forms of warfare, the advantage is on the side of those who take
the offensive. The modernists have broken with tradition partly because it
is not sufficiently immediate, partly because it is not sufficiently
experimental. Why not meet them on their own ground and, having got rid of
every ounce of unnecessary metaphysical and theological baggage, oppose to
them something that is both immediate and experimental--namely the presence
in man of a higher will or power of control? I use the word experimental
deliberately by way of protest against the undue narrowing of this word by
the scientific naturalists to observation of the phenomenal order and of
man only in so far as he comes under this order. One should also protest
against the restriction of the term reality to observation of this type.
Some of the most monstrous mutilations of reality that the world has ever
seen are being perpetrated at this moment--for example, by the
behaviouristic psychologists--in the name of the “real.” At all events
everything in the modernist movement will be found to converge either upon
the rôle of feeling or upon the rôle of experiment, and the final question
raised in either case is that of the will. As a result of the combined
influence of the various types of naturalists, the present age is at once
more emotional and more mechanical than any other of which we have
historical record. By mechanical I refer primarily not to the
multiplication of machines in the outer world but to the mechanising of
mind itself. An effective procedure is, as I have said, to meet the
mechanist on his own ground and point out to him that he is unduly
dogmatic, if he holds that his hypothesis is absolutely valid even for the
natural order, and that, if he goes further and seeks to make it cover the
whole of experience, to impose a deterministic nightmare on the human
spirit itself, he is abandoning the experimental attitude for an even more
objectionable form of dogmatism. Similarly one should meet the emotionalist
on his favourite ground of immediacy. Inasmuch as the higher immediacy has
been largely associated in the Christian occident with the operation of
God’s will, the substitution for it of the lower immediacy has meant
practically the setting up of a subrational parody of grace. In order to
make this parody plausible, the emotionalist has had recourse to the usual
arts of the sophist, chief among which are a juggling with half-truths and
a tampering with general terms. I have commented elsewhere on the way in
which words like “virtue” and “conscience” have been so twisted from their
traditional meaning as to eliminate the dualistic element that both
humanism and religion require. If there is to be any recovery of the truths
of dualism, at least along critical lines, a battle royal will need to be
fought over the word “nature” itself; here, if anywhere, one needs to
practise a Socratic dichotomy. The half-truth that has been used to
compromise religion in particular is that, though religion is in itself
something quite distinct from emotion, it is in its ordinary manifestations
very much mixed up with emotion. I give an example of this error in its
latest and fashionable form. In a very learned and, in some respects, able
book,[15] the Rev. N. P. Williams seeks to show that St. Augustine’s
experience of grace or, what amounts to the same thing, his love of God,
was only a “sublimation” of his “lust.” St. Augustine was a very passionate
man and his passionateness no doubt enters into his love of God. But if it
could be shown that the love of God was in St. Augustine or any other of
the major saints merely emotion, sublimated or unsublimated, religion would
be only the “illusion” that Freud himself has declared it to be. The
psycho-analytical divine, who is, I am told, a fairly frequent type in
England, is about the worst _mélange des genres_ that has appeared even in
the present age of confusion. One may be helped in escaping from this
confusion by considering, so far as possible from a strictly psychological
point of view, what the exercise of the higher will has actually meant in
genuine religion. One must admit at the outset the difficulty of
determining what is genuine religion. Religion, not merely to-day but
always, has been subject to extraordinary perversions. It has ever been the
chosen domain of self-deception and “wishful” thinking. When one reflects
on the fanaticism, casuistry, obscurantism, and hypocrisy that have defaced
the history of Christianity itself, one is tempted at times to acquiesce in
the famous exclamation of Lucretius.[16] Yet one must insist that religion
is in its purity the very height of man. As to where this pure religion is
to be found, we should keep in mind the saying of Joubert that in matters
religious it is a bad sign when one differs from the saints. Let us then
turn to the saints in whom there is some authentic survival of the spirit
of the Founder. This spirit surely appears in the author of the _Imitation_
when he writes: “Know for certain that thou must lead a dying life; and the
more a man dies to himself the more he begins to live in God.” Moreover the
author of the _Imitation_ is at one here not only with Christ but with
Buddha, the chief source of sanctity in the Far East. The point on which
Christ and Buddha are in accord is the need of renunciation. It should be
abundantly plain from all I have said that the higher will is felt in its
relation to the expansive desires as a will to refrain. The humanist does
not carry the exercise of this will beyond a subduing of his desires to the
law of measure; but it may be carried much further until it amounts to a
turning away from the desires of the natural man altogether--the “dying to
the world” of the Christian. With this background in mind, we should know
what to think of the humanistic and religious claims of the modernist
movement. This movement has, from the eighteenth century and in some
respects from the Renaissance, been marked by a growing discredit of the
will to refrain. The very word renunciation has been rarely pronounced by
those who have entered into the movement. The chief exception that occurs
to one is Goethe (echoed at times by Carlyle). Any one who thinks of the
series of Goethe’s love affairs prolonged into the seventies, is scarcely
likely to maintain that his _Entsagung_ was of a very austere character
even for the man of the world, not to speak of the saint. The humanitarians
in particular, whether of the utilitarian or of the sentimental type, have
put slight emphasis on the inner control of appetite. They have encouraged,
either directly or through the ineffectiveness of the substitutes they have
offered for this control, a multiplication and complication of desires that
is in flat contradiction with the wisdom of the ages. Judged by the
standards of the great traditional faiths, the religion of “progress” or
“service” or “humanity” merely illustrates on a vast scale the truth of the
old Latin adage that “the world wishes to be deceived.” The various
naturalistic philosophies that have been built up on the ruins of tradition
should, at all events, whatever their merits or demerits, be made to stand
on their own feet. It should be one’s ambition to develop so keen a
Socratic dialectic, supported by such a wealth of historical illustration,
that it will not be easy for the Walter Lippmanns of the future to propose
some form of naturalism as the equivalent of “humanism” and “high
religion.” In his attempt to show the inadequacy of humanism apart from
dogmatic and revealed religion, Mr. T. S. Eliot has painted a picture of
the humanist exercising in a sort of psychic solitude self-control purely
for the sake of control. It is evident however that the real humanist
consents, like Aristotle, to limit his desires only in so far as this
limitation can be shown to make for his own happiness. This primary
reference to the individual and his happiness is something with which we
are nowadays rather unfamiliar. Our preoccupation, one is almost tempted to
say our obsession, is, at least in our official philosophy, with society
and its supposed interests. A study of humanism from the sociological point
of view would call for a separate essay. I may, however, indicate briefly
the main issue: the individual who is practising humanistic control is
really subordinating to the part of himself which he possesses in common
with other men, that part of himself which is driving him apart from them.
If several individuals submit to the same or a similar humanistic
discipline, they will become psychically less separate, will, in short,
move towards a communion. A group that is thus getting together on a sound
ethical basis will be felt at once as an element of social order and
stability. No doubt a still more perfect communion may be achieved on the
religious level. There are however differences of dogma and ecclesiastical
discipline that make a meeting on this plane difficult even for the various
denominations of Christians. If one’s survey is extended, as it should be
in these days of universal and facile material communication, to include
Mahometans and Hindus and Chinese, the obstacles in the way of a union
among men that is primarily religious are seen to be well-nigh insuperable.
It might, for example, be conducive to the peace of the world if everybody,
East and West, accepted the authority of the Pope. The chances of such
universal acceptance are, however, short of some very “visible upset of
grace,” practically negligible. One can scarcely remind oneself too often
that the great traditional faiths, notably Christianity and Buddhism,[17]
have their humanistic side where closer agreement may be possible. If the
leaders of the various national and cultural groups could bring themselves
to display in their dealings with one another moderation, common sense and
common decency, they would accomplish a great deal--vastly more than they
have been accomplishing of late. The difficulties in the way of an
understanding, even on this humanistic basis, not to speak of any deeper
religious understanding, have been augmented by the fact that large numbers
in the Christian occident as well as in the orient, especially in China,
are falling away from their traditional disciplines into spiritual anarchy.
The dangers of this anarchy, combined, as it is, with the accumulation of a
formidable mass of machinery that, in the abeyance of any higher will, is
likely to be pressed into the service of the will to power, are appalling.
The first step, if there is to be an effective opposition to spiritual
anarchy of the current type, must be, as I remarked at the outset, right
definition. The idea is becoming fairly widespread that there is needed at
present a reaction from the romantic movement and that this reaction should
assume a religious or a humanistic character. This idea will not in itself
take us very far. Even Benedetto Croce, whose philosophy would seem to be
in its underlying postulates almost at the opposite pole from a genuinely
religious or humanistic position, has declared that we need a “new
Christianity” or a “new humanism,” if we are to escape “from intellectual
anarchy, from unbridled individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism,
from pessimism, from every aberration which for a century and a half has
been harassing the soul of man and the society of mankind under the name of
Romanticism.” Occasional humanists may appear under existing conditions,
but if there is to be anything deserving to be called a humanistic
movement, it will be necessary that a considerable number of persons get at
least within hailing distance of one another as to the definition of the
word humanism itself and the nature of the discipline that this definition
entails. This preliminary understanding once established, they could then
proceed, in the literal sense of that unjustly discredited term, to work
out a convention. Their next concern would almost inevitably be with
education. Education is, as Professor Gass has remarked, the one altruistic
activity of the humanist. The reason is that if the humanistic goal is to
be achieved, if the adult is to like and dislike the right things, he must
be trained in the appropriate habits almost from infancy. The whole
question should be of special interest to Americans. Economic and other
conditions are more favourable in this country than elsewhere for the
achievement of a truly liberal conception of education with the idea of
leisure enshrined at its very centre. In the meanwhile, our educational
policies, from the elementary grades to the university, are being
controlled by humanitarians. They are busy at this very moment, almost to a
man, proclaiming the gospel of service. It will be strange indeed if
dissatisfaction with this situation is not felt by a growing minority, if a
demand does not arise for at least a few institutions of learning that are
humanistic rather than humanitarian in their aims. One is at all events
safe in affirming that the battle that is to determine the fate of American
civilisation will be fought out first of all in the field of education.
Note.--For a humanistic view of the field of education, the reader may be
referred to an article by Irving Babbitt, “President Eliot and American
Education,” in the _Forum_, January, 1929, or to his book on _Literature
and the American College: Essays in Defence of the Humanities_ (Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1908). See also Norman Foerster’s recent book, _The American
Scholar: A Study in Litteræ Inhumaniores_ (University of North Carolina
Press, 1929).--Editor. FOOTNOTES [2] For an outline of Chinese humanism,
see the article by Chang Hsin-Hai in the _Hibbert Journal_ for April, 1928
(“The Essentials of Confucian Wisdom”). [3] See _The Conduct of Life_,
translation of the _Tsung Yung_ by Ku Hung Ming (Wisdom of the East
series), p. 55. [4] “Unum hoc animal sentit quid sit ordo, quid sit quod
deceat, in factis dictisque qui modus.” _De Officiis_, Lib. I. [5] See
_Analects_ (Wisdom of the East series), p. 109. [6] “Conclusion” to his
volume _The Renaissance_. [7] For Pater’s definition of humanism see the
end of his essay on Pico della Mirandola (_The Renaissance_). [8] See
_L’Inde el le Monde_, pp. 32, 165. [9] See, for example, the symposium
entitled _Humanist Sermons_ edited by C. W. Reese (1927). On page 60 of
this volume one encounters the statement that “all Americans are
humanists”! For a fuller elucidation of the distinction between the
humanist and the humanitarian see the opening chapters of my book
_Literature and the American College_ (1908). [10] See my book _Democracy
and Leadership_, p. 25. [11] For the different meanings that this maxim may
have see the last chapter of my book _The Masters of Modern French
Criticism_. [12] See “The Mucker Pose” by James Truslow Adams, _Harper’s
Magazine_, November, 1928; reprinted in _Our Business Civilisation_ (1929).
[13] For the early hostility of certain Christians to Graeco-Roman culture
and the final reconciliation between this culture and the Church, see E. K.
Rand’s _Founders of the Middle Ages_, _passim_. _Cf._ also P. E. More’s
“Paradox of Oxford” (_Shelburne Essays_, Vol. IX). [14] See Ch. V of
_Democracy and Leadership_ (“Europe and Asia”); also Appendix A (“Theories
of the Will”). [15] _The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin_ (Bampton
Lectures for 1924). See p. 331. [16] “Tantum religio potuit suadere
malorum.” [17] Confucianism is of course primarily humanistic. _The
Humility of Common Sense_[18] PAUL ELMER MORE I It is a nice question to
ask whether belief in the absolute irresponsibility of the artistic
temperament has engendered the modern ideal of absolute art, or the
contrary. Which is first, the complacency of conceit or of theory? For
myself I am willing to leave the solution of such a problem to the Demon
himself, who alone knoweth his own mind; but from the _Æsthetic_[19] of
Signor Croce, the most epoptic hierophant of the demonic mysteries in these
days, I can see how nearly the two absolutes are related, and can get some
glimpse of the procedure of the metaphysical mind at its highest point of
activity. Now Signor Croce, though really himself a child of Hegel, makes
good sport of the theoretical æstheticians in the train of Kant and Hegel
who define art as pure hedonism, or pure moralism, or pure conceptualism;
and so far he does well. You might suppose he was taking the ordinary and
sensible point of view, viz., that art must of course give pleasure, and
must be psychologically moral (not pedantically so), and must contain
ideas, but that it is a false sort of simplification to define art itself
therefore _as_ pleasure, or _as_ morals, or _as_ ideas. If such were the
motive behind Croce’s antipathy to the Teutonic æsthetics of the last
century, he would seem, as I say, to be pleading for the liberty of common
sense against the absolutism of the Demon; but he too quickly dispels any
such illusion. “Art,” he declares, “which _depends_ on morals or pleasure
or philosophy _is_ morals or pleasure or philosophy, and not art at all.”
Now what kind of logic is this that argues: Because art is not pure
pleasure, therefore pure art is absolved from the need of giving pleasure;
because art is not pure morals, therefore pure art is absolved from any
concern with morals? One might as well say, e.g., that cookery which is
relished for the pleasure it gives _is_ pleasure, and not cookery at all;
therefore cookery has nothing to do with pleasure. It is the old story of
Luther’s drunken man on horseback: prop him up on one side and over he
flops on the other. Because one absolute is not true, therefore the
contrary absolute must be true; because art which gives pleasure is not
definable simply as pleasure, therefore art is a hieratic abstraction
entirely independent of pleasure. But if such a theory of art would seem to
be buzzing in a metaphysical vacuum, it is not without its very practical
aspect, whether as cause or effect. “The artist,” says Signor Croce, coming
down abruptly to earth, “is always above blame morally and above censure
philosophically.” There you have it, the claim to irresponsibility, so dear
to our militant gentlemen of the press, vested in the authority of an
awesome name. I do not suppose many of our emancipated writers are deeply
versed in the thin dialectic of æsthetics, but they understand pretty well
what is meant when they are told that in their work as creative artists
they need not concern themselves with the ethical laws supposed to govern
life or with the dull maxims of truth. It may be a question, as I have
said, whether the great Neapolitan has risen from the popular lust of
irresponsibility to his theory of independent art or has condescended to
the lower level from the heights of abstract reasoning. In either case the
next step, from a definition by negation to a definition by affirmation,
carries him into an altitude beyond the reach of any earthly telescope.
Art, he has shown, is absolutely not pleasure or morals or philosophy; it
just absolutely _is_--but is what? In the answer to this question I seem to
hear no human voice but the very diction of the Demon. Otherwise I cannot
understand whence the avowed foe of Kantian and Hegelian abstractions has
derived his positive definition of art, which of all abstractions is the
most abstract and of all absolutes the most absolute. “Art is intuition,”
he says, that and nothing else; not the vision of something, mind you, but
pure vision. Or, if you desire more words in your definition, you may have
it thus: “An aspiration inclosed in the circle of a representation, that is
art; and in it the aspiration exists solely by the representation, and the
representation solely by the aspiration.” Which words, if they mean
anything, signify, I suppose, that art is of the spirit of pure
creativeness, a reaching out towards a goal which is non-existent until
visualised by the very act of reaching out. Such a definition may engage
the attention of metaphysicians; in my common-place mind, frankly, it draws
blank. I do not comprehend what is meant by aspiring towards that which is
non-existent until we visualise it by aspiring. Croce is the pope of the
new school, and as such ought to be immune from the questioning of the lay
intelligence. For a more accessible exposition of the ideas stirring the
young modernists, I turn to the distinguished critic and philosopher of
Spain, José Ortega y Gasset, and in particular to his essay published under
the significant title of _The Dehumanization of Art_.[20] Unless I mistake
his language, Señor Ortega finds little satisfaction æsthetically in the
extreme products of the movement he describes. But he believes that it is
not the function of a critic to value works of art in accordance with his
own taste or distaste. And especially to-day, when more than ever before it
is a characteristic of art to divide mankind sharply into those who
comprehend and those who do not, the business of criticism should be to
enter into the intention of the artist, and not to judge his work from some
alien point of view, least of all to condemn. Well, Señor Ortega in a sense
comprehends; he states the various theories adopted by the _jóvenes_ to
justify their adventurous ways with admirable perspicuity and
precision--and with that final confusion at the back of his mind which
enables him to speak as one who belongs intellectually to the movement,
however practically his taste may lag a little behind its utmost advance.
The central thesis of Señor Ortega’s book, which at once justifies his
title and summarises the most advanced attitude towards art, is exactly
this: “To rejoice or suffer with the human lot which a work of art may
incidentally suggest or present to us, is a very different thing from the
true artistic pleasure. More than that: this occupation with the human
element of the work is essentially incompatible with pure æsthetic
fruition.”[21] That clearly is the voice of the Demon once more, appealing
to the same lust for an irresponsible absolute as inspires the Crocean
æsthetics. And now art is to be not only independent of morals but in its
essence divided altogether from human nature; and if it still aims to
please, its pleasure is of a kind peculiar to itself and unrelated to the
coarse fodder of life. Suppose, to take the illustration given by Señor
Ortega, a notable man is lying at the point of death. His wife will be
standing by his bed, a physician will be counting his pulse, while
elsewhere in the house a reporter awaits the news and a painter is engaged
to depict the scene. All four persons--wife, physician, reporter,
painter--are intent upon the same fact, but with varying degrees of
intimacy and with different kinds of interest. To the wife the event is an
occasion of grief and anxiety; she is, as it were, a part of it; whereas to
the artist, at the other extreme, the situation is entirely divested of
human sympathy or sentiment: “his mind is set solely on the exterior, on
certain lights and shadows, certain chromatic values.” And so it happens
that if the natural emotions felt on such an occasion by the wife, the
physician, and even to a lesser degree by the news-reporter, are what the
ordinary man (the “philistine” or “bourgeois” of the older romantic jargon)
regards as the real stuff of life, then art to the ordinary man is removed
to a sphere of incomprehensible unreality. “An artistic object,” says Señor
Ortega, “is artistic only in the measure in which it ceases to be real.”
Hence, in the scene just described, the actual death-bed and the artist’s
picture of it are two things “absolutely different (_completamente
distintos_).” We may interest ourselves in one or the other; in one case we
live with, or in, the event, in the other case we “contemplate” an object
of art as such, with æsthetic pleasure perhaps, but with no human emotions.
Just in so far as the picture shows any feeling for, or awakens in the
beholder any response to, the significance of death, it falls below the
high function of art. The tragedy of loss, the frustration of ambition, the
humility of surrender, the consolations of hope, the victory of love, the
sanctities of religion,--any shadow of these resting upon the canvas will
detract from the purity of æsthetic pleasure. The artist and the
connoisseur in the presence of death find only an occasion for certain
lines and colours. And further, as our power of contemplation becomes more
refined, we cease to discern (or, if we are artists, to paint) even the
unreal representation of a real event; a picture will cease to depend on,
or suggest, any subject whatsoever. For art is like a window through which
we look out upon a garden. The ordinary man sees only the flowers and
leaves beyond, and is so absorbed in these as to be quite unaware of the
pane of glass, the more so as the glass is purer and clearer. But with
effort we can make ourselves conscious of the medium through which we are
looking; and as our vision is thus concentrated on the glass, the garden
fades into a confused blotch of colours or even passes out of conscious
perception altogether. That is Señor Ortega’s vivid metaphor for the
Crocean theory of art as pure intuition--which he professes to reach,
however, by no theorising of his own but from study of the actual practice
of certain of the _jóvenes_. For those who believe in the divine mission of
art the elevation of society might seem to lie in obeying the command of
Mr. Skionar in Peacock’s _Crotchet Castle_: “Build sacella for
transcendental oracles to teach the world how to see through a glass
darkly.” It all sounds rather funny to me. But I hope I am not laughing at
an unfair caricature. What else in fact is the meaning of those sapient
critics, who might join me in repudiating the language of metaphysics, yet
insist that in judging a picture we shall pay no heed to the subject
represented but consider it as pure representation, or who say that the
value of a work of art depends not at all on the character of the human
experience put into it but only on the sincerity of self-expression?--as if
there were some mystical virtue in self-expression even when the self has
no experience worthy to be expressed. It is, in fact, pedantic talk of this
sort in the mouths of respected critics that indicates how far the
depredations of the Demon have extended into the realm of common sense. As
for the creators, so called, there may be a young votary of art here and
there who is trying honestly to put these abstractions into practice; and
for him, I should suppose, the goal of dehumanisation and derealisation
will have been attained when his pictures are simplified to a cunning
design of line and colour with no suggestion of a definite subject, or
still further to a spread of pure colour with no design at all; his music
to a pure tone without melody or even variation; his poems to a succession
of beautiful words unsullied by sense. That would seem to be the nearest
practical equivalent to seeing a pure pane of glass. One wonders why the
pilgrim of vacuity should be so slow and hesitant in his progress towards
so easy a mark. Perhaps he foresees that absolute art, so reached, will
cease to be art at all. Perhaps he has a foreboding that the prize if
obtained would not be very valuable. It is hard to imagine the pleasure or
profit to be derived from concentrating one’s attention upon a pane of
transparent glass until one sees nothing through it; most of us would
prefer to retain our impure perception of the flowers in the garden beyond.
Despite the majestic logic of youth we persist in thinking that such a
picture as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is a truer work of art than the
deftest whirl of colours ever painted; that the _Æneid_ is richer in
poetical joy than _Kubla Khan_ (not to mention the latest lyric from the
American colony in Paris); that Bach’s Mass in B Minor is still a miracle
and a rapture of sound. Yet all these--the painting and the epic and the
mass--are brimming with human emotion and with a brooding sense of the
eternal values of life. They are great for various reasons, no doubt; but
certainly among those reasons is the fact that they are not art at all as
the modernists would have us believe. The simple truth is that the effort
to create pure art is nothing more than idolatry to a fetish of abstract
reason--unless you prefer to ticket it as empty conceit--and could never
engage the practical interest of any but a few witless cranks. There is a
profound confusion in Señor Ortega’s interpretation of what is happening
among the mass of the younger artists, as indeed there is often in their
own statement of what they are endeavouring to do. They may be seeking an
absolute, but it is not an absolute of purity in any sense of the word. Now
I grant at once that there is a difference between art and life, that the
attitude of the painter, to return to the old illustration, is not
identical with that of the wife in the house of mourning. There is in art a
change, a transmutation, a something taken away and a something added.
“Art,” said Goethe, “is art only because it is not nature.” And Aristotle,
perhaps, had the same truth in mind in his famous theory of the purgation
of the human passions. In that sense we can accept a maxim that comes from
Japan: “Art lies in the shadowy frontiers between reality and
unreality.”[22] The point I would make is the falseness and futility of the
logical deduction that art can therefore dispense with the stuff of
humanity or nature, or can weigh anchor and sail off into a shoreless sea
of unreality. What has actually happened is this. Always the great creators
have taken the substance of life, and, not by denying it or attempting to
evade its laws, but by looking more intently below its surface, have found
meanings and values that transmute it into something at once the same and
different. The passions that distract the individual man with the despair
of isolated impotence they have invested with a universal significance
fraught with the destinies of humanity; the scenery of the material world
they have infused with suggestions of an indwelling otherworld. And so by a
species of symbolism, or whatever you choose to call it, they have lifted
mortal life and its theatre to a higher reality which only to the contented
or dust-choked dwellers in things as they are may appear as unreal. That,
for instance, is precisely what Perugino has achieved in his picture of a
death-scene entitled the Mystic Crucifixion, where pain and grief and the
fear that clutches the individual heart in its hand of ice have been
transmuted into a drama of divine redemption through suffering, while the
tender burgeoning of spring thrown up against the far-off juncture of earth
and sky gives hints of a mode of existence in joyous and infinite freedom.
Even the lesser creators, those who in innocence of spirit have undertaken
merely to reproduce what they see, may have done so with a clarity and
largeness of vision capable of working a magic alchemy of which they
themselves perhaps never dreamed. That was the tradition of agelong
practice; it is what we mean, or ought to mean, by classical. And then,
after the devastating materialism of late eighteenth-century philosophy
there came a change of ideals. The veritable feeling for the otherworld and
for spiritual values was lost, while at the same time the new school,
stirred with vague aspirations, was not satisfied with a simple and, in its
way, wholesome naturalism. Above all these prophets of the romantic
movement, as we designate it, revolted from the restrictive rules of an art
which was neither classical nor innocently naturalistic, but
pseudo-classical, and which had developed from one side of the Renaissance.
They too perceived that no great art was possible without escape from the
levelling tyranny of natural law, and, being unable to transcend nature,
seeing indeed no higher reality into which nature could be raised, they
sought freedom by sinking below nature. In painting, as Mr. Mather has
shown with fulness of knowledge and admirable acumen, this process of
escape meant “a successive elimination of academic authority, imagination,
memory, fidelity to nature, and nature itself. It would seem as if the last
sacrifice had been made; but no. In all these rejections and in the most
grotesque experiments the painter had retained his seriousness and
self-respect. This too went by the board in a brief moment after the War,
when the Dadaists bade the artist create in a mood of joyous bluff,
meanwhile mocking himself and his world. The oft-repeated demonstration is
complete once more--the latter end of expansive Romantic individualism is
Romantic disillusionment and Romantic irony.”[23] And the same history
might be given of modern music and literature, though in the case of the
latter the disinvolution, by reason of the medium employed, is more
complicated. For instance the liberation of art from the moral obligations
of life, so vaunted by Mr. Cabell and others of the left wing in America as
a new achievement, is really contemporaneous with the romantic movement. At
least as far back as 1837 we find George Sand declaring that by almost
universal consent the arts have become accomplices in this strange tendency
towards “amoralism.” Now conscientious theorists may hold that amoralism is
a step in the direction of freedom; in practice it became commonly a mere
euphemism for immorality, not to say vulgar indecency. The climax of the
movement in that direction was reached in the realism of Zola and others
who, quite frankly and systematically and “scientifically,” made human
nature coterminous with the bestial in man. Art may have been emancipated
from one set of bonds, but it was wrapt and enfolded and constricted in a
bondage tenfold straiter. It may have been dehumanised in the sense that it
had repudiated the government of reason which to the older humanists was
the distinguishing trait of man as man; it certainly was not purged of its
attempt to evoke passions which on a lower plane are _menschlich allzu
menschlich_. As a matter of fact the radical writers of to-day who are
accomplishing anything of magnitude are still predominantly of that school
of realism. But a few restless souls, those in particular whom Señor Ortega
has in mind, driven on by the despotic Demon of the Absolute, have not been
content to abide in this halfway house. They see clearly enough that art
has not been purified by such realism, but mixed and muddied by deliberate
opposition to the ethical interpretation of life; they will detach art from
even that poor remnant of deliberation which made a selection among the
elements of composite human nature with a certain regard, though an
inverted regard, for moral values. They hold deliberation to be the foe of
liberation. Hence the later theory, exemplified in English by James Joyce,
that art shall not reproduce a picture of life as the humanist sees it, or
even from the inverted point of view of the realist, but for its subject
matter shall descend to what they call the pure “stream of consciousness.”
The hero of fiction shall have no will, no purpose, no inhibition, no power
of choice whether for good or evil, but shall be merely a medium through
which passes an endless, unchecked, meaningless flux of sensations and
memories and emotions and impulses. And so the limit of elimination has
been reached--at least the practical limit, since below the stream of
consciousness there would seem to remain nothing to represent save
bottomless inanity. But this fact is to be noted: though the process of
evolution may seem to have been carried on in the name of absolute art, the
actual goal attained is an absolute of quite another order; there has been
no true liberation, but a progressive descent in slavery. As, successively,
one after another of the higher elements of our composite nature has been
suppressed, a lower instinct has taken its place. The submergence of the
humanistic conception of man as a responsible creature of free will has
been accompanied by an emergence of the romantic glorification of
uncontrollable temperament; this has been supplanted by a realistic theory
of subjection to the bestial passions, and this, at the last, by an attempt
to represent life as an unmitigated flux, which in practice, however it be
in literature, means confinement in a mad-house. The practitioners of the
newest art call themselves _surréalistes_, super-realists; they flatter
themselves, they are sub-realists. Art may be dehumanised, but only in the
sense that, having passed beyond the representation of men as
undifferentiated from animals, it undertakes to portray them as complete
imbeciles. To speak of the works produced by the boastful modern school as
pure art is, from any point of view, mere bluff. By their fruits you shall
know them. Turn the pages of the little magazine published in Paris under
the title of _transition_, wherein Mr. Joyce and a group of denationalised
Americans and Americanised Frenchmen collaborate to their own mutual
satisfaction: you will there find what the Simon-pure article is in theory
and practice. For instance a certain M. Louis Aragon,--described by his
admiring introducer as “an intellectual on a lifelong holiday, a
twentieth-century pilgrim with a pack of words on his back,”
etc.,--expounds the theory thus: Reason, reason, o abstract day-phantom, I
have already driven you from my dreams. And now I am at the point where
they are ready to blend with the realities of appearance. There is no
longer room only for me. In vain reason denounces the dictatorship of
sensuality. In vain it puts me on guard against error. Error is here the
queen. Come in, Madame, this is my body, this is your throne. I pat my
delirium as I would a beautiful horse.... Nothing can assure me of reality.
Nothing, neither the exactness of logic nor the strength of a sensation,
can assure me that I do not base it on the delirium of interpretation. And
so M. Aragon, concluding “that only the syllables of reality are
artistically usable,” exemplifies the new style: _Ité ité la réa Ité ité la
réalité La réa la réa Té té La réa Li Té La réalité Il y avait une fois LA
RÉALITÉ._ Such is the manifesto of Super-realism, “the Freudian period,” as
the addicts of the stream of consciousness call it, “to the realistic
misconception.” Their title, I have said, is a pretty mistake for
sub-realism; but they are not mistaken in their claim to have reached a
kind of absolute. At least I cannot imagine what lower level of imbecility
may still be honoured with the name of art. (If any votary of “pure art”
chances to read this essay, he will say: So Keats and Milton were treated
by critics of their age.) II One of the hardest things for a student to
learn, which yet, if he could but know it at the beginning, would save him
from endless perplexities and perhaps from final despair, is just the
simple fact that _brain-power is no guarantee for rightness of thinking_,
that on the contrary a restlessly outreaching mind, unchecked by the
humility of common sense, is more than likely to lead its owner into bogs
of duplicity if not into the bottomless pit of fatuity, that, to repeat the
phrase of Bacon, himself a shining example, the _intellectus sibi
permissus_ is the easiest of all dupes for the Demon of the Absolute. There
has been no more powerful intellect for the past hundred years than Kant’s;
I doubt if any writer ever filled the world with more confusion of thought
or clouded the truth with a thicker dust of obscurity. And it is in this
spirit of distrust, not incompatible with a kind of admiration, that I
criticise the works of one who to-day has reached the pinnacle of fame as a
thinker. Professor Whitehead’s philosophy spans the double field of
religion and science; and in each of these, I presume to say, he has come
by the circuitous ways of abstract reasoning to conclusions that in a
lesser man would be regarded as preposterous. If such a statement shocks
you or sounds disrespectful, take yourself the argument of his _Religion in
the Making_ and strip it to the bones. You will find that it proceeds from
the definition of religion as “the longing for justification,” and is
directed by the fact that “to-day there is but one religious dogma in
debate: What do you mean by ‘God’?” Upon this basis, then, Mr. Whitehead
undertakes to find such a meaning for the word “God” as will satisfy man’s
“longing for justification.” Such a simplification of the religious problem
will strike some inquirers as high-handed, but I let that pass; it has at
least whatever merits appertain to simplicity. And I admit ungrudgingly
that in the course of his lectures Mr. Whitehead makes many shrewd
observations on the deeper mysteries of human life. Memorable passages
might be quoted, for instance such sentences as these, that touch the
Crocean metaphysic on the quick: “To be an actual thing is to be limited,”
“Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality,”
“Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.” But in
the end how does Mr. Whitehead reply to his own question: “What do you mean
by ‘God’?” For convenience’ sake I quote this summary of his answer from a
eulogistic article in the _Hibbert Journal_ for July 1927: All being does
this [_i.e._, “comes to a focus in each thing”] because it is its nature so
to do. _This inherent nature of all being is God._ All being does this
because it is organised according to the principle of concretion. All being
does this because of a certain order or character which pervades it. That
order pervading the universe that makes it concrete is God. God is not
himself concrete, says Whitehead, but he is the principle which constitutes
the concreteness of things. That is to say, in still simpler language: An
individual object is not cut off from the universe, but stands in some
relation to all other objects and owes its character to this relationship;
this is so because it is the nature of things to be so; such is the law of
“concretion,” and the “principle of concretion” is God. Now, apart from the
final clause, a plain man might suggest that the argument, so relieved of
the obscurantism of metaphysical jargon, is more true than original--true
to the point of insipidity. As for the conclusion, no doubt, so left in its
native jargon, it comes with the shock of originality; but has it sense?
Will any man admit that the God whom he worships and to whom he prays--and
without worship and prayer the use of the word “God” is a pure solecism--is
no more than the “principle of concretion” in the universe? Has such a
definition any bearing on religion as the “longing for justification”? Is
it anything more than a phantom of abstract science surreptitiously
substituted for the object of faith? The fact is that between the last
clause of the argument and what precedes there is a sheer hiatus. It is the
age-old fallacy of metaphysics: you take a word used in ordinary speech
(“God”) with a perfectly clear connotation; you define the word in a manner
to suit your convenience (“the principle of concretion”); you prove that
there is something in the nature of things corresponding to your
definition, and then casually assume that your proof holds good of the word
in its popular sense. It is the oft-repeated adventure of the Absolute: you
wrap a common-place up in abstract terminology, and then in that fog of
language you find yourself precipitated into an abyss of nonsense (that the
“longing for justification” is satisfied by belief in “the inherent nature
of all being”).[24] But this is by the way. Our present topic is rather Mr.
Whitehead’s philosophy of science, which is his real concern, and in which
the terms “God” and “religion” are manifestly unwarranted intrusions. Here,
again, to the student of contemporary thought Mr. Whitehead’s _Science and
the Modern World_ must be in many ways a welcome book. His comments on the
connexion between the poets and the physical theories of their day are
illuminating and bring to the subject a knowledge not often found in the
literary critic. And I for one am much beholden to him for his treatment of
the ghastly relic of materialism bequeathed to us by our fathers--I would
almost say his indecent burial of it, were the epithet indecent applicable
to the disposal of a corpse which has remained too long above ground. And
very cleverly he directs his attack to the two points where the mechanistic
philosophy is most vulnerable--its apparent simplicity and its presumptive
regard of facts. There was indeed at first sight a seductive simplicity
about the theories of Huxley and his militant brothers. It is so easy to
say that the world is nothing but a machine nicely constructed of atoms,
running smoothly and undeviatingly under the mechanical laws of motion; to
deny that anything new or incalculable ever breaks in to disarrange the
regularity demanded by science; to dispose of the passions and appetites
and the very consciousness of man as mere products of atomical reaction. It
was the kind of simplification that promised to solve for us all the
annoying problems of life, exactly the kind of bait that the Demon of the
Absolute loves to dangle before a mind unprotected by the humility of
common sense. Certainly if ever any group of men had a cosmic footrule in
their pockets, it was this particular group of mid-Victorians who married
the atheistical philosophy of the eighteenth century to the physical
discoveries of the nineteenth. Unfortunately, what seemed a process of
simplification has led step by step to such a complexity of adjustments to
keep the machine going that long ago the plain man, if he dared, would have
scouted the whole conception as a fantastic dream. And here Mr. Whitehead,
by virtue of his standing as a mathematician, speaks with an authority for
which the plain man must be very grateful. “The physical doctrine of the
atom,” he says, “has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the
epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.” In all conscience, is it not
true that to accept the more recent developments of scientific mechanism
requires about the same sort of credulity as was demanded of the theologian
in the Middle Ages when asked to debate the number of angels who could
stand together on the point of a needle? And as the mechanistic theory,
when used to explain the inner workings of matter, instead of simplifying
science, breaks down under a weight of infinite complications, so, when
applied to the nature of man, it shatters itself on what Mr. Whitehead
rightly calls certain “stubborn and irreducible facts”--the most stubborn
and irreducible of these facts being, as every unperverted mind knows, that
we are not pure machines, and that any argument which would subject the
human will and consciousness to the mechanical laws of motion is void
because based on false premises. Against the high-handed assumptions of
Darwinian materialism and the fanatical dogmatism of its votaries (relics
of which still circulate in the backwaters of the biological laboratory),
as against all forms of complacent obscurantism, whether theological or
scientific, “Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages: ‘My brethren, by
the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be mistaken.’”
It is the bare truth that one must rake the records of history to discover
a more complete and abject subservience to the Demon of the Absolute than
that of the philosophy, falsely called science, of the period now closing.
And, as I say, any one who clings to common sense must be thankful to Mr.
Whitehead for lending his authority as a scientist to the unlocking of
these shackles. But then, why should so masterly an intellect, again like
Luther’s drunken man, topple over on the other side into a contrary but
equally impossible absolutism? Why? “The only way of mitigating mechanism,”
he says, “is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.” And so, instead of
admitting humbly that mechanism is mechanism while beside it there exists
something of a totally different nature, and that the ultimate nexus
between these two fields of experience surpasses our comprehension, he must
demonstrate mechanism out of the world altogether. In his philosophy there
will be no more solid obstinate material things such as go to the making of
machines, but only “events.” Time and space, which used to be regarded as
modes of perception, become internal components of things; value, which
used to be a name for our conscious estimation of what we could do with
things or for their effect on our spiritual life, now proves to be “the
intrinsic reality of an event.” There is, you see, an entire reversal of
the mechanistic hypothesis. Formerly it was held that the human soul obeys
the same laws as a stone; now we are to believe that a stone is of the same
nature as the soul. In either case we avoid the discomfort of a paradoxical
dualism and reduce the world to a monism which may plausibly call itself
science, though as a matter of fact Mr. Whitehead’s theory, if carried out,
would simply abolish science. And it is clear enough that the new monism is
open to precisely the same criticism as was that of the mechanists which it
looks to supplant. Aiming ostensibly to simplify, it really renders the
nature of things incomprehensibly complex. Promising to release us from the
known paradox of a world composed of two irreconcilable classes of things,
it ends by forcing a perfectly arbitrary paradox upon us in its definition
of inanimate objects. To define a stone as an event consisting of a bundle
of time, space, value, and relationships, does not seem to me to be moving
in the direction of lucid simplicity. “What is the sense,” Mr. Whitehead
asks, “of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what
you mean by mechanics?” And the question is entirely pertinent, if by the
word “mechanics” we mean slyly to imply something more than the observed
actions and reactions of material bodies in motion. Mr. Whitehead therefore
discards the “traditional scientific materialism” for an “alternative
doctrine of organism,” that is, for a “theory of _organic mechanism_.” Well
and good. But is it unkind to ask the use of talking about an organical
explanation when you do not know what you mean by “organism,” or to hint
that no very clear idea will be evoked by joining together two unknown
quantities, “organism” and “mechanism,” and calling the world an “organic
mechanism”? And again, what of the “stubborn and irreducible facts,” in
whose name Mr. Whitehead attacks the rationalism of the Huxleyites and
their predecessors of the eighteenth century? If we are to cast away their
imposing structure of logic as unreasonable for the simple reason that,
after all is said, we still know that the human mind (or soul, if you
please) is something other than a stone, shall we swallow the contrary
theory, which has not even the virtue of logic, and which transfers human
qualities to a stone? Aristotle made the proper and sufficient distinction
long ago, when he said that a stone obeys laws and a man forms habits: you
may throw a stone into the air a thousand times and it will continue to do
the same thing, whereas a man learns by experience. But alas for those
“stubborn and irreducible facts”! How bravely we all summon them to our
aid! How desperately we run from them when they appear! But if this merging
together of the animate and the inanimate in a new naturalism makes a
travesty of the inorganic world, its real menace is that, equally with the
older naturalism, it reacts to deprive humanity of what is distinctly
human. The solid objects of “our naïve experience” have been made organic
by a kind of relaxation into fluid composites of time and space and value
and relationships; they have evaporated into a semblance of psychical
events (the very term “events” indeed is little more than an awkward
translation of Berkeley’s “ideas in the mind”), and the peculiar note of an
event is its transitoriness: “one all-pervasive fact, inherent in the
character of what is real, is the transition of things, the passage one to
another.” Thus it happens that the organic and the inorganic worlds flow
together in an indistinguishable flux, wherein the soul also, dissolved by
association into a complex of relationships, loses that central permanence
of entity which used to be held to mark the dignity of man. Nor, if we look
beyond, is there anywhere “an ultimate reality” to which we can appeal “for
the removal of perplexity,” but only an endless concurrence of events. “In
the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover [itself a conception, one might
suppose, far enough removed from ‘our naïve experience’ into the abyss of
abstraction], we require God as the Principle of Concretion”--not a person,
not an entity of any sort, nor even a law apparently, but a mere name for
the fact that concrete groups of qualities are everlastingly forming and
reforming in the infinite vortex of existence. A cynic might distinguish
between the old naturalism and the naturalism now proposed to take its
place by saying that under the régime of the former true science might
flourish but no humanism or religion, whereas the metaphysical naturalism
of Mr. Whitehead would leave us neither true science nor humanism and
religion, but only mathematics. The Demon of the Absolute, whether he
appears as the advocate of a mechanical fatalism or of the universal flux
of relativity, is brother germane to Apollyon, the Destroyer. The curious
thing in all this farrago of insight and error is the superstitious hold of
the word science on a mind otherwise so awakened. Mr. Whitehead perceives
that one scientific hypothesis swallows up another--as indeed he could not
fail to see that his own hypothesis turns its predecessor upside down; he
admits with engaging candour that one and all they rest on a “naïve faith”
which cannot be verified and is “indifferent to refutation”; yet he clings
fanatically to the scientific attitude as possessing a monopoly of truth
and honesty. “When,” he says, “Darwin or Einstein proclaim[s] theories
which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about
saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have
been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been
gained.” I suspect that an utter confusion of thought has arisen here from
the ambiguity of a word--as has happened immemorially with metaphysicians
better and worse than Mr. Whitehead. Science as an accumulation and
classification and utilisation of observed facts may go on from victory to
victory; but science as a name for such hypothetical theories of time and
space, matter and motion and life, as those broached by the Darwinians of
the nineteenth century, or the Einsteinian relativists of the twentieth, is
not a progress in insight but a lapse from one naïve assumption to another
in a vicious circle of self-contradicting monisms. It really is not easy to
understand the state of mind of one, cognisant of the history of thought,
who urges us to seek relief from the present _débâcle_--Mr. Whitehead
himself places our intellectual and spiritual level lower than it has ever
been since the Dark Ages--by introducing the hypothetical method of science
into religion. This is his analysis of the present condition of the popular
mind: “A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an
unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being
composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the
basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering
in our civilisation.” My reading of history is different. I should assert
that our vacillating half-heartedness is the inevitable outcome of the
endeavour, persistent since the naturalistic invasion of the Renaissance,
to flee from the paradox of life to some philosophy which will merge, no
matter how, the mechanical and the human together. I should assert that the
only escape from our muddle is to overthrow this idol of Unity, this Demon
of the Absolute, this abortion sprung from the union of science and
metaphysics, and to submit ourselves humbly to the stubborn and irreducible
fact that a stone and the human soul cannot be brought under the same
definition. There are two laws discrete Not reconciled,-- Law for man, and
law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth
the man unking. For legitimate science one may have the deepest respect.
But to scientific absolutism masquerading as religion, one may say justly
and truly what was said so unjustly and cruelly to Keats: Back to your
gallipots! FOOTNOTES [18] Sections IV and V of the title essay in _The
Demon of the Absolute_ (New Shelburne Essays, Vol. I), 1928; reprinted with
the kind permission of the author and of the Princeton University Press.
Section IV (I, as here reprinted) concerns “The Fetish of Pure Art” and
section V (II) “The Fetish of Pure Science.” [19] _Nuovi Saggi di
Estetica_, 1920. [20] _La Deshumanización del Arte_, Madrid, 1925. [21]
_Alegrarse o sufrir con los destinos humanos que, tal vez, la obra de arte
nos refiere o presenta, es cosa muy diferente del verdadero goce artistico.
Más aún: esa ocupación con lo humano de la obra es, en principio,
incompatible con la estricta fruición estética._ [22] _Masterpieces of
Chikamatsu, the Japanese Shakespeare_, translated by Asataro Miyamori, p.
48. [23] _Modern Painting_, by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., p. 375. [24] There
are passages in Mr. Whitehead’s books in which the word “God” is used
properly, even nobly, with its religious connotation; and indeed, as
Professor A. E. Taylor has shown in the _Dublin Review_ for July 1927, part
of the difficulty in grasping his argument is owing to this intellectual
double-dealing. But in the end the conception of God as a physical law, or
impersonal principle, quite wins out. _The Pride of Modernity_ G. R.
ELLIOTT I In European literature from Homer down to Milton and Racine (not
to speak of Oriental literature) pride, wrong pride, is represented as far
and away the chief of human evils. Such is not the case with the
comparatively brief stretch of literature that ensues. Of course there are
sharp exceptions to the rule. But speaking by and large recent
literature--if that of the past two hundred years may so be termed in view
of the long eras behind it--has not held up pride as the towering villain
of the human drama. That villain has become more and more shrunken and
shadowy. The _hubris_ of the Greeks, the proud presumption against the high
gods that constituted for ancient writers the crown of human errors, seems
now an old, unhappy, far-off thing, quite hopeless for literary purposes in
the opening twentieth century. Even more hopeless seems the lineal
successor to _hubris_, the Pride that led the seven deadly sins in mediæval
pageantry, and doomed the heroes of humane tragedy in the Renaissance. The
surface reason for the fading of pride on our literary scene is obvious
enough. Pride used to be considered not only the most immoral but also the
most dramatic quality of human life. But recently life, or our imaginative
way with life, has assumed a non-dramatic air. The interminable series of
the falls of proud heroes and princes, historical or legendary, that runs
through the bulk of the world’s literature--well, this series seems now to
have terminated. Democracy’s interest in such personages is lackadaisical.
I heard a bright American undergraduate refer to them as “those old guys
that used to get bumped off quick.” And one must bear in mind that America,
if still a bright undergraduate, is widely representative of modern
civilisation. Yesterday a remote collection of insignificant states, she is
now becoming an international state of mind and, more significantly, of
imagination. In this state of imagination the old proud-falling potentate
cuts a small figure. Recently, to be sure, many princes have fallen, in
fact the majority of them; but they have fallen softly. The downfall of a
business corporation is far more noisy and generally disturbing; but a
corporation is impersonal and undramatic. As for pride, doubtless some
American presidents have shown promising tragic signs of it, but of course
these had to be nipped in the bud. A prince, even so powerful and
autocratic a prince as the American president, cannot fall proudly and
dramatically when he has to fall regularly every four years. Pride is not
popular with democracy either as a vice or as a virtue. Even a just pride
in oneself is publicly regarded as not justifiable. Self-esteem must be
submerged in party loyalty; and party loyalty, in turn, must whitewash its
rising arrogance with humanitarian sentiment, with eloquent devotion to the
welfare of men in general. To be sure, intelligent persons dislike the
blatancy of this sentiment. Most of them nevertheless are actually in
accord with the very heart of it. They wince and shrug at the slogan
trumpet of “Service to Mankind,” but they quietly salute the flag. They bow
in spirit to the reigning standard of “Social Value.” Tacitly accepting it
as prime motive they deprecate their own self-esteem. They abet the general
feeling that pride as the ruler of this world, good and evil pride alike,
has modernly been deposed: it is a thing of the past. This feeling, more
than any other feature of modernity, constitutes our break with the past.
It has inspired the general conviction that the modern age, so far from
being merely one phase, even the most important phase, of human history,
has brought about a permanent alteration in the basic conditions of human
history. And here again the majority of the leaders of opinion, while
disavowing the popular view in its blatant extreme, have been moulded in
spirit by the accumulating pressure of it. At the same time our knowledge
of the _facts_ of the past has continued to increase. Popular biographies
and surveys have circulated through a vast reading public. Hence has arisen
what may be termed the modern historical paradox. The opening twentieth
century has a wider speaking acquaintance with the past, and a fainter grip
of its essential reality, than was ever the case before. The past is quite
vivid to us, and quite unreal. Its main motif, its pride, is a dramatic
ghost. Recently Lytton Strachey’s keen book on Queen Elizabeth and her
Essex, and Francis Hackett’s glowing story of Henry Eighth and his wives,
have made the pageant of the sixteenth century brilliantly alive for us.
But in the end the pageant is more a pageant than ever; the past is more
utterly past. The scene sparkles along before our eyes in sharp and
multitudinous detail. Above all, the persons are amazingly human, as they
loom toward us in vivid “close-ups.” Yet in the end they are human
foreigners. They belong to a remote clime, and our attitude toward them is
ironic and superior even when most sympathetic. In fact they seem to us
_amazingly_ human just because we are surprised that they can be human at
all. For the central motive of their lives, their pride of spirit, is or
seems to us entirely out of date. Their ordinary desires were the same as
ours; we see that more fully every day. But the power of their pride, which
swamped or swept before it all those common desires, like the gale that
ruled their little sailing-ships on the Atlantic, is obsolete. It appears
almost as strange and superstitious, when we pause to reflect upon it, as
the spasmodic fits of humility that made those proud ghosts grovel at the
feet of their kings and gods. We think we have changed all that. But so
deep-going an alteration in human nature, such a huge discrepancy between
present and past, is disconcerting to the mind. It must needs be reduced
and accounted for. Our emotional conviction of the obsolescence of pride,
like every other strong and persistent feeling harboured by human beings,
must needs be rationalised. And the rationalisation is now in progress.
Pride has seemed to our imagination very unreal in the present; therefore
our reason is demonstrating that it was also quite unreal in the past.
Historical science aided by other sciences has undermined the pride of the
past. It appears now that proud princes, as well as proud nations and
empires, fell of old not by reason of pride but by reason of economics--or
the lack of economics. Or else there were geographical, ethnological,
biological, or psychological causes. The last-mentioned category is the
most effective of all for eliminating moral factors from human history. For
example, only an old-fashioned reader may still fancy that Henry the
Second, by conquering the violence of his pride, could have refrained from
causing the slaughter of Becket. That, to be sure, was the subsequent
opinion of Henry himself. But, psychologically speaking, Henry and the
old-fashioned reader are mistaken. Henry was subject to certain stimuli and
certain complexes that completely determined, and completely explain, his
extraordinary behaviour before and after the murder of the archbishop.
Emerson, looking back mildly from Concord upon the greedy and murderous
pride of old days, found human history very tiresome because it was so very
bad. To-day many disillusioned persons are finding it still more tiresome
because it seems to them neither bad nor good. It is non-moral, and
therefore non-dramatic. Never does it hang dramatically in the fearful
balance of the free human will between a false pride and a right humility.
It merely moves back and forth like the waves and currents of the sea.
History, unhappily, just happens. Perhaps, however, this ultra-modern view
of history, in which pride seems so unreal, is itself the offspring of a
very real pride. Modern pride is not of necessity less real than ancient
pride just because, so far, its way is less conscious and dramatic. After
all it takes time to dramatise ourselves to ourselves; and the modern age,
so modernists say, is not yet in full swing. They say that the modern
theatre has merely made a beginning and that in the future it will do great
things. If so, I would claim that the greatest of those great things must
be an adequate dramatisation of modern pride. But we cannot wait for that.
If we did, it would never come. It cannot come until there is general
recognition of the fact that pride is still the grand protagonist in the
human drama; and that under its drab modern dress it has lost not a whit of
its ancient sinew. Pride is most virulent, indeed, when it wears plain
clothes, when it hides itself from itself. Self-blindness, not dramatic
display, is and always has been the very heart of it. Precisely when pride
is most insidious is it least dramatic. Recognition of itself, which is the
preliminary step toward cure, is also the preliminary step toward dramatic
manifestation. Pride was very dramatic in old literature just because it
was unearthed from its very _un_dramatic lair in old human nature.
Discovery is the essence of drama. Life is intensely dramatic as soon as
its least discoverable motive is discovered, as soon as its “last
infirmity,” its most hidden pride of spirit, is shown in action. Therefore
if a superficial glance persuades us, as I said at the beginning, that
pride has faded in modern literature because modern life is non-dramatic, a
deeper search informs us that modern life _seems_ non-dramatic because the
meaning of pride has faded in our thought. We need to rediscover the truth
of the truism that pride is the most insidious and blinding of all human
qualities. Then we may discover the way of modern pride. We must see how
utterly non-dramatic pride can be before our poets may show us how
intensely dramatic modern life is. We cannot envisage the drama of modern
life in its full reality, we cannot touch the very heart of its tragedy,
until we realise the peculiar blindness of modern pride. II For example.
Some twelve years ago President Wilson announced on behalf of the United
States, or was quoted as announcing, that we were “too proud to fight.”
Soon afterwards we were fighting, not without martial pride, in the
greatest war of all time. The irony of this sequence was too broad to
escape notice. Yet the notice was comparatively slight. And the whole
matter has faded with ominous speed from the imagination of a public
debauched with the most adulterous mixture of pacific and pugnacious prides
that the world has ever known. The Wilsonian remark was easily smiled into
oblivion. The full dramatic irony of the situation, and the tragedy behind
it, cannot appear until that proud utterance is recognised, not as the
passing whimsy of a single person or party or nation, but as a vivid symbol
of the modern spirit at large. It may fairly be regarded, indeed, as the
verbal apex of the whole bad pyramid of modern pride--the pride of quick
and direct solutions, the pride of immediacy. The basis of that pyramid is
religious. No doubt the superstructure owes much to our triumphantly swift
results in science, industry, and humanitarian reform. But the pride of
practical achievement, thoroughly wholesome in its proper _locale_, would
not have formed a modern Babel unless assembled and underpinned by modern
religion. And modern religion, while denouncing more and more the various
arrogancies of our material civilisation, has not unearthed the deep
foundation which it itself has provided for them. As religion is properly
the founder and guardian of human humility, so religious pride is the prime
evil. We see this very easily in the past. We know that the most blinding
and hateful pride that grew among the ancient Greeks and Romans was not the
pride of city-state, of empire, of symmetric culture. It was the arrogance
of the religious philosophy of the Stoics, their assumption of a
pseudo-divine impassivity of spirit. Likewise the mediæval glorification of
chivalry, and even of ecclesiastic and theological edifice, is as nothing
to modern eyes in comparison with the spiritual presumption that grew in
mediæval asceticism. We see how vicious it was for the Stoic to be proud of
his pride, and for the monk to be proud of his humility. We have not yet
seen how vicious it is for the modern citizen to be proud of being neither
proud nor humble. He is spiritually proud of having escaped from spiritual
pride. He believes he has left that historic vice far and forever behind.
In his leisure hours he has learned all about it, he thinks, from
interesting books, periodicals, preachers, lecturers, travels, historical
moving-pictures, and maybe survey courses in college. He is amused and in
better moments saddened at the tremendous dramatic display of religious
pride in old times,--unaware that this evil never _displayed_ itself to the
hearts it mastered, nor does to-day. What, then, can he know of real
humility? “Why,” I was recently asked by a sincerely puzzled undergraduate
whose psychological interests had led him to scrutinise certain ancient
documents, “why were the old Christians always jawing about humility?” The
modern man is conscious, explicitly or implicitly, of possessing a new form
of humility much superior to the old. He is proud of his freedom from the
fearful self-abasement of his benighted ancestors. He is certain that his
own brand of humility, his kindly modesty in relation to nature and to
other men, is far more reasonable and real. Reality, indeed, is his
keynote. He believes he sees the facts of human nature with a plain and
full reality, or immediacy, that was impossible to men of old, distracted
as their vision was by the extremes of pride and humility. He has done away
with those two “mighty opposites.” His realism, his direct contact with
life, has antiquated their histrionic conflict. He is superior to that
primitive battle in the human breast. He has emerged from that cave warfare
into the light of immediate reality. He is “too proud to fight.” And this
pride of immediacy, as I have called it, is at bottom religious. It was
founded by the Protestant Reformation. More broadly speaking, it grows from
that urgent religious revolution still going on which was publicly begun by
the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth century. It goes on in Catholic and
Protestant realms alike and has many modes, ranging all the way from the
glittering wit of French Catholico-Modernism to the rash eloquence of the
Protestant pulpits of New York. Revolution it is with a vengeance, not
re-formation. And if it be true that the modern intelligence under the
influence of science is coming to see the natural need of ordered
evolution, instead of destructive revolution, in all human affairs, then we
should see this need primarily in religion. Here the cost of revolution is
heaviest. For the mischief of the revolutionary method--namely, that it
externalises the issue--is greatest in that sphere which should be of all
the most internal. The mental surfaces of religion are thrown into false
prominence as the insignia of controversy. Sacred rites and dogmas, through
the protective devotion of the loyalist and the pointed hostility of the
rebel, are externalised. The imaginative flexibility properly belonging to
them is congealed into a stiff surface that hides their inmost meaning,
human and divine. Instead of vital human organisms, nourished in their
growth and change by something of the divine circulation, they become fixed
mechanisms; to be maintained in running order or else discarded
altogether--windmills, pumping the living water direct to the household of
faith, or suddenly assaulted into junk-heaps by quixotic insurgents.[25]
Loyalists and rebels, in reaction from each other, attribute to their own
doctrines an impossible immediacy of truth. Thus both parties foster the
pride of spiritual immediacy. Obviously, however, it is not the
conservative but the protestant or modernist pride of immediacy that, for
the time being at least, has won the day. Indeed it has flourished like a
weed in the very midst of our best achievements. The great achievement of
modern times is the general realisation that life is of necessity
experimental, that change is a constant law for us, and that the human
spirit is more important than human customs and institutions however
sacrosanct. Hence our pride of freedom, freedom from the past. And this
pride is proper and sound in so far as it is a proud gratitude for the
general dissemination of a truth that the great saints and sages, under all
dispensations, knew--the experimentality of life. But our pride is rank and
noxious when we imagine we know this truth as well as the saints and sages
knew it, if not better. To be sure, we know it more widely in a certain
sense than they did, having discovered with the aid of science many
exterior illustrations of it which were unknown to them. We know it with a
wide and superficial immediacy. But they knew it with a profound immediacy.
They knew the basal experimentality of life because they knew it was
basifixed. They knew the depth and height of change because they knew the
permanency below and above it. They knew the Permanency that does the
experimenting, the Changeless that enables us to know change. Of this we
have lost hold. And the main source of our modern spiritual catastrophe,
the cancerous growth that disguises itself and induces the thronging
diagnosticians to limit their attention to secondary symptoms and remedies,
is the ancient evil in modern form, blind spiritual pride. The modern
imagination has more and more lost hold of the changing Permanency as the
modern mind has more and more developed its arrogance of change, its pride
of immediacy. This very pride keeps us from seeing the permanence of the
law of pride and humility in human nature. We patronise the wise men of
old--confident writers on “personal religion” in American magazines
patronise them--assuming that when they signalised spiritual pride as the
_permanent_ root of human ills, they were speaking only for an age and not
for all time, at any rate not for our time. This pride means a false
emphasis on “personal religion” over against institutional religion.
“Personal religion” now comprises a vast variety of creeds. Many of these
are asserted by their proponents, sometimes angrily asserted, to be not
religious at all, but they really are religious in the broadest or lowest
extension of this term. A few years ago newspaper reporters discovered in a
western state a not insane man who claimed that the earth was flat. As to
the long story of geodesy, he said it meant little to him, for he had “a
science of my own.” Nowadays many a person has in the same way “a religion
of my own.” But this phenomenon, unlike the other, is too popular just at
present to have any comic news-value. It would start a public laugh only in
the thirteenth or, who knows, in the thirtieth century. To-day many persons
who religiously swallow the authority of science, who religiously believe
that Einsteinism is true and wish they could understand what it means,
reject all authority in religion. They say that Jesus himself rejected it,
and patronise Him as the first of the moderns. They isolate Him from the
religious organism to which he was deeply attached; which shaped his
principles no less than his images; and through which indeed, during the
long preceding centuries of Hebrew history, his sublime nature itself had
been (if this may be said without irreverence) gradually “evolved.” Thus
they affix to Him a singularity no less miraculous, no less disruptive of
the laws of human nature and history, than that attributed to him by
popular orthodoxy; but far better calculated to debauch with blind pride
the souls of his worshippers or, as the case may be, his modern rivals or
superseders. They have learned from Him, not wisely but too well, that the
Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. They hug the false
inference which he so sternly and constantly rejected, namely, that man was
made to disuse instead of to use the Sabbath, to win spiritual maturity by
discarding institutional religion. Jesus discarded revolution. He continued
and reformed a great religious tradition. He made it capable of feeding
itself--and us--upon the best of Greek as well as Hebrew thought. He made
it nobly catholic in the very process of nourishing his individual soul
upon it. He was crucified because he was more deeply true to it than the
modernists, as well as the loyalists, of his day. Our modernists, however,
deem that his hand was raised and pierced to direct us to bite the hand
that fed us. The gnawing pride of religious individualism cloaks itself in
the assumption that the individual has transferred his reverence _entire_
from the traditional deity to “the present; God” as Emerson called Him, or
to the present Reality as successors of Emerson often prefer to call It.
But actually that transfer is never accomplished. The reverence never
arrives entire. Always some of it, often most of it, leaks away unnoticed
during the transshipment. Therefore this exchange is never attempted by the
greatest men of religion, nor advocated by the truest realists or
humanists. Jesus and Socrates both found the “Father’s business” in the
Temple, in the moral and imaginative organism of orthodox religion, and
never more so than when they were doing their best to cleanse it of
thieves. They were wrongly accused of an intention for which some of our
modern spiritual leaders have been wrongly praised, the intention of
destroying the Temple in order to rebuild it on their own insights, as it
were in three days. No doubt all men of deepest insight are strongly
tempted, in their first maturity, by this pseudo-divine impatience with
tradition. They yearn to show immediately that the Power within them is
more reliable than the “pinnacle of the Temple.”[26] But they perceive the
spiritual pride of this yearning, its tempting of God, and they forthwith
school themselves to the divine patience. They recognise that the Temple is
essential for _their own_ fullest development. They do not patronise it
diplomatically for the public welfare while deprecating it for themselves.
They see that the fullest type of spiritual life is attainable only through
the unbroken “tension,”[27] the constant critical interaction, between
personal and institutional religion, between individual inspiration and a
rich tradition. They know that their own humility, like that of the
multitudes whom they influence, must grow and bear fruit in the kind of
temple that George Herbert saw, the temple which is at once, and
mysteriously, within and without. In short, the greatest leaders of the
spirit faced the pride of spiritual immediacy and subdued it. But Emerson
did not. He only partly faced it, and he very considerably succumbed to
it.[28] He fell, and modern spirituality fell with him. The greatness of
this default in so great a man is admitted very reluctantly by those of us
who have loved him from youth. When they were beginning life, he told them
what a happy day it was for the youth when he discovered that “the above”
was the same as “the within.” He did not tell them that “the within,” on
the same happy day, begins to leak down through an unseen pride to “the
below.” He told them that “I the imperfect adore my own Perfect.” He was
not careful to explain to them how very imperfect is this Perfect--or else,
how scantily It is my own. Emerson’s effect on young men is most
significant, I think, in the case of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s Oxford
days, Newman impressed him with a sense of the laborious difficulty of
spiritual truth. But that sense was considerably soothed and weakened, I
think, by the cheery, confident voice that came to him from across the
Atlantic; throwing into contrast the melancholy beauty of Newman’s voice
and relegating its religious message to a past which, however alluring in
its beautiful melancholy, seemed now so utterly past. Arnold lost Newman
for religion while continuing to patronise him for beauty and culture. He
did not discern how greatly Newman, on account of his fresh and profound
humility, joined with a mind unsurpassed in the modern age for analytic
penetration, was needed by this age as a “friend and aider of those who
would live in the spirit.” Therefore Arnold left the way open for T. H.
Huxley to persuade the oncoming generation, in the blundering pride of his
naturalistic sophistry, that Newman’s way with truth was in the main
sophistic.[29] I am very far from wishing to disparage Arnold, as I am
accused of having done in previous papers. It is just because he was so
great and influential a critic, such a fine stronghold of humanism in the
midst of the nineteenth century, that his deficiency in this matter is
costly to-day. His tendency to a certain superior ease, not free from
presumption, in his treatment of religious truth was doubtless due in good
measure to the influence of Emerson. Hence when Arnold came to America in
the eighteen-eighties he could tell us how matchless Emerson was as a
modern “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit” without
telling us how deficient this friend was in the pertinent and prime
requisite of spiritual humility. Just here, perhaps, some readers are
priding themselves on never having cared for Emerson, in other words on
never having been young. But maybe they have absorbed some jots and tittles
of his toxin by way of Arnold and the college professors, or of Huxley and
the scientific metaphysicians, or of Whitman and the current poets. By
de-personalising his individualism in a rare and not unspecious fashion,
Emerson could send it seeping through an extraordinary variety of
individuals. To-day wherever two or three, or two or three hundred, are
gathered together in the name of God (modern)--in the name of the Over-Soul
or the Under-Soul, of Reality, Nature, Humanity, Hinduism, Good Will,
Progress, World Peace, World Religion, Individual Freedom, yes and even
Enlightened Disillusion--there is Emerson in the midst of them. To be sure
it is but a shade, a distorted shade, of the master. Yet it reminds us what
a crooked, widening shadow is thrown forward through the years by a hidden
grain of pride in a master mind. Emerson’s spiritual pride was veiled by
his personal modesty, which was the tolerant deference and flexibility of
the modern spirit at its brightest. His luminous nobility of nature and the
underlying soundness of his humanism[30] enabled him to give unexampled
force and radiance to the proud errors he inherited from the
eighteenth-century naturists and the great Romantic poets. It was he, above
all, who made naturism seem deeply natural and Romantic irresponsibility
nigh divine. He disclaimed responsibility for his words, yet spoke as one
having authority. He claimed the moody freedom of a Romantic poet together
with the plain weight of a prose prophet of common sense. He consummated
the noxious amalgam that his predecessors in prose and verse had prepared:
he _solidly_ confused poetic immediacy of experience with the immediate
presence of Truth. Admirers, half perceiving his confusion, have wholly
excused it on the ground of his unique constitution--just as he did! If
gold rust, what will iron do? If Emerson could be vitally yet complacently
muddled, what of the Emersonians? If the modern outlook is now confused and
unhappy, one reason is that the chief modern sage was confused and at the
same time spiritually proud. The balefulness of his confusion was concealed
from him by the subtle mingling of his pride into his modesty. He was too
modest to believe that his individual outlook could become a public
tragedy, and too proud to doubt that his individual inspirations were
universally valid. He attributed these too much to deity and not at all to
Rousseau. He disavowed all predecessors and all disciples. In his study or
along the woodpath he deemed he was alone with the Soul; never realising
how much the thoughts that arose in him were determined by the souls who
had influenced his soul and by the souls whom his soul wanted to influence.
His solitude of the Soul was thronged with unacknowledged souls. He
dislimned them all into deity. His religious predecessors had loudly
demolished one religious form after another to leave no barrier, so they
thought, between the soul and God. He, the last great Protestant, serenely
set fire to the limits of the soul itself. With suave and awful
presumption, he melted all souls into God. The outcome is a new barrier
between them and Him, a cool, unobtrusive glaze of pride. The modern pride
that Emerson helped so much to crystallise, wears a lucent, modest air. It
looks like a lens turned directly upon Reality. But it has the opaqueness
of a mirror and is turned upon ourselves--if only by the grace of God we
could see our reflections in it. Its surface seems plain, undramatic, when
compared with the ancient modes of _hubris_,--until one perceives therein
the swarming shapes and conflicts of the modern tragedy. Dramatic enough is
the way this pride, during the past two hundred years, has worked out
cogently from its religious centre to its secular circumference, in recent
years with catastrophic speed. In religion it has meant more and more a
blind emphasis upon the _immediacy_ of spiritual values--as though their
close presence to Everyman were the same, or almost the same, as his real
possession of them. Modern religionists have debased the great doctrine of
the Immanence of God and, therewith, the doctrines of divine love, the
brotherhood of man, the goodness of the human heart, and the “positiveness”
of morality. The results for Everyman are now glaring. Deity, from
Everyman’s modern viewpoint, is fast disappearing into human nature; or
into that mystic conglomerate of man and the universe which is either
called Nature or, as Mark Twain might say, is “the same gentleman under
another name.” New names are being invented for It daily by pseudo-science.
Advanced Protestant theology lies at the proud foot of this conqueror.
Forgetting that modern religion at the first did help to wound herself, the
more conservative type of theist blames science for harming religion. The
up-to-date theist blames religion for not equalling the flight of science,
unaware how terribly religion has maimed her wing with pride. A common type
of minister deprecates the spread of atheism while confidently advocating
the very doctrine that fosters it. If he is shrewd enough to glimpse his
dilemma, he can justify himself with Emersonian blandness by pointing out
that the abuse of an excellent idea is not a good ground for the disuse of
it--the excellent idea being a conceited, facile, and slippery sentiment of
divine immanence. This immanentism has proudly pawed down holy truths to
the everyday level of Everyman. And he, finding that when thus muddied they
sour the daily bread of his happiness, is now rejecting them wholesale;
thereby exhibiting the destructive aspect of that divine justice, that
relentless Love of Perfection, which his pastors have hidden behind a gross
version of the divine love for men. Our religious leaders, announcing
promiscuously the perfect love that casteth out fear--a doctrine which the
holiest saints approached with awe--have succeeded in casting out the true
fear that belongs with our imperfect love. They have speciously disparaged
“negative” in favour of “positive” morality. With Emersonian impatience
they have shrugged at the _definite_ moral precepts of the ages, as trite
and rather forbidding antiquities, while advocating an _indefinite_ moral
sentiment, as the prime discovery and panacea of the modern age. They have
slurred the divine negation, the “Everlasting No,” which, acting down
through the poor human conscience, constitutes the great _unadulterable_
factor of positive morals and, in the end, the most positive provision
against positive unhappiness. This proud religious blindness has opened the
highway for blind secular naturism. The one has played into the hands of
the other; the blind has led the blind toward the pit of spiritual anarchy.
Consider, for example, the quick succession and interplay of these three
phases of the modern spiritual drama: first, the Protestant notion of
immediate justification by faith in Christ; second, the humanitarian notion
of justification by faith in mankind; and third, the cynical notion of
justification by faith in nothing--except primitive desire. In the third
act of the tragedy, as in the other two, the leading motive is a specious
emotional immediacy fed by subconscious pride. For the Nothing that modern
sceptics are devoted to (its finest dramatic representation is in the works
of Thomas Hardy) includes a concupiscent Something by the exercise of
which, so they feel, we may be saved--or at least vitally damned. Hence our
very disillusion to-day is flown with pride. Our current disillusionists,
not humbled by the fact that the modern rejection of moral severity is
eventuating in a febrile weakness of the vital human appetites, continue to
disparage that severity and to advocate, as our only hope, a romantic
resurgence of those appetites. They yearn for a flood-tide between rotten
banks; fancying, apparently, that “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose
all their guilty stains,” immediately. They hymn a spurious Primitive as
their Protestant forbears hymned a spurious Christ.[31] Consider, too, the
dramatic inevitability with which the “psychists” and the
“legislationists,” so to call them, have come swarming more and more into
the breaches that modern religion has made in the human conscience. The
psychists are proudly animated with the old Sophist hope of reducing that
mysterious citadel and of rearranging the whole soul on modern rational
lines. They are teaching the oncoming generation to _think_ in a fashion
indicated in the following remark made to me by a thoughtful youth: “When a
fellow tries to do the right thing, he has a satisfaction that seems at the
time very real; but of course, as soon as he _thinks_, he sees that this
satisfaction isn’t real at all.” At a recent American congress of thinkers,
one of them explained how religion and morality are being taken over and
saved, in so far as worth saving, by psychology. He was confident of
tucking the setting sun, quite immediately, into his grandstand. The
legislationists, on the other hand, would save the fading rays by immediate
public measures, national and international. In a world dim with
unprecedented bloodshed, misty with subtle suspicion and self-seeking, and
darkening ever more with impiety and lust, they would produce by political
or social machinery the lights of peace, good will, purity, and temperance.
They are busily wiring a twilight world for incandescent goodness. They
would arrest and soften with electric legislation the awful working-out of
divine laws. The leader in this project is an ideal figure of Columbia. But
under grave scrutiny the radiant figure reveals a good many lineaments of
her who was the leader of the seven deadly sins. One recalls with something
of a shiver the queenly “progress” of Lucifera in her pleasant
twilight--oblivious of the dead men’s bones thick under foot and the “foggy
mist” all along the way.[32] Columbia, the progressive modern spirit, is
too proud to face the fearful carnage of human values and the foggy
confusion of principles brought about by the modern _heart_. Kindly persons
after criticising various modern ills, take comfort by concluding that,
after all, the modern age is sound and right at heart. But here, precisely,
is the source of all those ills. The modern heart has gone wrong. The chief
leaders of imagination during the past two centuries assumed that modernity
meant a real change of heart, a change for the better; that owing to the
long schooling of the past and the new lights of the present, the human
heart could now afford to relax its old combat with itself. This assumption
is parroted to-day, with varying degrees of subtlety, by preachers,
philosophers, educators, youngsters, legislationists, artists, Rotarians,
and disillusionists. At the same time they are demonstrating conclusively
that the old human heart, unregenerate, is still with us. They are showing
its ancient and amazing capacity for inventing new ways of disguising old
Duty,--the kind of duty that means a daily, painful, but not inglorious
battle within the heart itself. They are showing us how inglorious human
thought and art can become, how shallow, cheap, and in the end intolerable,
when the human _heart_ has become “too proud to fight.” III This
catastrophe, when fully recognised, can point us to fresh hope and faith.
We may win afresh the old faith which goes hand in hand with a certain
disillusion, a certain kind of scepticism, foreign to our current
disillusionists. This faith, says Newman, “looks for no essential
improvements or permanent reformations in the dispensation of those
precious gifts which are ever pure in their origin, ever corrupted in man’s
use of them.”[33] So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has
not produced the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a good many
earlier ages. “My _ideas_ of life have become so rotten,” thus a
Pragmatised and Behaviourised youngster confessed to me, “that I wonder my
_life_ is not rottener.” He looked startled when I told him to give his
ideas time. However, it appeared that, partly in spite of and partly by
means of his marked self-consciousness, he had attained to some veracity of
inward unhappiness. We may hope that his case is quite typical. In other
words, our self-conscious modern age has provided a wide and unprecedented
demonstration of the fact that the chief danger to human happiness is
immorality of _ideas_. Previous ages have done lip-homage to high moral
standards while grossly violating them in practice. The modern age has
proudly assumed that it has grown far beyond such hypocrisy. Meanwhile it
has developed the subtler hypocrisy of cultivating depraved and specious
ideas while shrinking from the _full_ consequences of them in conduct. The
result is that life looks dully undramatic, culture and art degenerate, and
thoughtful persons who are harmless enough in their acts have a real misery
in their spirit. Surely, therefore, we have now a chance to learn afresh
the _inward_ relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that “precious
gift” which we have so bitterly corrupted, the law of humility. We may now
perceive that the universal proverb “Pride goes before a fall” is no less
applicable to our age than to the old aristocratic ages; and that, far from
being merely a maxim of external prudence, it is the folk-sign of an
_inward_ region of cause and effect that we, with all our
self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated. We may find again the inward
and yet superhuman rigour of the Laws. We may learn that they are
supernatural without being ever _un_natural; always immanent in us and yet,
in a mystery beyond the reach of our science, always transcendent of us.
Browning’s Paracelsus, embodying the modern mixture of romance and science,
complained in regard to his own catastrophe that “God’s intimations fail in
clearness rather than in force.” Precisely so; but there is no use in
whining about it. The human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can,
Laws which we did not invent; which no man, except when stupified by
pride--either his own pride or the pride of his teachers, relentlessly
visited upon him to the third and fourth generation--can conceive to be
merely human inventions. Those Laws fail in human clearness, certainly, but
not in force. They came to send a sword into the earth, more than Peace.
They have been the cause of agony and misery for millions of innocent or
ignorant people; and no man has succeeded in making clear the full ground
of this. From the standpoint of human justice, those Laws are fearfully
general, vague, and incalculable. Yet our truest happiness, and indeed our
truest originality, depend on a constant effort to elucidate them and apply
them afresh to each new generation and individual. This task is of course,
in a worldly sense, an impossible one. New sins and difficulties, or rather
old sins and difficulties in inexhaustibly new modes, appear at every step.
Salvation for the individual never becomes easier; and the social frame is
so built, beneath our building, that it cannot be saved. Old seers and new
scientists are true to a deep human instinct in prophesying that some day
the world will be destroyed by fire, collision, or decay; will “dissolve
like an insubstantial pageant faded.” Our surest Comfort, at the opposite
pole from modern comfortableness and not divisible from right conduct, is
in knowing that those Laws, while “ever corrupted by man’s use of them” are
indeed “precious gifts ever pure in their origin.” Clough, that fine
religious humanist who faced the modern situation without blinking, had a
sound humility when he wrote: “I steadier step When I recall That though I
slip Thou dost not fall.” The fresh humility that we need must be built up
patiently by religion and by humanism; each working in its own way and
carefully respectful of the other, even (perhaps _especially_) when these
two approaches are equally employed by one person. Religion is normally
theistic, and therewith mediatorial and sacramental. Otherwise she is not
catholic and, _in the long run_, loses her right humility. This should be
evident enough from the long history of religion, Christian and
non-Christian, past and present. Theism decays continually, but by reason
of its own sins rather than the virtues of opposing doctrines. Pantheism,
deism, and all the others flourish in its decadencies, more or less
parasitically, but cannot take deep root in human humility. I do not mean
that theism is true because it works, but that it works because at its best
it is our truest mode of conceiving the Eternal One. Voltaire’s epigram,
“God created man in His own image and man promptly returned the
compliment,” is superb and lasting because the doctrine here parodied is
lasting and sublime. The parody is catholically critical because the
doctrine itself is deeply catholic. Modernism, when strictly criticising
catholic doctrine, is helpful; when frankly rejecting it, respectable; when
blandly attempting to reduce it to poetry, baneful--baneful in its hidden
pride--and, I trust, hopeless. Not similarly hopeless is Latin
Fundamentalism; by which I mean the attempt of Latinised theology, no
matter in what branch of the Christian church it appears, to define
religious mysteries with a literalism that is too precise to be accurate.
Most hopeful is the work of a small and quiet group of theologians,
belonging to various churches, who are resuming and carrying forward the
thwarted hope of the great Christian humanists of the Renaissance. They are
striving for a non-revolutionary, a firm and organic, development of
Christian doctrine; that is, for a real catholicity. It is they, studious,
ethical, open-eyed, and humble who are rebuilding the foundations of the
Temple. Yet the Temple, or let us say “the church militant here upon
earth,” is at its best inadequate. The man of good sense has always found
and will always find it necessary to take the church with a grain of salt,
even though the salt loseth its savour without the church. Good sense is a
distinct foundation; and humanism is built upon it. Humanism may be
theistic or _non_-theistic; it is unsound when it is anything between. When
non-theistic, it falls short of the full truth that is in the human
imagination. The pre-eminent example of course is the sublime religious
humanism of the Buddha. However, if it be true that the primitive Hindu
pantheon had 330,000,000 gods, doubtless the Buddha had several million
good reasons for not being a theist. Theism at its worst fosters, as
nothing else can, the proud imaginations of the human heart. Humanism,
which in one of its most important functions is a criticism of religion, is
essential for sound religious humility. Religion needs the humility
derivable from the consideration that happiness may be obtained without
religion. Humanism is the study and practice of the principles of human
happiness _uncomplicated_ by naturistic dogmas on the one side and
religious dogmas on the other. When religion, as at present, has degraded
“God’s love” and abolished “God’s anger,” humanism will insist that the
former doctrine (though at its best supreme) is no less _metaphorical_ than
the latter, and not less subject to unconscious superstition. When religion
assists irreligion in softening God’s laws, humanism will insist that a
rediscovery of their severity is essential for right humility and
happiness. Just here I am forced to express the hope that those estimable
critics, Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Walter Lippmann, will at one point
counteract each other’s influence upon the public. Mr. Eliot, aiming toward
humane religion, tends to reduce humanism to a mere balance of mind, a
ghost of the Arnoldian culture, subservient to anglo-catholicism. Mr.
Lippmann, aiming toward religious humanism, tends to reduce deity to “an
ideal of the human personality,”[34] a rather ghostly ally of practical
morals. Each is somewhat swayed by the modern desire for immediate
measures. Providentially, however, a more catholic attitude has already
been erected by two older critics, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor
Irving Babbitt--the two most potent and distinguished personalities, though
not the finest writers, that have so far appeared in English literature of
the twentieth century. The one, a devout Roman Catholic of England, has
indirectly done much for the best interests of humanism. The other, a
rigorous moral humanist of New England, has indirectly done much for the
best interests of religion. Their extraordinary scholarship is guided by a
sound humility of spirit. In their writings, neither ventures further than
his equipment warrants into the other’s field, and they do not contradict
each other in fundamental points. They agree in the conviction that now,
for the sake of religion itself, the way of humanism must be clearly
discriminated from the way of religion. Mr. Babbitt has urged that religion
at its best is far above, and at its worst far below, a sound humanism.
Baron von Hügel has urged that Christians should face now, more frankly and
fully than they have ever faced before, the fact that the ethical or humane
way has a distinct and _divinely ordained_ validity of its own for those
who cannot honestly follow the religious way; and that the full health of
each way depends upon the health of the other. This truly catholic
attitude, which is essential for modern humility, is not palatable to the
pseudo-catholicity of the modern mind. We have fancied, especially in
America, that expert reason aided by democratic tolerance could soon
discover the underlying relationships between the different ways of
salvation, thus federating these in a single “concern,” a sort of efficient
successor and substitute for the universal infallible church of the Middle
Ages. Behind this enterprise stands the overweening assumption of modern
philosophy that the universe itself is a single organism with a large
variety of inter-assimilable aspects, such as religion and science, love
and morals, good and evil, God and Nature. Tennyson would not have been so
shocked by his rediscovery of the perennial fact that God and Nature are at
strife if he had not been so infected by the modern notion that they ought
not to be,--that properly they belong in a universal banking trust whose
members, however they may quarrel on the surface, never suffer a real
severance of business relations. Nor would our current disillusionists feel
so badly about the inevitable dissolution of that trust if their
grandfathers had not credited it so heavily. Let us now recognise pride as
the grand sponsor of that trust--the pride of unity and immediacy, or of
universal “continuity” as the late T. E. Hulme would say. Let us humbly
admit that the universe is faulted, geologically speaking, deeper and
higher than our knowing. What of ultimate plan and unity its strata may
have, God only knows. Our youths who have learned to smile with a weary
superior air at the traditional division of reality into God, Man, and
Nature, would breathe more freely and begin again to taste the vital zest
of the universal drama, if we would now teach them that this traditional
division is _less naïve_ than the theory of universal continuity; is better
grounded in universal human experience; and, above all, is more truly
accordant with the profound division which any thinking man may find within
himself to-day when he is sufficiently self-reliant and experimental to
plumb beneath the surfaces where our ephemeral psycho-physicisms weave and
flutter. Recently humanism, in its attempt to fulfil and deepen the
experimentality of the modern spirit, has of necessity placed its chief
emphasis upon that inward division. It has insisted that the _opposition_
between the higher and lower wills within us, whether they be called
“divine” and “natural” or what not, is essentially inexplicable by expert
reason and is nevertheless, from the present standpoint of human happiness,
the most important feature of the universe arrived at by free and full
experimentation. This humane _dualism_ strikes at the very heart of modern
pride, the pride of spiritual _monism_. It sets a true immediacy over
against a false immediacy. It assigns a central value to the paradox
established by the immediate experience of Everyman when he tries (in the
terminology of common sense) to be “at one with himself” by keeping his
“better self” above his “worser self.” It depreciates the expert reasonings
and romantic emotions which, overriding that vital paradox of good sense,
would leap immediately at spiritual unity and continuity. Consequently the
humane dualism, more than any other doctrine of recent criticism, has met
with angry rejection or obfuscating comment. A good example of the latter
is afforded by a generous and intelligent reviewer who comments as follows
upon the dualistic humanism of Milton: “Milton, after all, had not read
Darwin; we have ... Milton’s energetic dualism was based on religious
conceptions which are genuinely outlived; the power behind his allegory of
the soul was his belief that the world was shaped and created for mankind;
and, conceiving of ourselves now so much more humbly than he did, we cannot
set our lives on such a stage.... We cannot invent an opposition we do not
feel.”[35] The above, in a representative modern fashion, confuses modesty
and humility. The modern modest dogma that the world was not “shaped and
created for mankind” has shown itself, when all its implications are
considered, no less deficient in real humility than the conceited belief
that the world was created for human comfortableness. This belief was far
more radically repudiated by Milton than by us. Only with the aid of modern
pride can we be sure that his _basic_ religious ideas have been
“_genuinely_ outlived” and that we, having read Darwin, conceive of
ourselves “much more _humbly_ than he did.” He, to be sure, was no adept
either in Darwinian or in Emersonian modesty. As a man among men he had
strong intellectual and even personal pride. But above it he had true
spiritual humility; which may consist with, and derive support from, that
virtue too much obscured by modern modesty, namely “self-esteem, founded on
justice and right, well managed.” This kind of self-reliance enabled Milton
to assign full value to the moral division he found within himself. His
“energetic dualism,” as the reviewer calls it, his dramatic sense of the
_real_ opposition between the nature of lust, pride, and Chaos and the
nature of purity, humility, and Peace, was not “based on” transient
religious concepts. It was “based on” the duality he found at the centre of
himself as well as at the centre of European experience, Christian and
pagan. He would have found it also at the centre of ancient Buddhism, if he
had known this as we know it to-day. But, says my reviewer, “we cannot
invent an opposition we do not feel.” Very true. Nevertheless, with the aid
of right self-esteem and humility, with a patient critical reverence for
what is best in ourselves and in accumulated tradition, European and
Oriental, we may not only “feel” but realise, in thought and conduct, an
opposition we did not invent. Only thus can we proceed to a spiritual use
of our scientific modesty. Over against the self-flattery of religious
superstition, science has revealed the indifference of a vast physical
universe. Here is wholesome seed for a fresh humility. But so far its
growth in the modern spirit is blighted; blighted much less by the old
superstitions which the modern religionist enjoys attacking than by the new
superstition which he himself has fostered--the bastard ideal of love. This
ideal, religiously derived from an illegitimate mixture of two fallibles,
democracy and St. John, infects to-day the blood of many who, rejecting St.
John and perhaps also democracy, believe loudly in Sex; or who, tired of
Sex also, believe in nothing because it seems the sole alternative to the
spurious all-immanent divinity of modern love. This love, though
masquerading as powerful and strenuous, is essentially soft. It has
succeeded in masking the Cross, not only the Christian but the universal
Cross, in soft flummeries. The hard universe of science disowns it. And so
does the severity of the divine Laws. If we learn again to revere these in
their full severity as we find it in history (especially recent history)
and in ourselves, to bow before their awful beauty with a love that fears
to call itself worthy of casting out fear, then the outward laws can again
become real images of the inward Laws. Outward nature with her unfathomable
self-subsistence, her rigorous detachment from the egoistic delusions of
the human heart, and her firm satisfactions for those who seek only to know
and follow her laws, can again be seen as a real though very distant
representation of the Divine Nature itself. The dual nature of man, freed
from the intervolving vapours of old metaphysical dualisms and new
metaphysical monisms, guarded from insidious loves, and cultivated with
renewed moral vigour, can be seen again as the isthmus between Time and
Eternity: our firm and fruitful land between unfathomable, unmixing, but
not unkindly seas. FOOTNOTES [25] Recently I attended on successive Sundays
an extremely Catholic and an extremely Protestant celebration of the Holy
Communion. The solemnity of the former was injured by the priest’s sermon,
which evinced the pumping process, the “defence-mechanism,” referred to
above. At the other service, the mound of bread-cubes that appeared on the
table below the pulpit, alongside a pitcher of grape-juice, was suggestive,
I fear, of the above mentioned junk-heaps. For the minister interrupted his
readings from old sacramental liturgies to explain how much the ceremony
rightly meant to his sect, and how much it wrongly meant to the Catholics.
[26] Luke IV, 9-13. [27] This word is borrowed from the late Baron
Friedrich von Hügel, in whose life and writings the truth of it is
powerfully and beautifully illustrated. [28] His crucial period in early
maturity, his “temptation in the wilderness,” is examined in my article “On
Emerson’s ‘Grace’ and ‘Self-Reliance’” in the _New England Quarterly_, Vol.
II, No. 1, 1929. [29] See the essays on Newman, Arnold, and Huxley in
Robert Shafer’s _Christianity and Naturalism_, 1926. [30] See the chapter
on him in Norman Foerster’s _American Criticism_, 1928. [31] An interesting
critique bearing on this subject is “The Modern Distemper” by Professor
Ralph Barton Perry in the _Saturday Review of Literature_, June 1, 1929.
[32] Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_, Book I, canto 4. This great poetic fable
would be studied in our schools and colleges with deeper emotion if its
application to modern pride were not screened off by modern pride itself.
[33] From _Parochial and Plain Sermons_, 1880, Vol. II, No. XXXI. [34] _A
Preface to Morals_, p. 326. [35] From a review of my book _The Cycle of
Modern Poetry_ in the _Times Literary Supplement_ (London), June 20, 1929.
_Religion Without Humanism_ T. S. ELIOT I must rely, in these few pages,
upon a brief summary of the limitations within which I believe humanism
must work, which I published in the _Hound and Horn_, June, 1929. In that
paper I stated my belief that humanism is in the end futile without
religion. Here I wish to put forward briefly a view which seems to me
equally important, the counterpart of the other, and one which ought to be
more welcome to humanists. Having called attention to what I believe to be
a danger, I am bound to call attention to the danger of the other extreme:
the danger, a very real one, of _religion without humanism_. I believe that
the sceptic, even the pyrrhonist, but particularly the humanist-sceptic, is
a very useful ingredient in a world which is no better than it is. In
saying this I do not think that I am committing myself to any theological
heresy. The ideal world would be the ideal Church. But very little
knowledge of human nature is needed to convince us that hierarchy is liable
to corruption, and certainly to stupidity; that religious belief, when
unquestioned and uncriticised, is liable to degeneration into superstition;
that the human mind is much lazier than the human body; and that the
communion of saints in Tibet is of a very low order. If we cannot rely, and
it seems that we can never rely, upon adequate criticism from within, it is
better that there should be criticism from without. But here I wish to make
a capital distinction: criticism, infidelity and agnosticism must, to be of
value, be _original_ and not inherited. Orthodoxy must be traditional,
heterodoxy must be original. The attitude of Voltaire has value, because of
its place in time; the attitude of Renan has value, in its historical
perspective; Anatole France I can only consider as a man who came at the
most unfortunate date for his own reputation--too late to be a great
sceptic, and too soon to be a great sceptic. There must be more orthodoxy
before there can be another Voltaire. And precisely I fear lest humanism
should make a tradition of dissent and agnosticism, and so cut itself off
from the sphere of influence in which it is most needed. For there is no
doubt in my mind that contemporary religious institutions are in danger
from themselves; that they have with few exceptions lost the
“intellectual,” except that pernicious kind of intellectual who adopts
dogma merely because doubt is out of date. Nowhere is this more obvious
than in America. All the religious forms which have some ancestry, and many
which have none, flourish there; but among persons whom I have known, there
is hardly one who had any connection (not to say any conviction) with any
of them. But America is not isolated in this respect; it merely shows us
under a magnifying glass what occurs everywhere. The two dangers to which
religion is exposed are apparent everywhere--and they are both cases for
which “humanism” or “culture” might be called in: _petrified
ecclesiasticism_, and _modernism_. The great merit of the Catholic Church,
from the worldly point of view, is its catholicity. That is to say, it is
obvious that every religion is effectively limited by the racial characters
of the people who practise it, and that a strictly racial or national
religion is certain to hold many irrelevances and impurities, from lack of
an outside standard of criticism. When the Catholic Faith really is
catholic, the aberrations of one race will be corrected by those of
another. But it is obviously very difficult even for the Roman Church,
nowadays, to be truly catholic. The embarrassment of temporal powers, the
virulence of racial and national enthusiasms, are enormous centrifugal
forces. The great majority of English speaking people, or at least the vast
majority of persons of British descent; half of France, half of Germany,
the whole of Scandinavia, are outside of the Roman communion: that is to
say, the Roman Church has lost some organic parts of the body of modern
civilisation. It is a recognition of this fact which makes some persons of
British extraction hesitate to embrace the Roman communion; and which makes
them feel that those of their race who have embraced it have done so only
by the surrender of some essential part of their inheritance and by cutting
themselves off from their family. But if one feels that the culture of the
Roman Catholic Church to-day is imperfect--and also in danger of splitting
up into various local and national bigotries and political factions which
will retain only the name and the observances of catholicism--one cannot
get any satisfaction from what happens outside of that church either. The
Roman Church in America has little contact with some of the most valuable
elements in American culture; it not only lacks humanism, but is in danger
of adding vulgarity. In England it is negligible. But both in England and
America, Protestantism is in still worse case. It can be, and usually is,
equally vulgar; it can be equally narrow and bigoted; with the alternative
that when it is not narrow and bigoted it is liberal, sloppy, hypocritical
and humanitarian. The Roman Church is dangerous in one direction; the
Protestant Churches are dangerous in two directions. I have already said
what I think of humanism without religion; I respect it, but believe it to
be sterile. Religion without humanism produces the vulgarities and the
political compromises of Roman Catholicism; the vulgarities and the
fanaticism of Tennessee; it produces Mrs. MacPherson; and it produces
liberal uplift; and it produces the Bishop of Birmingham. For it is the
chief point of this short paper, that religion without humanism produces
the opposite and conflicting types of religious bigotry (liberalism in
religion is a form of bigotry). We have Cardinal O’Connell; the late W. J.
Bryan; and we have the cultivated divines of the most radical wing of
Unitarianism. The sum of _disjecta membra_ is completed by the humanists. I
have examined several popular theological works by Anglican clergy of the
liberal school.[36] It would I am sure be difficult to convince any of
these worthy people that they were humanitarian without being humanist.
Humanitarians (and among them we must include anti-humanitarians like Dean
Inge, a sentimentalist _à rebours_) are often highly cultivated people who
have read many books; some of them, in England at least, can read Latin and
Greek; the Bishop of Birmingham took honours in mathematics. Yet in
surrendering dogmatic faith they are at the same time surrendering their
humanism. It is from such people that we hear most about “science and
religion”; it is such people who pay, and lead the flock to pay, that
exaggerated devotion to “science” which the true humanist deplores. It is
curious that whilst on the one hand the liberal theologian tends to pay
homage to an illusory divinity called “science” the advanced scientist
tends to pay homage to an equally vague “religion.” People seem to suppose
that by science yielding points to religion, and religion yielding points
to science, we shall quite soon arrive at a position of comfortable
equilibrium. What will be “real” will be the technical progress of science,
and the material organisation of the churches: we shall still have
professors of physics and we shall still have clergy, and nobody will lose
his job. Scientists and clergy alike seem to speak nowadays as if they were
in terror of the spectre of unemployment: “I will not make exaggerated
claims,” they both seem to say, “lest I may be discovered to be
superfluous.” But this apparent approximation of science and religion,
which we discover in such theological works as those I have mentioned, and
in such popular scientific works as those of Whitehead and Eddington, is a
delusion. The meeting is a mere cancellation to zero. Nothing positive is
attained by reciprocal surrender. The theologian says “of course dogma is
not truth,” and the scientist says, “of course science is not truth.” Every
one is happy together; and possibly both parties turn to _poetry_ (about
which neither scientist nor theologian knows anything) and say “_there_ is
truth, in the inspiration of the poet.” The poet himself, who perhaps knows
more about his own inspiration than a psycho-analyst does, is not allowed
to reply that poetry is poetry, and not science or religion--unless he or
some of his mistaken friends produce a theory that Poetry is Pure Poetry,
Pure Poetry turning out to be something else than poetry and thereby
securing respect. Both parties, the liberal theologian and the scientist,
are deficient in humanism. But what is more serious, to my mind, is that
the humanist is deficient in humanism too, and must take his responsibility
with the others. What happens, in the general confusion, is not only that
each party abdicates his proper part, but that he interferes with the
proper part of the others. The theologian is terrified of science, and the
scientist is becoming terrified of religion; whilst the humanist,
endeavouring to pay proper, but not excessive due to both, reels from side
to side. And the world reels with him. On the following point I speak with
diffidence, recognising my lack of qualification where qualification is
severe and exact. Humanism has much to say of Discipline and Order and
Control; and I have parroted these terms myself. I found no discipline in
humanism; only a little intellectual discipline from a little study of
philosophy. But the difficult discipline is the discipline and training of
emotion; this the modern world has great need of; so great need that it
hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is only
attainable through dogmatic religion. I do not say that dogmatic religion
is justified because it supplies this need--that is just the psychologism
and the anthropocentrism that I wish to avoid--but merely state my belief
that in no other way can the need be supplied. There is much chatter about
mysticism: for the modern world the word means some spattering indulgence
of emotion, instead of the most terrible concentration and askesis. But it
takes perhaps a lifetime merely to realise that men like the forest sages,
and the desert sages, and finally the Victorines and John of the Cross and
(in his fashion) Ignatius really _mean what they say_. Only those have the
right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss. The need of the
modern world is the discipline and training of the emotions; which neither
the intellectual training of philosophy or science, nor the wisdom of
humanism, nor the negative instruction of psychology can give. In short, we
can use the term Humanism in two ways. In the narrower sense, which tends
always under emphasis to become narrower still, it is an important part in
a larger whole; and humanists, by offering this part as a substitute for
the whole, are lessening, instead of increasing, its importance; they offer
an excuse to the modern theologian and the modern scientist (only too ready
to grasp it) for _not_ being humanistic themselves, and for leaving
humanism to its own specialists. Humanism can offer neither the
intellectual discipline of philosophy or of science (two different
disciplines), nor the emotional discipline of religion. On the other hand,
these other activities depend upon humanism to preserve their sanity.
Without it, religion tends to become either a sentimental tune, or an
emotional debauch; or in theology, a skeleton dance of fleshless dogmas, or
in ecclesiasticism, a soulless political club. Without it, science can be
merely a process of technical research, bursting out from time to time, and
especially in our time, into sentimental monstrosities like the Life Force,
or Professor Whitehead’s God. But in the full and complete sense of the
word, Humanism is something quite different from a part trying to pretend
to be a whole, and something quite different from a “parasite” of religion.
It can only be quite actual in the full realisation and balance of the
disciplined intellectual and emotional life of man. For, as I have said,
without humanism both religion and science tend to become other than
themselves, and without religion and science--without emotional and
intellectual discipline--humanism tends to shrink into an atrophied
caricature of itself. It is the spirit of humanism which has operated to
reconcile the mystic and the ecclesiastic in one church; having done this
in the past, humanism should not set itself up now as another sect, but
strive to continue and enlarge its task, labouring to reconcile and unite
all the parts into a whole. It is the humanist who could point out to the
theologian the absurdities of his repudiation, acceptance, or exploitation
of “science,” and to the scientist the absurdities of his repudiation,
acceptance, or exploitation of religion. For when I say “reconcile,” I mean
something very different from the dangerous and essentially anti-humanistic
adventures of the Bishop of Birmingham or Professor Whitehead. And let us
leave Einstein alone, who has his own business to attend to. As I believe I
am writing chiefly for those who know or think they know, what “humanism”
means, I have not in this paper attempted any definition of it. I take it
that the reader thinks he knows what it means, and that he will understand
that I am putting before him the difference between what I think he thinks
it means and what I think I think it means. I have just one note to add,
which is the preface to an extensive sequel. I believe that at the present
time the problem of the unification of the world and the problem of the
unification of the individual, are in the end one and the same problem; and
that the solution of one is the solution of the other. Analytical
psychology (even if accepted far more enthusiastically than I can accept
it) can do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce
unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political, and
economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce the
great society with an aggregation of human beings who are not units but
merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs. The problem of
nationalism and the problem of dissociated personalities may turn out to be
the same. The relevance of this paragraph to what precedes it will, I hope,
appear upon examination. FOOTNOTES [36] E.g., _Should Such a Faith
Offend?_, by the Bishop of Birmingham; _I Believe in God_, by Maude Royden;
_The Impatience of a Parson_, by H. R. L. Sheppard. _The Plight of Our
Arts_ FRANK JEWETT MATHER, Jr. I Any expression of a humanistic society
through the arts depends upon the acceptance by the artist of some sort of
central authority. The authority is not that of official organisations or
written codes; it is rather that of approved traditional ideals in which
both the artist and the laity believe. In their application to the work of
art, such ideals appear concretely as accredited conventions. In a
humanistic society, these conventions assume no burdensome or arbitrarily
authoritative form. They represent merely a body of successful
experience--ways that have been tried and found good. The accepted
convention tells the artist how he must begin; it does not tell him how he
must end. It does, however, warn him off from any too abrupt breaking with
tradition, and from any too urgent assertion of his individual taste save
in so far as that taste finds sanction in precedent and in opinion other
than his own. Right here is the stone of stumbling. The humanist artist
willingly admits that his own genius is not his final authority. He checks
its impulses by the practice and teaching of other geniuses, and by the
degree of acceptance which its expression commands from competent criticism
and patronage. It is not enough that he shall have expressed just himself;
it matters quite as much that he shall have communicated himself to a fit
public with whom he shares a confidence in the guiding conventions of his
art and in ideals mutually honoured. On the side of the artist, this
relation will indicate a procedure of delicate adjustment. The accepted
conventions of his art and the ideals of the society for which he works,
will of course not fit him precisely any more than a ready-made suit fits
perfectly either the artist or layman. The practical problem of the
humanist artist, then, will be how far he shall reshape himself to the
expectations of his public; and how far he may change these expectations in
a sense favourable to his individual bent. And this implies chiefly a very
superior sort of judgment and common sense. The humanist artist will feel
that it is a vain thing to have expressed himself, however gorgeously, if
nobody knows that he has expressed himself, and he will also admit that the
mere feelingful and urgent self gains richness and value only when it is
measured by other selves in society. On the side of society and patronage,
a humanised art would imply in practice a central authority lightly and
genially imposed, a just offishness towards the artists who too overtly
repudiated the tradition, withal a somewhat sceptical hopefulness towards
experiment and innovation, a hospitable desire to understand the artist
even when his communication is obscure, a wish to have its own ideals
expressed through the arts. In short a humanised society co-operates with
the artist to a degree difficult even to imagine to-day. It provides him
with incentive, furnishes most of his æsthetic notions, helps him to
realise himself through opportune criticism and companionship, thus taking
an active part in what is the essential thing--the formation of his spirit.
So far I have dealt in convenient abstractions which are in part
misleading. I have made the reciprocal relation between the artist and
public too conscious, much more conscious than it has been in history. I
shall presently try to correct the error by appealing to precedents
concretely in given time and place. However, the over-emphasis on
consciousness as producing mutuality between artist and public may well be
pragmatically justified. It seems unlikely that our society will simply
gravitate towards humanism. On the contrary, if we are to achieve a
humanistic social balance, it will apparently be done only through much
taking of thought, on the part of both the enlightened laity and the
intelligent artist. So the analysis I have tried to make of the mutually
helpful relation of artist and layman in a humanised world, though it
overstresses the conscious element in this reciprocity in seeming disregard
of past history, may for that very reason suggest a programme for history
yet to be realised. Programmes, however, are entirely valueless except as
they rest soundly on dynamic states of mind. Our problem as humanists is to
create a state of mind in which neither artist nor layman will exaggerate
the worth of his idiosyncrasy, nor yet follow the general drift
unthinkingly. We are trying to make a man who is a friendly critic both of
himself and of the society in which he moves, a man who accepts the growing
complexity of living as offering him fascinating and profitable problems of
adjustment. To maintain this hope in the face of the
chicken-and-lobster-eating motorist, the radio fan, the devotee of the
“talkies,” the sycophant artist who bows to base authority, and the
behaviourist artist who admits none but that of his own glands--to keep the
hope of making humanists in the face of the daily American spectacle
requires an audacity which even the Expressionist might envy. But we
contributors to this symposium have actually seen a few humanists made,
have helped a little to make them perhaps; and we are dealing with
spiritual values which transcend ordinary statistics. A few thousand
genuine humanists in America would make our society humanistic; a hundred
humanist painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, and men of letters
would make our art solidly humanistic. In this hope we keep our tiny banner
up beside the hoardings that promise to beautify our teeth, remove our
corns, clothe our bodies appealingly, or incase the relentlessly exposed
legs of our women in silk as durable as filmy. II That adjustment between
artist and layman which seems so difficult to-day, until the seventeenth
century and the beginning of modern times came of itself and in some such
fashion as this--it hardly matters whether the scene be Italy, Spain,
France, England, China, Japan, India, or Persia: in every case the basis
was fine craftsmanship. Pretty much all objects of common use were
delicately conceived and carefully made. The amateur of to-day gladly pays
great prices for the ordinary grave figurines and temple vessels of China,
for the horse trappings of the Scythians, for the common household gear and
even the workman’s tools of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, for
the comfit boxes and carved fobs of feudal Japan, for the peasant furniture
of Brittany and Scandinavia. This general high level of craftsmanship
depended chiefly on the fact that even the humblest craftsman was also a
designer. To the joy of fit execution was joined that of successful
invention. A very few craftsmen became what we now call artists,--that is
made finer inventions on a more impressive scale, designed a cathedral or a
palace instead of a simple house, decorated an entire chapel instead of a
bride chest or tournament shield, made a bronze statue instead of a
chiselled ink stand. But the line between the craftsman and the artist was
not a sharp one. At Florence a Donatello belonged to the Stonecutters Guild
and officially was merely a very highly esteemed stonecutter. And every
future artist entered upon his career as a simple apprentice in a craft.
The tragedy and frustration so common in the artists’ career to-day were
absent. The apprentice with only a fine craftsman’s endowment lived out his
life contentedly as a craftsman. But he was free, had he the ability, to
become an artist and to achieve the companionship of princes. The step from
craftsman to artist lay really in the artist’s intelligent assimilation of
greater subject matter or in his fuller expression of subject matter common
to artist and craftsman alike. Such subject matter was furnished him by his
ecclesiastical and temporal betters; he did not invent it. There was no
hardship in this imposition, for the values of his betters were also his
own. There was a like-mindedness and real co-operation between artist and
patron. A romantic and sentimentally individualistic criticism has
challenged this case. No person who knows either history or human nature,
however, will hold that Giotto was hampered because he had to paint the
legends of Saint Francis and those of the Virgin; that Raphael was great in
spite of the fact that he had to find symbols for syncretic theology; that
Hogarth is belittled by the fact that he so genially followed the literary,
satirical current of his age. A humanistic criticism will hold, on the
contrary, that an essential factor in the greatness of these artists was
that, their themes coming almost ready made, they were spared the waste and
perturbation of so-called original invention and were free to face in
tranquillity their real problem of transformation and execution. To
recapitulate: the craftsman, until at most a couple of centuries ago,
depended on a universal taste for the well-made thing, while the artist
depended on the taste of a minority, the taste of an aristocracy with which
he himself felt in harmony. The few remaining fine craftsmen of to-day find
no general taste for the well-made thing upon which they may depend, while
the myriad artists of to-day face no aristocracy whatever, no accepted body
of taste whatever, but rather a congeries of pseudo-aristocracies each with
its shifting preferences, which hardly deserve the name of tastes at all.
How the isolation of the artist with the virtual extinction of the
craftsman has come about is a commonplace of history which need be recalled
here only in its broad lines. The factory within a century has done away
with the craftsman designer. Still earlier the crumbling of the old
aristocracy of birth and religion at once put an end to community of taste
at the top, and gave exaggerated scope to the already strongly rising ideal
of originality and individuality as highest æsthetic values. A stable and
spiritually profitable patronage ceased and was succeeded by a capricious
and heavy handed patronage from a new wealth undisciplined either by
tradition or by fine and broad personal experience. The artist’s immemorial
task of realising himself in society became almost impossibly difficult. If
he were weak and clever, his resort was to sycophancy; if he were strong
and wise, there was little for him but patience, resignation, and a tragic
hopefulness; if he were strong and unwise, he became a rebel. And the
rebel, in a manner perfectly familiar to the neurologist, built up his
compensations, by which he extolled that isolation which was really his
sore misfortune as his superiority and his advantage, until after three
generations it has become a common conviction among artists that their
proper task is self-expression in a void, that there should be no desire to
communicate and, obviously, no need to be understood. And just at the
moment when the position of the artist was becoming barely tenable, the
number of artists increased inordinately. The craftsman who didn’t want to
go into a factory but wanted to use his head and hands delicately, had to
become an artist, while wholesale methods of education in the practice of
art made the way to becoming an artist easy to any young person with a
modicum of money and diligence. As if that were not enough, the false
glamour thrown about the artist life by romantic poets and novelists
brought new hordes of the unfit to join the bewildered survivors from the
old régime. III Now, any going back to the conditions of the Middle Ages or
to those of the Renaissance is of course impossible; but if craftsmanship
and art are again to become normal functions in a helpful social order, the
old formulas, at least in principle, must hold. There will be no generally
fine craftsmanship until most people want well-made things and get them
from craftsmen who design; and the so-called fine arts will have no general
importance until there are many patrons with a common bond of taste which
is sympathetic to most artists. Is there anything which promises so
desirable a reconstruction? On the side of craftsmanship, I fear nothing is
to be expected. The gallant counter-attacks of a John Ruskin and a William
Morris against modern industrialism show just how much and how little can
be gained from a militant reaction. A hundred passionate spinsters are
printing batiks or glazing pottery in as many æsthetic last ditches, but
they are mostly doing so at the expense of rich and generous eccentrics, in
short are merely subsidised artists disguised as craftsmen. We are getting
better designed things from the factory--the museums are working usefully
to this end--but this reform only enlists a handful of professional
designers, and does nothing to produce the old type of creative craftsman.
In short we probably must say good-bye to the craftsman save as a
picturesque survival, like the man who is skilful with the rapier or the
long bow. All we can hope for is that some improvement in the general
taste, which I think is reasonable to look for,--since for a century it
could hardly have been lower,--may cause a discriminating demand for better
designed factory goods. This of course leaves the problem of the artist and
the craftsman just where it was, with the sole difference that the passing
of the craftsman shuts off the possibility of any return of the artist to
his traditionally best school, the shop of a good craftsman. So if there is
to be any useful rebuilding, I feel it must proceed after the very modern
precedent of the skyscraper, from the top down. Much might conceivably be
done to produce a more coherent and intelligent patronage for the fine
arts, much is already being done by museums, art dealers, colleges and
universities, and all manner of art societies. Indeed the increased
activity of museums, collectors, and colleges in behalf of the acquisition
and appreciation of fine works of art has persuaded Mr. R. C. Duffus that
we are well launched on an American Renaissance, and to that effect he has
published a very interesting book. Far be it from me to minimise the
importance of activities in which I have been and am deeply engaged myself.
One may gladly admit that to multiply our art treasures--and for a
generation the multiplication has been astoundingly accelerated--is in
itself an unqualified benefit. But the mere accumulation of great works of
art and much talk about them does not imply understanding of them, and the
question the humanist must raise is always--Are these masterpieces
understood? And how are they understood? Mediæval Rome lay in full artistic
decadence when much of the glory of her old art was visible on every hand.
To understand any nobly conceived work of art, one must have lived nobly in
deed, in imagination, or in both. To own a great work of art may be a mere
counsel of personal vanity; to expound a work of art, a mere assertion of
self-importance. A whole school of interpretation, which has its faculty,
museum, and journal, tears the work of art from its human context and
studies its forms as if these were ends in themselves. And this sort of
teaching is popular. Along such lines one may make a generation of resolute
pedants. For the humanist such teaching is not merely defective but
positively harmful. On the other side, there is much sound and modest
teaching, and the next generation of art patrons will be far better trained
than that which is passing. Yet all such useful activities are simply
marginal. Without a predisposition in its visitors, the museum might just
as well be unvisited, since it then has no more dignity or value than the
peep show. It is a proper uneasiness before flattering statistics of
attendance that has rightly induced our museums to inaugurate direct
instruction in appreciation. It is a weakness and limitation of such
teaching that it too often merely foments a diffused interest in art taken
as an entity and not as related to human values generally. For appreciation
really requires a right and balanced attitude towards life. It was really
more important for Florence that her great citizens, while bowing to the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, wanted a full and
honourable life in Florence--it was really more important, I say, that they
cared discriminatingly for the dignity of their ordinary activities and for
the authority of their faith, than that they cared _specifically_ for
painting, sculpture, and architecture. In short some aristocratic vision of
the good life has always been the foundation on which great national art
has been reared in the past. It behooves us then to ask what is in America
our accepted vision of the good life? For upon it must rest our art. What
do we all agree to (saving always negligible minorities of “knockers”)? I
fear it would come to these few articles of faith:--to make a lot of money
by fair means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die
with one’s boots on. This is a credo which has within its limitations
positive merits, and it is by no means lightly to be decried, but it
palpably offers little spiritual nourishment to the “art-artist,” to quote
a recent mayor of New York. A certain kind of art it feeds admirably. And
it naturally gets the art it feeds--the immaculate bank clerk in campus
clothes, the sylph-like apparition in the porcelain tub, the beach party in
the classy car--the art of the advertisement generally. And this ideal also
finds its authentic expression in the cheap heroics and shallow idealisms
of the moving picture, and the potpourri of dubious music and eloquence
over the radio. These are our representative arts, as sculpture was the
representative art of Greece, or painting of Florence. The prospect is more
pleasing when we turn to architecture, really the only art that is
perennial. Here there is at least a great progress, a far higher level of
taste than that of a generation ago, a competent and audacious coping with
unprecedented problems. Yet here as elsewhere the cult of haste works harm.
No architect of a skyscraper is given time to think his building out.
Perfection in the arts rests largely on trifles lovingly meditated, and
what successful architect has time for meditation? We have in abundance
such arts as we deserve, and we shall have better arts only as we deserve
them through better ideals of life generally. Painting and sculpture are
kept alive by a sort of artificial respiration. It is to be hoped that the
increasing public use of both in decoration may restore to these
traditionally leading arts a fuller measure of vitality. As it is, these
arts have joined fine craftsmanship as an elegant survival, like fencing or
court tennis. Since painting and sculpture are the arts I most love, it
would be pleasant indeed to come forward with a programme for their
rehabilitation. But I have no such programme. I feel rather that we should
at once accept the situation and emphasise it. The only remedy, and a
partial one at that, is, I think, this: since painting and sculpture have
become exotic, relatively unwanted, and subsidised arts, let us rebuild on
their rarity value. If instead of making it ridiculously easy to learn
painting and sculpture, we made it difficult, we should probably have
better painting and sculpture. This could be done by withdrawing charitable
support from the art schools, keeping open such as reasonably pay their
way, and by suspending the artificially encouraged salesmanship of painting
and sculpture. There would remain the human problem of what to do with the
thousands of young men and women who legitimately wish to work delicately
with their hands; but in a civilisation that is supplied from the factory,
that problem seems insoluble. And withal there may be a satisfactory outlet
in amateurism--this has happened notably in the art of the theatre at the
very moment when the moving picture seemed to announce the end of the
spoken play. In general I am not discouraging the support of survivals.
Indeed I see in such support a singularly sympathetic act of patronage. But
one should know what he is about. I have, for example, a predilection for
the quill pen, but I should be very unwise to endow an institution for
writing with the quill. And we are very unwise in America when, not really
wanting their works, we artificially multiply painters and sculptors.
Whatever reform comes from within the arts, will probably not come from
carefully fostered survivals nor yet from conscious revivals, but rather
from the response of the wanted arts to a finer demand. The comic strip and
the moving picture seem barometric to me, as does illustration for
advertising. Whenever I see a marked improvement in these popular arts, I
shall expect to find greater improvement in the traditional fine arts of
sculpture, painting, and architecture. And while I am only a casual
observer of these barometric arts, what I have observed of design for
advertising and of the moving picture does not cause me either to hope
unduly nor yet to despair utterly. Certainly both have improved much within
my experience. There remains the dilemma: can the democratic arts really
acquire distinction, that solicitude for perfecting trifles which we have
already remarked, or must they stop at a certain level simply because they
are democratic arts? It would be hazardous to answer this question, but
historically no democratic art, with the possible exception of engraving,
has as yet transcended fine craftsmanship and successfully invaded the
realm of great ideas. That realm has without exception been occupied by the
arts that were frankly aristocratic. IV Our desired rehabilitation of the
traditional and also of the new arts may in the last analysis depend upon
the creation _within_ our democracy of the right sort of an aristocracy.
Here we are back to the central problem of humanism--how to produce a
superiority that is generally accepted and socially available. If we can
make such an aristocracy, it will foster the artist and the arts justly and
generously; it will provide a world in which the creative artist is no
longer a tolerated alien but solidly at home. Whenever such an aristocracy
has a clear and noble vision of the good life, it will want symbols for its
ideals, and will call upon the only man who can provide such symbols--the
artist. One would like to think that the oncoming generation, with
unparalleled advantages in museums and in collegiate instruction in art,
endowed with a great open-mindedness, audacity, and hopefulness--one would
like to think, I say, that this young generation will provide the needed
humanistic support for art. But association with youth, delightful as it
is, gives me no very clear hope in any humanistic direction. The most
typical and engaging youths and maidens of to-day illustrate merely the
lovelier and more attractive traits of the barbarian. They have an
unlimited confidence, very beautiful in its way, with the smallest
background of lived or imagined experience. They think life is so simple
that they may ignore all the traditional solutions for its manifold
problems, trusting to their own instinct of the moment to meet emergencies
that have engaged the best wits of generations of sages and saints. We
have, characteristically tinged with humanitarianism, the mentality of the
noble bandit sheik or the generous sea rover, who knows what he wants and
asks nothing from tradition or authority. To make humanists of this
generation of self-elected spiritual adventurers implies preliminary
contrition and moral rebuilding. There was a better chance really of making
humanists out of my own somewhat over-sophisticated and _fainéant_
generation. At least we started from the sound postulate that life was
complex, and the problem of living a problem of delicate adjustment in
which one needed whatever help he might draw from any time or source. So I
am really glad that I shall probably not see the young generation when it
passes the forties. Bruised in its self-confidence, perplexed and baffled
by a life envisaged too simply, it is all too likely to manifest a general
revulsion to indiscriminately chosen formalisms--social, political, and
religious--with the result that the middle-aged dull dog of to-day will be
as nothing in view of his successor of twenty years hence. On the better
side, a general return to formalism may be the opportunity for an
intelligently aggressive humanism. It will be an advantage to find, what we
to-day sadly lack, a basis of agreement on any traditional plane, however
narrow. Thus the new generation may after all serve the ends of a future
humanism, if only by living into entire discredit their barbarous programme
of individualism. In fine, the problem of a humanistic art is no discrete
problem, but rather that of humanism generally. It has been my task merely
to define the issue in a single aspect, and not at all to find a solution
that could be adopted to-morrow. The deep gap that isolates the serious
artist from a public content with the puerilities of the radio and the
“talkie,” will scarcely be bridged to-morrow or the day after. Many
critics, indeed, hail the latter-day individualist as the finally liberated
artist, and bid us joyously expect even more individualism than that which
has already been so generously vouchsafed us. This may be a true prognosis.
No one can safely deny the possibility that art may be permanently “on its
own.” If so, art will of course become merely an eccentric activity, an
indulgence and luxury of coteries, hence of no more concern really to the
humanist than the trade, say, of the perfume maker. On the other hand, no
one can safely deny the possibility that art may once again be profoundly
integrated with society. Every contributor to this volume is perforce
thinking toward that reintegration, even if the theme be not in his mind
nor the words on his pen. To my younger colleagues, then, in whom the hope
of a new humanism lies, I leave the problem and the solution, with that
chastened confidence which befits a humanist grown old in the most
unpopular of faiths. _The Dilemma of Modern Tragedy_ ALAN REYNOLDS THOMPSON
I Most modern tragedy is depressing; classic tragedy is elevating. That the
best tragic art of the past, in spite of the calamities it presents,
elevates the spirit is obvious; but the cause of the “lift” it produces is
obscure. If the cause were technical and formal beauty, _Ghosts_ ought to
be more inspiriting than _Macbeth_. If it were wholly the melody of
verse--which most modern drama has foregone--no great classic tragedy could
endure translation. But Greek tragedies can still powerfully exalt an
audience, though presented in the English renderings of Campbell and
Potter! The problem seems particularly to have appealed to the German
metaphysical mind. Hegel thought tragedy a transcendental reconciliation of
opposites. Schopenhauer found in it resignation to loss of individuality
and return to the universal Will. Nietzsche turned the latter’s pessimism
into the semblance of optimism by defining the spirit of Dionysus as an
intoxicated joy in annihilation and union with nature. But one hardly need
resort to metaphysics, since the experience seems sufficiently explained by
psychology. It is in my opinion chiefly the result of admiration. Every
tragedy grows from a struggle of the individual against circumstance; but
this emotional elevation we are discussing, as distinguished from more
melodramatic thrills, seems to arise not from the mere struggle but from an
impressive exhibition of will. The spectator is inspirited because in
tragedy he sees an exhibition of convincing heroism. The tragic hero
achieves a spiritual victory in spite of a physical defeat. “To affect the
soul, and excite the passions, and above all to move admiration,” says
Dryden, “is the delight of serious plays.”[37] In some respects the reverse
of this view is the neo-classic doctrine of poetic justice, which is still
held by some critics. According to poetic justice it is not the hero whom
we are to admire, but the moral law which destroys him. Thus Mr. Ludwig
Lewisohn writes: “Traditionally the serious drama deals with the
transgressions of an immutable moral law by a self-originating will.... In
each instance the destruction of the protagonist reconciles the spectator
to a universe in which guilt is punished and justice is upheld.” That some
such view governed the _intentions_ of religious dramatists like Æschylus
or Racine we must admit; but for the modern sceptic at least their plays
are inspiriting in proportion as the struggle exalts the endurance, if not
the goodness of the hero. That such was even the intention of other
dramatists, Shakespeare in particular, is more than doubtful. Other critics
like Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch foretell the extinction of tragedy because it
is dependent on an anthropocentric view of the universe. It is the “tragic
fallacy,” says Mr. Krutch, to fancy that one’s “passions are important
throughout all time and all space.” Though we may agree that they are not,
to conclude from that rather obvious fact that tragedy is dead seems not
wholly logical. Whatever the nature of the world, human greatness remains
important for human beings; and Mr. Krutch would seem to give away his case
by so plainly admiring greatness in the very tragedies whose passing he
deplores. The ethical victory of the tragic hero is not a vindication of a
moral order in the universe; neither is it a victory for an elaborated
system such as religion fosters. Macbeth is wicked but admirable. Something
primitive and universal in mankind responds to courage, fidelity,
endurance, even for evil ends. Such admiration rises spontaneously from our
strongest impulses, those toward survival and success. In the theatre to
behold a man steadfast in his will even to death is to feel our own natures
enhanced and to discover in ourselves unrealised powers. Such heroic
manifestation of will is essential to tragedy of the great tradition, and
is found in Sophocles, in Shakespeare, in Corneille alike. Several
influences have combined in destroying heroic tragedy. It was the tradition
of the Renaissance to make the hero a prince, the mere semblance of
nobility securing a deferential response from the audience. Modern
democracy has changed all that. Industrialism, furthermore, has fostered
the feeling that success is synonymous with getting rich. And science has
not only helped destroy popular traditions that might have nourished a
modern spirit of admiration, but has fostered a wintry air of scepticism,
making man appear not an imperfect angel but a super-educated monkey.
Psychology in particular has been industriously cutting at the root of
heroism, the belief in free will, by exhibiting the mechanical causes for
conduct. The writer of tragedy who succumbs to these influences finds
himself thus in a dilemma. Unable to believe in greatness, he cannot
inspire others. If he would gain elevation, he must falsify his beliefs; if
he would express his candid view of life, he must forego the tragic lift.
Heroic tragedy was the outcome of a view perhaps pessimistic about things
in general, but always optimistic about the human quality of individuals.
The modern view is pessimistic about everything. As Hardy expressed it, the
prospect most harmonious with the temper of the thinking modern would be a
gaunt waste in Thule. As a result the dilemma of the naturalist poet is
this: _He cannot be both honest and sublime._[38] II This statement will be
more convincing when illustrated with examples drawn from various
manifestations of the tragic spirit--in narrative poetry and the novel as
well as in the drama. I have emphasised the effect of science; and at first
thought it might seem that the great romantics of a century ago, who
preceded the scientific disillusionment, still kept the heroic tradition
alive. It is true that they inherited the tradition, but in their hands it
became not heroism but heroics. The romantic tendency was to seek thrills
rather than truth, and to draw less from human nature than from a literary
fashion. _Hernani_ and _Ruy Blas_, for example, are highly effective
constructions of clap-trap, to which Hugo’s beautiful and rhetorical verse
gives a semblance of significance. But they can be taken seriously only by
abandoning the intelligence. To-day they seem no more tragic than Dumas
_père_ or the _mélodrames_ of the Boulevards from which Hugo learned his
technic. As melodrama they are, to be sure, still entertaining. Such
romantic literature of escape did not of course decrease in popularity with
the development of science, but it distinctly lost literary prestige. After
the fifties and sixties the romantic who would be taken seriously had to
cope with scepticism and disillusionment. Thus Rostand, writing _Cyrano de
Bergerac_, was careful to preserve the smile of sophistication; he
delicately played with pathos, and even flirted with comedy. We can take
the extravagances of the drama half in the spirit of play and enjoy them as
a fairy tale. Its heroism is the heroism of fancy, not of life. It is in a
similar spirit that we enjoy the thrillers and detective tales of to-day.
We seek them for recreation only; and it is difficult to imagine that such
romance can ever again be thought of as seriously tragic. The romantic
writer, however, can scarcely be expected to be content with the rôle of
popular entertainer. Though for the past fifty years on the defensive, he
has persisted in attempting the exaltation of tragic art. Maeterlinck, for
example, sought to reconcile pessimism with romance by developing a
fatalistic “static drama” and throwing over it a Pre-Raphaelite mist of
romantic symbolism. With him a symbol became less a visible sign of another
object than a stimulant to emotional intoxication; and if we look at the
early plays with clear heads we see that they are rooted in a determinism
fatal to the heroic tradition. Later Maeterlinck grew more optimistic, but
in _Monna Vanna_, which was inspired by Browning, we get exaltation of
passion rather than will. Whereas Maeterlinck tried to preserve romantic
values, if not heroism, by reconciling them with science, the great
Russians, Tolstoi and Dostoevski, evaded scientific pessimism by escape
into a romanticised Christianity. The result was no less fatal to heroism.
As they saw it, the Christian paradox was that the worst persons achieve
the greatest regeneration; and they presented it with extreme violence.
Thus in Tolstoi’s _The Power of Darkness_ the leading character is not only
a drunkard, a lecher, and a murderer of his own child, but he is hopelessly
craven, stupid, and weak. Yet he wins salvation by public confession. Such
a conversion seems more emotional than religious, since it is the result of
no discipline of the will. But apart from such questions it would appear
obvious that such a play as this is poles apart from heroic tragedy. It is
Tolstoi’s sentimentalised conception of Christian poetic justice which is
exalted. The exaltation which the romanticist failed to achieve, the
scientific naturalist did not even attempt. Ibsen, apart from his great
intrinsic importance, is interesting because he shows the transition from
the one mode to the other. His early plays were modelled after Scribe and
Schiller; and use of the sagas links him with the heroic tradition. Though
sceptically, he exalted the will and prophesied the superman. But his
mature work shows the effect of science: men are portrayed more as victims
than shapers of events, and responsibility is shifted from the individual
to society. His transition from romanticism to scientific naturalism was
made easy by the fact that romanticism had already identified man with
nature. Disillusion concerning the latter brought about degradation of the
former. Though the increasing use of symbolism gives Ibsen’s later work a
romantic tone, the plays are built on studies of mental abnormalities which
seem almost intended to demonstrate the non-existence of heroism. The fall
of the master builder is indeed a symbol of the falsity of what Shaw calls
“ideals.” But Ibsen’s anti-heroic tendency is seen perhaps most forcefully
in the famous tragedy of his middle period. In _Ghosts_ the formal
resemblances to Greek tragedy and the element of human error obscure the
essential differences. The animus vitalising the action is the attack upon
a false code of morals--or “ideals”--of which the heroine is the victim.
And, as is proper in a naturalist tragedy, the _Spirocheta pallida_ is made
the _deus ex machina_. The emotional effect, furthermore, is not elevation
but horror. We can admire the author for honesty and daring, but not the
characters. The best of them, Mrs. Alving, is admirable only in intention,
and false to her convictions, as the author makes a point of showing. She
is at the curtain so far from a “spiritual victory” that there remains for
her a dilemma which is probably the cruelest in dramatic literature:
killing her own son or letting him live an idiot. The contrast between this
play and, let us say, _Hamlet_ is plain when we compare Oswald’s cry, “The
sun--the sun,” and the final speech of Fortinbras: Bear Hamlet, like a
soldier, to the stage; For he was likely, had he been put on, To have
prov’d most royally; and for his passage, The soldiers’ music and the rites
of war Speak loudly for him. The former is the bitter irony of disillusion,
the very mockery of the romantic cliché, “Then came the dawn.” The latter
ends the play with eloquent praise.[39] III The elevation which Ibsen gains
in _Ghosts_ through beauty of structure and atmospheric effect does not
carry over to the theme; here the author frankly chooses honesty and
foregoes sublimity. Few or no writers since have been at once as great and
as honest. If we observe the literature of the last quarter century to see
how it has met the dilemma, we shall find perhaps an explanation of current
anarchy and experimentation. Some take refuge in subtle evasions, disguised
by the cleverness of novel technic or material. But those who do not evade
the issue follow two roads: _the road of laughter_, which goes by way of
irony and satire; and _the road of tears_, by way of pathos or cruelty. The
former path, since it leads away from the tragic emotions, need not detain
us long. With effort the romantic can school himself into a detachment of
head from heart in which he can smile at the contrast between his dreams
and the reality. His laughter may be bitter, but it is laughter.
Pirandello, aware of the flux and illusoriness of life, deliberately
contrasts it with the permanence and significance of fiction; and extracts
mirth from the grotesquerie and cleverness of his paradoxes, in spite of
the disillusionment underlying them. Anatole France armoured his
sensibility with detached artistry and the _esprit gaulois_. Aldous Huxley,
too much the moralist to be wholly detached, solaces himself with savage
satire. The whole work of Cabell is a series of repetitions of one bitter
“jest” involving the night before and the morning after. Such writers,
emotionally romantic but intellectually sceptical, choose to laugh at their
predicament rather than weep. The road of tears concerns us directly. It
usually follows the way of pathos. Though Aristotle made pity and fear
correlative emotions, it is a fact that we feel the former more for the
weak victim like Ophelia than for the hero, and that the more we admire,
the less we need weep. Pathos must be subordinate in heroic tragedy if the
play is to elevate our spirits. Obviously, however, the modern who sees
nothing to admire is left with pathos as his chief effect. Pathos and
horror we find in Hardy, little mitigated by any admiration except for the
author’s artistry. Rarely we find a heroism of sorts in characters like
Michael Henchard; but it is significant that the author ended his novels
with _Jude_. Galsworthy’s habitual irony always borders on pathos if not
sentiment. French “naturalism” is harsher and at times, as in _Madame
Bovary_, finds expression in bitter irony. But pathos is none the less its
most powerful effect. _The Old Wives’ Tale_ of Arnold Bennett is an English
imitation; here we feel the pathos of mere mortality quite apart from
anything the very ordinary characters do. In Theodore Dreiser,
“naturalism,” though sadly in need of pruning, still bears its bitter
fruit. It is characteristic of its spirit that Dreiser uses the word
“tragedy” with reference to the fate of a Clyde Griffiths. But since pathos
skirts the gulf of sentimentality, the “hard-boiled” generation since the
war have turned from it. Those of the younger group who cannot laugh have
as a result begun to explore another emotion, which lies even deeper in our
nature, and which is also compatible with disillusionment. The savage in
all of us finds a fierce and hard delight in torture. Significantly the
word “sadism” has become fashionable. We may name the emotion “cruelty,”
though the word is perhaps inadequate. In the drama an important forerunner
of contemporary exploitations of cruelty and sex, as well as of
expressionism, was Frank Wedekind. Cruelty is manifest in James Joyce. In
D. H. Lawrence it accompanies a pathological exaltation of sexuality, and
thus gives him greater hardness than his American parallel, Sherwood
Anderson. A very interesting instance of it is the work of a contemporary
American poet whose fame is still unequal to his remarkable achievements. I
speak of Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers’ long narrative poems spread a more than
Thyestian banquet of horrors. With surprise we learn that in private life
the author is so unwilling to inflict pain that “he never picks a flower
wantonly.” But in his art he more than compensates for such sensibilities.
_Roan Stallion_, for example, depicts the passion of a modern Pasiphaë. The
unlucky husband is trampled by the stallion, and the woman shoots the
animal. _Tamar_ deals with incest between brother and sister, and ends with
a fire which burns down the house and its more or less crazy inmates. _The
Tower Beyond Tragedy_, though treating the Clytemnestra legend with great
power, ends in the incest motive between Orestes and Electra. The
perversity of theme, however, is partly compensated by elevation of
treatment, for Jeffers has a certain grandeur of style, drawing as he does
upon Greek literature, the Bible, modern psychology, and physical science
for thought, and the beauty of natural scenery for description. A passage
which illustrates at once his power of style and his drift toward cruelty
is found in preparation for the crucial scene of _Roan Stallion_. Humanity
is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from,
the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be
split. Tragedy that breaks man’s face and a white fire flies out of it;
vision that fools him Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his
limits, unnatural crime, inhuman science, Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves
that leap over the walls of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science, Useless
intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make
an atom, These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly
with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape He approves the praise, he that
walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, The
heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For him,
the last Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself,
the mould to break away from, the coal To break into fire, the atom to be
split.[40] In interpretation of his thought Mr. Louis Adamic quotes Mr.
Jeffers as saying that civilisation tends inevitably toward downfall
through sexual introversion. Although to attempt to “break out of humanity”
after the fashion exalted in _Roan Stallion_ is, to be sure, dangerous,
“misinterpreted in the mind of a fool or a lunatic,” nevertheless the fault
of the civilised person is that he “regards man exclusively,” “founding his
values, desires, his picture of the universe, all on his own humanity.” Mr.
Jeffers thus levels his attack directly at the foundation of humanism, and
allies himself with the naturalists who seek salvation in the physical. He
thus flies from normal humanity into cruelty and perversion. But the end of
these is death. And in poem after poem is expressed the longing for the
peace and endurance of granite,--of the grave. The violent destruction of
the individual is the logical outcome of his creed, and the denial of human
values leads to the annihilation of humanity. This tendency, the extreme
development of which we find in Jeffers, we find in less degree in our
leading American dramatist. But in Eugene O’Neill it is obscured by other
qualities; and generalisations are rendered difficult because he is groping
and experimental, not only in technic but in philosophy. Because of this
difficulty as well as for his intrinsic importance, O’Neill requires
special consideration. IV A writer’s ’prentice work is likely to be
revealing, and O’Neill’s is no exception. The one-act play _Thirst_, for
example, reveals an imaginative absorption in the violences and brutalities
of life. Most of the one-acts in the volume with _The Moon of the
Caribbees_ have more normal and convincing characterisation, but about half
are built upon abnormal situations involving incipient insanities or morbid
passions. This interest in mental abnormality has not diminished. O’Neill’s
plays are studies in psychopathology. _Beyond the Horizon_ deals with a
weak romantic who takes refuge from harsh reality in dreams, and finally
dies of consumption. _Gold_ is a melodrama growing out of an insane
delusion. _Diff’rent_ is the horrible case-history of a victim of
sex-repression. _The Hairy Ape_ describes a character who, if he is not a
mere symbol, develops from incipient to raving madness. A play with a
normal beginning, “_The First Man_,” turns out to be a study of an
emotional fixation. _Welded_ depicts two egotistical introverts in whom
goes on the torturing conflict between passionate love and uncontrolled
temperament. The flames of lust and greed, fanned into madness--these are
the materials of _Desire Under the Elms_. _The Great God Brown_, viewed
apart from its symbolism, portrays split personality and madness. _The
Fountain_, beneath its exotic romanticism, is the story of an _idée fixe_.
The plot of _Strange Interlude_ might have come from the case-book of
Freud. If we cannot judge the chief character of _Lazarus Laughed_ by human
standards, we can recognise in Caligula and Tiberius realistic studies of
psychic abnormalities born of lust, cruelty, and fear. And the author’s
latest play, _Dynamo_, is a study of religious mania. The blighting effects
of our industrial and social life seem hardly adequate to explain this
persistent interest in the pathological. To follow the method of the new
psychology which O’Neill uses so largely, we are likely to be correct if we
seek an emotional frustration; but American life is hardly the chief cause.
Similar interests are seen, for example, in Ibsen, Strindberg, and
Wedekind, all of whom must have had their effect on the younger dramatist.
My suggestion is that O’Neill has found his highly romantic temperament
incompatible with the teachings of science, and has sought to evade the
dilemma of modern tragedy by the road of tears, exploiting both pathos and
cruelty. That his temperament is highly romantic is obvious. His early work
is almost Conradian in atmosphere; and his great vigour of imagination is
strikingly displayed in the gorgeous settings and strange situations of
plays like _Marco Millions_ and _The Fountain_. Indeed, in the melodrama of
fear and horror he is a genius, fertile in themes to startle and amaze, and
skilful in adapting them effectively to the stage. Such a play as _Ile_,
moreover, is not only horrible but poetically true. _The Emperor Jones_ is
in my opinion his masterpiece, perfectly constructed and artistically
inevitable. The settings and plot contribute with as inexorable an art as
that of Poe to a single emotional effect, which is furthermore bound up
with a clear and convincing problem in character. The theme of _The Emperor
Jones_ is the regression of a negro to savagery; and as we watch the
succession of weird visions, and feel the emotional crescendo of the
tom-toms, at the same time we see the disintegration of the negro’s mind.
The parallel progress of outer and inner effects is beautifully executed;
and behind the individual we become aware of the dark tragedy of his race.
But with so luxuriant a fancy, O’Neill has never been content to construct
a dream-world of his own, out of despair of the real one. He has never
abandoned the search for his dreams in actual life, and as a consequence in
his later plays his visions of beauty are forever being distorted by the
lurid light of disillusion. Thus he has seldom written pure romance. _Marco
Millions_ becomes heavy satire; and _The Fountain_ leaves a bitter taste.
For the most part he seeks to deal realistically with contemporary life. To
see men as mere parts of a mechanistic and soulless universe, and at the
same time to long passionately for the beautiful visions of imagination, is
to find those visions a torture unless they can in some way be reconciled
with reality. Lesser writers have often been diverted into a seeming
reconciliation of them by becoming ardent propagandists; by adopting
programmes of reform, and writing problem or thesis plays. But while
O’Neill shows the romantic’s characteristic hatred of tradition and
restraint, he is not content to do less than face the fundamental problem.
And if he hates “puritanism” and sympathises with its victim, he by no
means blindly admires the libertine. Indeed, he seems to find no man whom
he can whole-heartedly admire; he can exalt no character or cause, and thus
does not gain the elevation of heroic tragedy. He finds life a muddle; he
leaves it a muddle. Too often, indeed, the muddlement gets into the
construction as well as the themes of his plays. _Desire Under the Elms_,
one of the most nearly tragic of his plays, starts as a study of greed,
with old Cabot as the central character. Cabot, in fact, has heroic
qualities, for he is a man of will. But half way through, the play turns
off into the more alluring theme of sexual lust; old Cabot is thrust into
the background; and the ending is, surprisingly, the traditional one of
crime and retribution. The play lacks artistic unity; it falls in two. The
lack of unity is felt, again, in _Anna Christie_, which in spite of the
author’s expressed intention has for the audience simply a conventional
happy ending. It is strikingly manifest in _Strange Interlude_. The central
character of this alone knits together the various situations and themes of
the nine acts. Of the situations three or four distinct plays might have
been built. Of the themes there are at least eight; and it is impossible to
say which the author considered central. Much, for example, is said about
“happiness” as the end of life. Again, the doubtful value of self-sacrifice
is illustrated. From Darrell’s point of view, love, that blind biological
urge, seems to be a modern variety of Fate. More than once Nina expresses
the notion that God is a woman. The most powerful scene of the play is
where Nina exults over her “three men”: are we to look for possessiveness
in love as a theme? Or a woman’s need of several sorts of love? Or is the
play a study in relativity with reference to insanity? Certainly the
character with the insane inheritance is actually the most normal person.
Or perhaps we have a study in the results of meddling with other people’s
lives. The popular success of this play is hardly an indication of
unification. That success seems to be attained in spite of lack of unity,
and to rest chiefly on the novelty of the nine acts and of the technic of
spoken thought, on the frank treatment of sex, and on the great power of
characterisation and of separate situations. Here is a writer with a genius
for the theatre, a powerful imagination, and great emotional force, who
except in shorter studies of melodramatic horror seems unable to canalise
his energies into rounded and unified works of art. He suffers the conflict
he symbolises in “Dion Anthony,” between his inborn longing for goodness
and beauty, and an acquired frustration, cynicism, and despair. Often the
despair conquers; but we must honour him for the fact that, having no
faith, he persists in seeking one. Unlike lesser writers he is no
compromiser with truth as he sees it; but in one play at least he has
persuaded himself into a positive affirmation. The play is _Lazarus
Laughed_. The symbolist technic of this play forces attention upon the
underlying theme. Only Lazarus is unmasked, and he is thus shown freed from
the illusions of mortality. The rhythmical repetitions and symmetrical
groups of the choruses materialise ethical sympathies and antagonisms. And
the theme is stated repeatedly: there is no death. But when we try to
understand this affirmation we are repeatedly baffled. It cannot be the
Christian belief in personal immortality. The resurrection of Lazarus would
give ground for such a view were it not obvious that the author has taken
over a Christian legend merely as starting point for his non-Christian
allegory. Not only is Christian immortality not preached, but Christian
morality is not expounded. The hero displays not humility but arrogance.
For him men are not evil until redeemed by the grace of God; they are
innately good but perverted by fear. He thus incites them not to love one
another because children of a loving God, but to live passionately and
instinctively. To be freed from the fear of death means for those who come
under his spell not to live on earth after the Golden Rule, in meekness to
forgive and suffer wrong; but to drown all human interests in a mad delight
in death. And they laugh with exultation at the prospect of annihilation.
The paradox seems essentially irrational. Cries Lazarus: “Once as squirming
specks we crept from the tides of the sea! Once as quivering flecks of
rhythm we beat down the sun. Now we re-enter the sun! Cast aside is our
pitiable pretence, our immortal egohood, the holy lantern behind which
cringed our Fear of the Dark.... We will to die!” In a manner strikingly
similar to that of Jeffers, O’Neill exalts pan-evolutionary nature; having
passed beyond horror at the scientific demonstration of an inhuman
universe, he attempts to pull himself out of humanity into a rapturous
acceptance of Nature. But Jeffers finds no source for laughter in his god
“that laces the suns with planets, the heart of the atom with electrons.”
Whence does O’Neill derive his mirth? He may well have got his inspiration
from Nietzsche. I have summed up Nietzsche’s idea in _The Birth of Tragedy_
as “an intoxicated joy in annihilation and union with nature.”
Significantly it is just following an attack on Christianity that he exalts
the laughing mood. We must fear the “romantic,” he says, because the
romantic tends to end comforted like a Christian. “No! ye should first of
all learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should learn to _laugh_, my young
friends, if ye are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will
perhaps, as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to
the devil--and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of
that Dionysian ogre, called Zarathustra: “‘Lift up your hearts, my
brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your
legs, ye good dancers--and better still if ye stand also on your heads!...
“‘This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--to you, my brethren,
do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated: ye higher men, _learn_,
I pray you--to laugh!’” It needs intoxication--of one Dionysian sort or
another--to find such incitements mirth-provoking. It is necessary to
abandon all reasonable grounds for comfort except the rather chilly one
that we are physically made of stardust, and therefore should rejoice to
dissolve our living complexity back into it. _Lazarus Laughed_ indeed
arouses a fair measure of the necessary intoxication, so imaginative and
emotional is it. But its comfort can last, I fear, only while we actually
hear the laughter of Lazarus. V Thus our most gifted American dramatist,
together with other finer spirits of to-day, is unable to accept
traditional modes or satisfy the desire for admiration and worship.
Romanticism, in identifying man with nature, hastened the decay of a heroic
tradition which it at first attempted to foster; and under scientific
naturalism the decay ended in dissolution. Whether the author uses a
so-called “naturalistic” technique after Ibsen or Maupassant; or whether,
like Wedekind or Jeffers or Cabell, he seeks other modes of expression, so
long as he thinks of man as in no way superior to the outer world or
different from it, he is none the less subject to the naturalistic point of
view.[41] Recently, to be sure, certain developments of science have given
rise to hopes of mysticism within a naturalistic monism. The argument, so
far as an unscientific reader understands it, seems to run thus: Einstein
has offered proof that time and space form a continuum and that events are
“relative.” Studies of the atom have upset orthodox conceptions of physics,
and physicists themselves are beginning to talk about matter in terms that
sound for all the world like Bishop Berkeley. Science admits a mysterious
enveloping Unknown. The new hypotheses, of course, merely re-enforce the
acknowledgment of ultimate mystery which thoughtful people have always
made. The novelty of the new mysticism is that it builds not on theology or
metaphysics but mathematics and laboratory experiment. The next step in its
argument is the dubious one. If science grants an enveloping Unknown, the
man who would explain that Unknown in terms of his desires is as likely to
be right as one who explains it in inhuman terms. And if there is a chance
that one’s desires may be true, it needs no psychologist to assure us that
plenty of people will immediately assume that they are true. For them
science seems to justify mysticism and open the door for the hosts of
dreams, so long shut out of a rationalistic universe. But the weakness of
such wishful thinking seems obvious; and to the humanist the whole argument
is beside the point because it would vindicate human values by naturalistic
data. If some scientists are nowadays growing mystical, it is not therefore
logical to deny the facts that their controlled experiments have
demonstrated. The dilemma of modern tragedy remains very real. There is no
refuge in obscurantism through return to illusions which science has
shattered. Reason denies the objective reality of our dreams; and so long
as the honest man accepts a monism which identifies man with nature, he can
find no justification for tragic exaltation. The humanist, however, denies
the necessity for this identification. Without in the slightest degree
disparaging the truth or worth of physical knowledge he maintains that the
realm of value has significant validity when taken as distinct from the
realm of fact. The realm of value belongs to man; that of fact, to outer
nature. One depends on the other, but the two are different. Value depends
on the operation of physical laws, but it remains value. The fallacy of the
naturalist has been the assumption that to explain the cause of a thing is
to explain away its value. Human emotions may be caused on the naturalistic
plane by the secretion of endocrine glands or what not; on the human plane
they remain what they were to Homer or Shakespeare. It is interesting to
know about chromosomes and Mendelian laws, about biochemistry and vital
machinery; but human values remain the same. Whatever the findings of
science, man humanly speaking is still what he always was: comic, pitiful,
despicable--now and then sublime. The humanist is concerned with the realm
of values, and thus is concerned with ethical laws. The lives of all men
progress under these laws; and the endeavours of great men have been to
discover and formulate them. To the humanist it seems evident that literary
art, dealing as it does with human actions, must deal with ethical laws,
which are the foundation of conduct. And it would seem obvious folly to
attempt to divorce literature from them. Romantic art as recreation is a
blessing to jaded mortals; and naturalistic art at its best is, within its
limits, penetrating. But to the humanist it seems that both types of art
have failed in dealing with ethical laws. The romantic is always an
extremist, demanding perfection, or denying the existence of goodness. The
naturalist has become so absorbed in the mechanism of the instrument that
he has become deaf to its music. The humanist desires emotional
satisfaction; he desires to face the truth. But he also wishes to preserve
a normal humanity in which human values are central. Though hearing the
revelations of science, he keeps his ear attuned to the music of humanity.
Though enjoying the thrills of liberated feeling, he is unwilling to
purchase them at the expense of moderation or proportion. He believes not
in prohibition but in temperance. Ethical laws are what make man human, and
it is these that the artist must ponder. And to find guidance he cannot do
better than follow Arnold’s advice--not less sound for being tiresomely
familiar--to know the best that has been thought and said in the world. He
must break with the contemporary tradition of romantic scorn for tradition;
he must seek to become a part of the great tradition, by knowing the best.
To become a part of it does not mean to attempt mere imitation; it means
that the artist will be forevermore dissatisfied with pettiness or
insincerity in himself, and will have a lofty but possible standard by
which to measure his work. Those who work in the “modern temper” are unable
to discover a worthy heroism to exalt. But if one turns to the records of
classic art, he will find a nobility of spirit no less admirable to-day
than in the past. His response will be an evidence of the existence of
heroism, a proof of its reality in human nature. It will be a proof of its
reality, of course, not in perfection but in aspiration. And if one looks
about him he will find the same aspiration in living men and women. He will
find it even expressed in deeds--imperfectly, humanly. If he should be
artist enough to give adequate expression to what he feels and sees, he
could rise above the dilemma against which naturalism has forced our modern
literature. Cynicism will, to be sure, urge that every man finds what he
looks for, and to look for greatness will lead to a denial of evident
imperfections. The humanist professes himself not unaware of the latter.
Long before naturalist novelists pictured the _bête humaine_, Christianity
declared man innately evil; but unlike naturalism, Christianity believed
man capable of redemption by Grace. The humanist as such is not concerned
with theology, and is content to believe that Grace, however it comes, is
sometimes found. He is inclined to doubt that it comes only to those who
have joined a church; he is inclined to believe that nobility is found now
and again in all sorts and conditions of men. But the main thing is that it
exists; and no artist who does not see the good with the evil sees life
steadily and whole. To follow the narrow path between cynicism and romantic
idealisation; to recognise the imperfections in man and the inevitable
domination of physical force over the individual, and yet to preserve
admiration for the indomitable spirit which drives the individual to will
and to do nobly; and finally to find adequate means of artistic
expression--that is the task of one who would write great tragedy. Though
hard, it is still possible. Only when the artist follows lofty standards
can he hope to control and guide his own efforts toward sublimity. While
humanism offers him no magic key to success, it offers him hope, and a
discipline. FOOTNOTES [37] I have considered the tragic emotions more fully
in an article, “Melodrama and Tragedy,” _Publications of the Modern
Language Association_, September, 1928. [38] Since this paper was written
my attention has been called to “Humanism and Tragedy,” an admirable
article by Mr. F. McEachran (_Nineteenth Century and After_, July, 1929).
Based on Professor Babbitt’s three levels of human conduct, naturalistic,
human, and religious, Mr. McEachran’s thesis is that tragedy, since it
demands an assumption of human dignity, cannot develop in a naturalistic
age like the present, and is difficult in a religious one. The age of
Pericles, of Elizabeth, and of Louis XIV were humanistic; they were
followed by naturalistic decadence in which man and nature were equated and
tragedy became impossible. Mr. McEachran’s “human dignity” and my “heroism”
seem equivalent. [39] It is to be noted, as further illustration of the
anti-heroic tendency of modern thought, that critics have sought to explain
Hamlet as not a hero but a psychopath. What Shakespeare wished his audience
to feel, however, seems open to no doubt. [40] From _Roan Stallion, Tamar,
and Other Poems_, Boni & Liveright, 1925. [41] Should I remind the reader
that in thus generalising I admit exceptions? One such, whom I have
discussed elsewhere (_Sewanee Review_, April, 1929) is, in my opinion,
Joseph Conrad. _An American Tragedy_ ROBERT SHAFER I Mr. Theodore Dreiser’s
critical friends have always been ready to admit his deficiencies as a
literary artist, and these deficiencies are really extraordinary.
Nevertheless, by universal consent Mr. Dreiser stands at the head of the
realistic movement in American fiction, not merely because he is its
pioneer, and has endured obloquy and even persecution for the Cause, but
primarily on account of his seriousness and singleness of purpose, his
depth of keen feeling, and his earnest reflectiveness. His work also
anticipates in important respects the efforts of the post-realists and
super-realists, so-called, and altogether has a present salience which
insistently demands consideration. The work, however, cannot be
assessed--cannot indeed be understood--apart from the man; and fortunately
Mr. Dreiser has written much about himself.[42] He was born in 1871 in
Terre Haute, Indiana, of German Catholic parents who struggled vainly
against poverty. In the schools of another Indiana town he received the
elements of an education, but apparently learned little of value to him
beyond reading and writing. In boyhood and youth, in school or out, he
became acquainted with a number of the better-known writers, chiefly of
fiction, of the nineteenth century, but without gaining from them more than
momentary entertainment. He has said that as a boy he “had no slightest
opportunity to get a correct or even partially correct estimate of what
might be called the mental A B abs of life.” [sic] If the truth is to be
told, one reason for this lay clearly within himself. For he was, as his
records show him, a stupid boy and young man, lapped in vague reverie and
hazy dreams of enjoyment, and roused slowly to puzzled observation and
thought. “No common man am I,” he used to tell himself when he was scarcely
out of his ’teens, with no evident reason save that with adolescence came
an intense craving for freedom from the shackles of common life--freedom to
indulge fully his temperamental longing for sensuous and materialised
delight. This self-conceit helped to prevent him from learning what could
have been learned during his boyhood, and, as he grew older, aroused in him
bitter resentment against the limitations of his early environment. Those
limitations, at the same time, were extreme. The Dreiser household was one
combining almost unrelieved ignorance with perfect tastelessness, presided
over by a father whose consuming interest was a Catholicism degraded into
mere ceremonies and prohibitions. Mr. Dreiser explicitly denotes the
quality of the purifying influence dominant in the home and community of
his youth: “One should read only good books ... from which any reference to
sex had been eliminated, and what followed ... was that all intelligent
interpretation of character and human nature was immediately discounted. A
picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful.... The dance in our
home and our town was taboo. The theatre was an institution which led to
crime, the saloon a centre of low, even bestial vices.... It was considered
good business, if you please, to be connected with some religious
organisation.... We were taught persistently to shun most human experiences
as either dangerous or degrading or destructive. The less you knew about
life the better; the more you knew about the fictional heaven and hell
ditto.... In my day there were apparently no really bad men who were not
known as such to all the world, ... and few if any good men who were not
sufficiently rewarded by the glorious fruits of their good deeds here and
now!... Positively, and I stake my solemn word on this, until I was between
seventeen and eighteen I had scarcely begun to suspect any other human
being of harbouring the erratic and sinful thoughts which occasionally
flashed through my own mind.” By the time Mr. Dreiser had fairly formed the
suspicion that, despite appearances, other people might not be much better
than himself, his family had begun to break up, following the death of his
mother, and he himself had been thrust into the world--or rather into
Chicago, where the Dreisers by now lived--to earn his way. He did manage to
spend one year at Indiana University, to the great improvement of his
health, but with no positive intellectual benefit, so that he refused to
waste a second year, which he might have had there. He confesses this, it
should be said, in no boastful spirit. He was in fact made to realise at
Bloomington that there were elements of knowledge which it would be useful
to him to acquire--but he found the effort hopeless. His mind could not be
constrained, and, besides, the deficiencies of his earlier schooling stood
in his way. Hence he returned to Chicago, to become a collector for an
easy-payment furniture shop. It was at this time that his
feelings--scarcely yet his imagination or his reason--were awakened by the
spectacle of “America on the make.” He found that spectacle intensely
vital. At the same time, too, he was doing the first reading that really
came home to him:--he was reading a daily column of Eugene Field’s in a
Chicago newspaper. It gave him the notion of doing something like that
himself, and sent him hunting for a post on a news-sheet. This he finally
obtained, and at the reporter’s desk achieved his real education, one not
beyond his grasp. His first instructor promptly informed him that “life was
a God-damned stinking, treacherous game, and that nine hundred and
ninety-nine men out of every thousand were bastards.” The truth of this
generalisation Mr. Dreiser proceeded to establish for himself, by
observation of those of life’s realities which constitute news, and by
intercourse with fellow-journalists. He discovered that practically all
men, high or low, were lying hypocrites, outwardly professing a fine
morality, but privately violating this without hesitation whenever it would
serve their turn in the pursuit of gain or in the satisfaction of lust.
This was the reality, at any rate, which the young reporter saw, and which,
as he says, broadened considerably his viewpoint, finally liberating him
“from moralistic and religionistic qualms.” So liberated was he, indeed,
that he came to judge men “thoroughly sound intellectually” in proportion
as he found them “quite free from the narrow, cramping conventions of their
day.” So liberated was he that he came to see the “religionist” for what he
was: “a swallower of romance or a masquerader looking to profit and
preferment.” He came also to see behind “the blatherings of thin-minded,
thin-blooded, thin-experienced religionists” only “a brainless theory.” Nor
was this the limit of his discoveries. He came further to see that life was
not simply a ruthless struggle for material advantages, because, howsoever
ruthless and intelligent one’s struggle, still, one might be defrauded by
sheer accident. Chance seemed, at times, the final ruler of all
things--many of the reporter’s assignments combining “to prove that life is
haphazard and casual and cruel; to some lavish, to others niggardly.” Mr.
Dreiser, it is fair to say, was the more ready to learn these lessons of
experience because, as he plainly tells his readers, he himself was lustful
and passionately eager for the material satisfactions of life. He longed to
join in the antics of the rich, who alone, as he judged, were bathed in
happiness. He felt, as he gazed enviously upon the gilded sons and
daughters of earth, that, from no fault of his, life was tragically
cheating him. And this sense of grievance, feeding upon itself, passed
easily through a sentimental phase into bitterness, as his reminiscences
show: “Whenever I returned to any place in which I had once lived and found
things changed, as they always were, I was fairly transfixed by the
oppressive sense of the evanescence of everything; a mood so hurtful and
dark and yet with so rich if sullen a lustre that I was left wordless with
pain. I was all but crucified at realising how unimportant I was, how
nothing stayed but all changed.... Life was so brief, ... and so soon,
whatever its miserable amount or character, it would be gone.... But I,
poor waif, with no definite or arresting skill of any kind, not even that
of commerce, must go fumbling about looking in upon life from the outside,
as it were. Beautiful women, or so I argued, were drawn to any but me.... I
should never have a fraction of the means to do as I wished or to share in
the life that I most craved. I was an Ishmael.” Not always, of course, was
Mr. Dreiser sunk in a bitterness induced by self-pity and sentimental
regret. Often in moments of successful work or of flattering companionship
he was quickly lifted up into a mood of expansive self-satisfaction,
equally unbalanced. Then he would say to himself: “I must be an exceptional
man.... Life itself was not so bad; it was just higgledy-piggledy,
catch-as-catch-can, that was all. If one were clever, like myself, it was
all right.” It was indeed magnificent, so long as the slave of temperament
could dream of his heroic future as something assured. But dreams, like
life, were unstable, and the fever for self-advancement, becoming
intolerable from its intensity, would transmute itself--not every time into
frank self-pity--but sometimes into tearful “sympathy for the woes of
others, life in all its helpless degradation and poverty, the unsatisfied
dreams of people.” And from the downtrodden for whom he wept he also drew a
lesson. The hideous inequalities both of fortune and of capacity which he
saw, proved to him that democracy, like morality, was a sham, a hollow
convention, irrelevant, indeed opposed, to the facts of life and practice.
Mr. Dreiser’s journalistic career took him from Chicago to St. Louis, and
thence, with several stops on the way, to Pittsburgh, during a period of
rather more than three years. In these years, he says, speaking of his
“blood-moods or so-called spiritual aspirations,” he was “what might be
called a poetic melancholiac, crossed with a vivid materialistic lust of
life.” His body, he adds, “was blazing with sex, as well as with a desire
for material and social supremacy.” It is not surprising, consequently,
that he found himself able to entertain carnal desires for several women at
the same time--though this at first surprised him, and troubled him also,
until his day of liberation from “moralistic qualms.” It is not surprising
either that he presently was captivated by a charming country girl, several
years older than himself, who had no single idea and only one desire in
common with him. He had welcomed his liberation from “moralistic and
religionistic qualms” the more complacently because of the simplification
of thought and conduct to which it pointed. From this time the conduct of
life was to be straightforward as well as simple, in accordance with the
brutish yet vital law of following your dominant impulse regardlessly,
ruthlessly, slavishly. But now this liberation itself was mainly
instrumental in plunging him into a new, long-continued, and grievous
difficulty. For his simple country maiden, though she was drawn to him as
he was drawn to her, was nevertheless rigidly conventional, immovably
“moralistic,” one of the predestined pillars of an ordered society and a
stable family. She steadfastly refused to yield him her body without
marriage, and he, alas, was not only unable to support her but deeply
unwilling to marry her even if he could. Clearly this pair did not
understand all that divided them in spirit, but, still, Mr. Dreiser knew
from the first some portion of the truth. For he knew what love really was:
it was a mere “blood-mood”; it was a vivid lust crossed with poetic fires;
it was irresistible, of course, but it was like everything else, transient,
shifting, evanescent. He already suspected, as he later concluded, that
monogamy--marriage indeed of any kind--was a debasing institution which not
only killed the love that brought men to it, but also deformed and dwarfed
their personalities. It might not harm stupid and lethargic men, but the
man of individuality, at least, the highest type of citizen, required utter
freedom to follow his vital impulses--required the joys of the sexual act
“without any of the hindrances or binding chains of convention.” He knew,
in fine, that “the tug of his immense physical desire for his beloved”
might easily have been satisfied, despite his poverty, without compromising
the future, and without doing a hurt to society, had there only been “any
such thing as sanity in life,” outside of himself. He even knew, after the
first raptures of idyllic feeling had passed, that any other beautiful
woman would have served his need as well; but, nevertheless, he clung to
this one, because in fact no beautiful woman whom he found accessible did
keep alive in him the same fever of desire. Yet his beloved remained
immovable, and so drew him on, through several years of miserably divided
feeling, into a marriage finally accomplished after his carnal fires had
cooled, owing to the passage of time and the casual ministrations of
certain other fair creatures, more pliant, but unsatisfying. I dwell upon
this painful episode, following Mr. Dreiser’s own example, because it tells
so much. It was the crucial event of his early life, and it left an
ineffaceable scar. The fact is, indeed, that without definite knowledge of
this miserable union, it would not be easy to understand how Mr. Dreiser
became so obstinately fixed in those notions of life which journalism and
its associations gave him and which he was eager to accept. Without
definite knowledge of this marriage, further, it would be impossible fully
to understand his novels; for none of them could have been written quite as
it stands save in the light of this afflictive experience of his, and
several, it is extremely likely, could not otherwise have been written at
all.[43] Some knowledge of another side of Mr. Dreiser’s life, however,
during his years of work for the news-sheets, is also necessary for those
who would understand his novels. He has told us that in St. Louis the great
literary idol of his associates was Zola, and after Zola, Balzac. These
novelists, and especially the former, were constantly held up to him as
models by one of his assignment-editors, who made it abundantly clear what
Zola stood for. Mr. Dreiser read none of the Frenchman’s books at this
time, but he did read an unpublished novel by two St. Louis newspaper men
which made a deep and lasting impression upon him and which, as he later
discovered, was wholly inspired by Zola and Balzac. This was “the opening
wedge for him into the realm of realism,” and, too, “it fixed his mind
definitely on this matter of writing,” firing him with a desire to create
something of the sort himself. He thought the novel “intensely beautiful,”
“with its frank pictures of raw, greedy, sensual human nature, and its open
pictures of self-indulgence and vice.” In these indirect ways, evidently,
Zola exerted upon the young reporter an influence real and significant. It
was, indeed, probably much more important than the direct influence exerted
by Balzac not long thereafter; though the accident which brought Mr.
Dreiser to a fevered and ecstatic reading of many of Balzac’s novels, while
he was in Pittsburgh, marked what was for him “a literary revolution.” The
crowning stage of Mr. Dreiser’s education, however, was now to come, while
he was still in Pittsburgh, with his discovery of certain of the writings
of Huxley, Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer. Huxley, Mr. Dreiser credits with
finally dispelling the “lingering filaments” of Christianity still trailing
about him; and Huxley’s work of dispersion was completed by Spencer’s
_First Principles_. This book wholly “threw him down in his conceptions or
non-conceptions of life” by its “questioning or dissolving into other and
less understandable things” all that he had deemed substantial. “Up to this
time,” he says, “there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to get
on and the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place
was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that there
was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one had to, and
that it was of no importance. Of one’s ideals, struggles, deprivations,
sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic
compulsions.... Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly
and carelessly driven one at that.” The seeming ill logic of some of these
remarks--the sudden concern over spiritual things felt by one who had
hitherto devoted himself whole-heartedly to the world by sensuous
appearances--is not unimportant. Clearly Spencer’s book left an abiding
mark on Mr. Dreiser because it represented in a general way the abstract
conclusion towards which his own observations had been pointing. Without
knowing it, and without any attempt to set his intellectual house in order,
he had himself been drifting towards a mechanistic naturalism. Spencer made
him aware of this, and if, as he thought, that awareness left him crushed
and hopeless, it at least seemed to clear his mind of rubbish, and to give
his view-point self-consistency and finality. Nevertheless, he did not come
forth a Spencerian; and, indeed, his debt to the _Synthetic Philosophy_ may
easily be exaggerated--the more easily because it really is important. Mr.
Dreiser emphasises the fact that his reading of the _First Principles_ was
followed by an emotional revulsion--a revulsion which the Synthetic
Philosopher can scarcely alone have caused. And in truth just at the time
when he stumbled upon Spencer his feelings were strained to the
breaking-point. He had just returned from a last desperate, yet
unsuccessful, effort to seduce his country maiden, which left him crushed,
not only by that defeat itself, but by the consciousness that the
gratification he was bound to secure was now driving him towards a marriage
for which he had no capacity, no desire, and no prospect of sufficient
means. Moreover, immediately after his Western visit he had gone, for the
first time, to New York, where he had received an extraordinarily vivid
impression of all the glories and delights of that worldly success, with
its attendant wealth, which he so intensely craved. The sight had fired him
to renew his efforts after so grand a reward, but, at the same time, had
made him gloomily feel his distance from it, lodging in his mind a stubborn
doubt if it could, after all, ever be attained by him. The combined weight
of these experiences had intensified his already bitter sense of the
world’s indifference to his desires and aims, of the world’s unconscious
cruelty, and of its brutal injustice. He had eagerly embraced the world at
his earliest opportunity, had reviled those who opposed themselves to
it--and what was the world doing for him, what was it not blindly and
carelessly doing against him? He was brought to the point of sheer despair,
and was ready to turn upon the world--yet not ready to turn his back upon
it. For he had not the slightest conception of any other than sensuous and
worldly values, of any other than material gratifications which might bring
to him fulness of life. Years ago he had defiantly closed _that_ door,
without in the least knowing what he was doing, and it was never to be
opened to him. He was miserably exasperated by defeat, but the world’s
appeal was still insistent and compelling, and would be heard and obeyed
for many a year, whether or not it became suspect for a siren’s call. In
these circumstances the _First Principles_ came really as a god-send. The
book had the impressive appearance of being the voice of science itself
uttering at last the Truth. Yet its weight and authority left undisturbed
Mr. Dreiser’s worldliness and some of his dear prejudices. It left, indeed,
everything as it was with him; but it did appear to rob everything of
value, and so, as he thought, left him crushed and hopeless. Actually,
however, it offered him a species of consolation for the crushed and
hopeless state into which he had already been plunged by his efforts after
a “realistic” way of life. A species of consolation;--because, though the
dehumanised conception of the world and life presented by naturalism was
“cold comfort,” still, it did enable one who felt badly used to turn upon
the universe and _say_, if not feel, that life was a meaningless and
unimportant phenomenon anyhow. The _Synthetic Philosophy_, Mr. Dreiser
tells the world, “eternally verified” his “gravest fears as to the
unsolvable disorder and brutality of life.” Precisely; as these turns of
phrase show, it left his feelings what they had been, likewise his desires
and aims, and his sentimental humanitarianism and more. What Spencer gave
him was something to fall back upon and _say_ in hopeless or disillusioned
moments, but something which, leaving him otherwise where he was, even
helped to preserve him inviolate from self-criticism or self-discipline.
Following the guidance of temperament and mood, he took from Spencer what
he wanted, and nothing else; and it so happened that this included little
or nothing specifically characteristic of Spencer as against various other
naturalistic thinkers. The tone, indeed, of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism, as
well as its emphasis upon accident and chaotic disorder, is not only more
sophisticated than that of Spencer’s, but abruptly contradictory of the
Synthetic gentleman’s grandiose fancy of one eternal, universal law
infallibly working to bring about perfection in all things earthly. His
dark emotional naturalism--and, it may be added, several of the
contradictions it has involved him in--bring Mr. Dreiser, as some of his
readers have perceived, close to Thomas Hardy, in proportion as he is far
from Spencer. He does not mention Hardy in the record of his development
which I have been following, but he is said to have confessed to “an
enchanted discovery” of that novelist in 1896, and his delight is what was
to be expected. As far as one can see, however, his indebtedness to Hardy,
though real, is not important. II This, in summary form, is the story of
Mr. Dreiser’s preparation for a novelist’s career. His first novel was
published in 1900, and his sixth in 1925. Though from an early time he has
had warm friends amongst the critics, still, even the most devoted of these
have harshly condemned some of his books; and, in general, critical
opinion, when not predominantly hostile, has been sharply divided.
Nevertheless, in the face of whatever difficulties, Mr. Dreiser has slowly
won a leading position in the world of fiction, for reasons which I began
by mentioning. And his sixth novel, _An American Tragedy_, was, upon its
appearance, widely proclaimed a masterpiece. Certainly, moreover, _An
American Tragedy_ is by all odds the best of Mr. Dreiser’s novels, though
perhaps not the most _interesting_. In it his language is still faulty, as
in his earlier books; the quality of his style is mediocre, when not worse;
his narrative is badly proportioned;--but, nevertheless, the novel also has
excellences which its author had not previously achieved, and which are
seldom to be found save in works of a serious and mature artistry. It has a
sombre inevitableness, a self-contained adequacy, a restraint, dignity, and
detachment which bespeak not merely the experienced craftsman, but also the
workman’s sure grasp of his theme united with a deeply emotional confidence
in its truth and importance. A far higher intelligence is exhibited in its
execution than in Mr. Dreiser’s play, _The Hand of the Potter_ (1918),
whose theme is similar in several respects. If one should name a single
change indicative of the intelligent masterliness of _An American Tragedy_,
perhaps the most significant is the fact that in this book, for the first
time, Mr. Dreiser has permitted his characters and events to speak entirely
for themselves. But though _An American Tragedy_ marks a really notable
advance in technique, and a heightened plausibility thus attained, partly
through restraint, still, it exhibits Mr. Dreiser’s thought and the
essential quality of his realism entirely unchanged. How Mr. Dreiser
reached a mechanistic naturalism has above been shown, and how he became
conscious of the fact. The appropriate result was that all his novels
became tales of human irresponsibility, constructed to illustrate life’s
contradiction of the hollow conventions of society, and life’s obedience to
blind laws which make the individual’s experience a chaos with an end
unrelated to desert. This is the theme of _An American Tragedy_, as of the
earlier novels. It is a tale of human irresponsibility, supported by
youthful prejudices never relinquished, built up on false antitheses, and
capped by a merely circumstantial realism calculated to give the narrative
a deceptive air of importance. Youthful prejudice, for example,
transparently dictates the important part played by religion in this novel.
Religion is represented as an illusion capable of deceiving only those
blind to life’s realities--the hopelessly incompetent and unintelligent,
those whose advocacy would itself discredit any doctrine. Religion’s
illusory nature is said to be self-evident, indeed, since it has much to
say of Providence, yet manifestly bestows on the convert no worldly
rewards, in satisfaction of the real needs and desires with which he is
endowed, not by his own design or wish. Convention, too, is represented as
a force which sways only the stupid and lethargic, which makes no demands
entitling it to respect, and which the intelligent disregard deliberately,
the temperamental wilfully. Intelligence itself is pictured as merely an
instrument useful for devising methods of self-advancement;--in other
words, as the servant of inborn temperament. And temperament is the one
irresistible, compelling force in life, to which all else is ultimately
obedient. Hence no one is really responsible for anything;--save, perhaps,
the novelist who sees this important truth, at length, and by careful
selection of appropriate matter is able to picture it for us. Not even Mr.
Dreiser’s expert care and long practice, however, are sufficient to enable
him to evade a difficulty inherent in the nature of his theme. For the
predicament of Roberta Alden is infinitely sad, and her creator narrates
her history and murder with an exemplary truthfulness which emphasises that
sadness to the full. Nevertheless, the reader’s sympathy is not invoked.
The girl, on the contrary, is presented as the inevitable resultant of
inheritance, environment, and sex, and she lives as an embodied energy
rather than as a person. Extraordinary pains are taken, with all the
multitudinous details of her story, to balance causes against effects, and
she emerges a plausible creature. There is nothing incredible in her being
just conventional enough and unwary enough and love-sick enough to suit the
story’s purpose; but, too, there is nothing in her nature or her history to
render either important. Indeed, her grievous distress, leading up to her
murder, takes on, under Mr. Dreiser’s hand, the same significance as the
squirming of an angleworm, impaled by some mischievous boy--no less, but
certainly no more. “Chemic compulsion” draws Roberta Alden as it draws
other substances. “Chemic compulsion” epitomises the book. It “just
happens”--and this is all--that “chemic compulsion” entangles Roberta with
the squid--Clyde Griffiths, the defeated squid. For readers of Mr.
Dreiser’s “epic” tale, _The Financier_, who recall the apologue of the
lobster and the squid cannot fail to recognise Clyde Griffiths as the
embodiment of the latter--and his cousin Gilbert as the patient, triumphant
lobster. The squid, it need scarcely be said, commands no more sympathy
than Roberta;--indeed, most readers inevitably must sympathise with the
spirit of the “irate woodsman’s” brutal question during the trial. This
undefiled son of the forest asked: “Why don’t they kill the God-damned
bastard and be done with him?” But, just for this reason, it has to be
remembered that Mr. Dreiser exhausts every possible means so to account for
Clyde as to preserve him from all blame. The squid is the complete
plaything of “chemic compulsion,” the paragon of irresponsibility, the
perfect exemplar of the truth as the truth has been revealed to his
creator. This being so, it is little less than a miracle that Mr. Dreiser
has contrived--through the infinite detail of a merely circumstantial
realism--to save Clyde Griffiths’ humanity sufficiently to maintain the
reader’s “suspension of disbelief” until the end of the book. Undoubtedly
he has done so, though he has not succeeded in making all readers feel that
patience has been adequately rewarded. They have been impressed, as is
fitting before so monumental a composition; they have been troubled; they
have not been recompensed. Eight hundred and forty pages devoted to the
unconscionable prolongation of a mere sensational newspaper story! Remarks
to this effect I have heard more than once; and they roughly indicate the
real difficulty--the inevitably self-destroying effect of such an effort as
Mr. Dreiser’s, in proportion as it is successful. This difficulty, however,
does not actually lie in the plot of _An American Tragedy_, as the remark
just cited implies. The bare plot of the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus might
equally well form the basis of a mere sensational newspaper story, and
Clytemnestra in that play and in the _Choephori_ makes for herself, not
without seeming justice, the plea that is made for Clyde Griffiths. Not
she, but Destiny, she says, through her its helpless instrument slew
Agamemnon; and she also pleads that she did not make herself, yet can only
act out her inborn nature. But it is not for his plots, nor because he was
well acquainted with Mr. Dreiser’s view of life, that Æschylus lives on
still amongst us. His dramas have a perennial and deep value for mankind
because, rejecting the plausible notion of “chemic compulsion,” he
struggled with profound conviction to convey a very different meaning
through their form, characters, and action. Without evading any of its
difficulty, he asserted his faith that Moral Law uncompromisingly governs
the life of man, making for an order which is divine, in the face of a
chaos intrinsically evil, and that men are fully, if tragically,
responsible for the consequences of their acts, whatever their motives or
compulsions, so that ignorance and self-conceit are equally as criminal as
violence. This is not to say all, of course, but it may suffice to show how
Æschylus and, more clear-sightedly, Sophocles cut straight through to the
centre of the human problem and propounded a solution which, if not the
only one, nor by itself a complete one, is still, strictly speaking,
irrefutable, being founded directly upon facts of experience which have not
changed with the passing generations;--an unassailable solution, moreover,
which gives weight and meaning to every individual and to all of his acts.
And hence it is that the bloody and sensational fables of Æschylus and
Sophocles, triumphantly formed in full harmony with their meaning, have an
interest and value for men which time does not exhaust. Mr. Dreiser’s
difficulty is not that he has different facts of experience to
interpret;--he has precisely the same facts concerning an essentially
unchanged human nature. His difficulty is that his mechanistic naturalism
compels him so to select and manipulate facts of experience as to deny,
through his narrative, that human life has any meaning or value. The
attempt is suicidal, and the more consistently it is carried out the more
completely is Mr. Dreiser forced to divest his creatures and their actions
of any distinctively human quality and meaning. The more successful he is
the more insignificant his work becomes. _An American Tragedy_, as I have
said, is more skilfully, faithfully, and consistently executed on the
naturalistic level than any of its author’s earlier novels, and precisely
for this reason it contains no single element of tragedy in any legitimate
sense of the word, and it impresses thoughtful readers as a mere
sensational newspaper story long drawn out. In other words, in proportion
as Mr. Dreiser contrives to accomplish his self-imposed task he has nothing
to tell us except that there is nothing to tell about life until it can be
reduced even below the apparent level of animal existence, to the point
where it becomes a meaningless chaos of blind energies. Whether or not any
real sense of the self-destroying character of this effort, to create a
literature as valueless and insignificant as possible, will ever strike Mr.
Dreiser’s consciousness, I should not venture to guess. But only an
obstinate self-conceit, or an invincible stupidity, one imagines, could
have kept him from seeing the absurdities into which he was forced, in the
course of half-a-dozen sentences, when he recently attempted to draw up a
brief statement of his present belief. He wrote: “I can make no comment on
my work or my life that holds either interest or import for me. Nor can I
imagine any explanation or interpretation of any life, my own included,
that would be either true--or important, if true. Life is to me too much a
welter and play of inscrutable forces to permit, in my case at least, any
significant comment. One may paint for one’s own entertainment, and that of
others--perhaps. As I see him the utterly infinitesimal individual weaves
among the mysteries a floss-like and wholly meaningless course--if course
it be. In short I catch no meaning from all I have seen, and pass quite as
I came, confused and dismayed.”[44] To this point has Mr. Dreiser’s
naturalism driven him. If the general sense of this awkward yet mannered
statement comprised the truth about him and his work, he would, of course,
never have been asked to make it. He would, in all probability, have been
confined long ago to an asylum; and he would certainly never have written
any of his books. Those books, moreover, have manifestly not been written
just for his own entertainment. They have been written because he felt he
had something to say--because of his certainty that he had come to know the
truth, as men in general knew it not. And with singular faithfulness of
purpose and of industry, involving what for him must have been almost
superhuman effort, because of his defects of mind and training, he has
devoted himself to the struggle to express the truth as he conceived
it--that is, to reduce it to consistency and give it coherent form. He has
also neglected nothing, within his limits, to make it impressive. He has
thus lived a rationally purposive life, reducing at least to symptoms of
order the welter of his impressions and impulses, controlling at least
fitfully his rebellious temperament, and mastering (or “sublimating”) at
least partially his almost pathological obsession by sex. For the sake of
self-expression--or, as I shall presently suggest, of
self-justification--he has thus achieved an appreciably disciplined life,
and so has in his own person, against his own literary aim, furnished a
convincing refutation of his philosophy. He has effectively proved that _An
American Tragedy_ gives form to a view of life as gratuitous as it is
unmeaning. Fortunately it is now realised by an increasing number of people
that naturalistic philosophies are merely speculative ventures, which
derive no valid support from “modern science.” And it has, besides, been
shown above how little “science” had to do with the formation of Mr.
Dreiser’s naturalistic prejudice. Mr. Dreiser, on his own showing, was
first awakened to a sense of life as a problem to be solved by his
discovery of the radical contrast between the ethical standards of his
father and his church (as he understood its teaching), and his own
spontaneous impulses and desires. His haphazard, undirected education gave
him an unexcelled opportunity to learn that there were many others like
himself, that they seemed to be the most vigorous members of their
communities, and that they never hesitated to transgress every ethical
standard, when they could get away with it, in their struggle for
self-advancement and self-gratification. He treasured every impression
which seemed to be on his side against ethical standards by which he stood
condemned. His self-esteem had been gravely shocked by the discordance he
had discovered, and he now found the means to restore it and, indeed, to
strengthen it, by appeal from home and church to the larger world. Not he
was in the wrong of it, but the “senseless,” “impossible” theories which
would have convicted him of shameful tendencies. “In shame there is no
comfort, but to be beyond all bounds of shame,” says one of Sidney’s
Arcadians, and this Mr. Dreiser might thenceforth have taken for his motto.
Governed by this apolaustic prejudice, he has since continued his
transparent course of seeing only what he has desired to see, or rather of
admitting the reality of only what has suited him, while setting down all
else as either hypocrisy or delusion. And while it is true that no one
escapes the necessity of bringing only a selective attention to bear upon
the outer world, it by no means follows that we are all alike cut off from
“reality.” On the contrary, it does mean that the basis of our selective
attention, the interests and purposes served by it, are of fundamental
importance. And the disastrous effect of Mr. Dreiser’s apolaustic prejudice
is that it encouraged him in slavery to mere temperament, in helpless
surrender to the chaotic flow of “natural” impulses, while it brought to
his attention from the outer world only what fed itself, the antics of
complicated beasts with strange illusions. The trouble with what he thus
saw is not that it was non-existent, some gross trick of the fevered
imagination;--it was there to be seen--it is there, in grievous plenty. No,
the trouble is that none of it has positive significance. The naturalism
which it fathers lights up the animal in man, but tells man nothing of that
which positively distinguishes him from the beast--more, it vindictively
denies that anything save hypocrisy and delusion does so distinguish him.
And while it seeks to dissolve our humanity, it ends, as it ends in Mr.
Dreiser, in a bottomless morass of misrepresentation and despair. This is
the American tragedy of our confused age which constitutes the real import
of Mr. Dreiser’s masterpiece. Note--For permission to quote from the
writings of Mr. Dreiser, I am indebted both to him and to his publisher,
Mr. Horace Liveright. FOOTNOTES [42] In that which follows I draw chiefly
upon _A Book About Myself_ (1922), but also make use of _A Hoosier Holiday_
(1916), _Twelve Men_ (1919), and _Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub_ (1920). _A Traveler at
Forty_ (1913) is also a revealing book. [43] I refer particularly to
_Jennie Gerhardt_ and _The “Genius.”_ Limitations of space unfortunately
prevent me from considering here any save Mr. Dreiser’s latest novel, _An
American Tragedy_. [44] From the _Bookman_, September, 1928 (Vol. 68, p.
25). _Pandora’s Box in American Fiction_ HARRY HAYDEN CLARK America,
Carlyle wrote Emerson, “is verily the Door of Hope to distracted Europe;
which otherwise I should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness.”
The Door of Hope! It is perhaps time now to ask down what corridors this
door has led, to scrutinise the precise quality of American hope. Is it a
new hope, or a disguised form of the European hope which has led “to
blackness of darkness”? What, for example, have our fiction writers,
reflecting the American mind, past and present, reported regarding the
success of their quest for happiness? If they have reported that certain
sorts of hope have led to despair, what evidence is there that other sorts
lead to joy? For “the desire for happiness,” says Arnold, “is the root and
ground of man’s being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness
wrong, that he seeks for delight where delight will never really be found;
then you illumine and further him.” Let us sketch the quality, first, of
the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty; second, the hope of an American
paradise of nature; and finally, the hope of “A Paradise _within_ thee,
happier far.” I If we consider the European background of the hope to
escape to a paradise of supernal beauty and bliss, we find that in the
classical legends of the Golden Age, in such Renaissance writers as Lyly,
Sidney, and Spenser, and in such later work as Thomson’s _Castle of
Indolence_, this idyllic Arcadianism was either frankly recreational and
non-philosophic or else a cloak for allegory. Not until the middle of the
eighteenth century was the idyllic dream taken seriously. Revolting from
earlier and contemporary restriction of the imagination, Akenside advocated
refusing to “restrain” one’s “soaring fancy,” Joseph Warton glorified the
“creative and glowing imagination,” and Edward Young sought to escape “this
pestilential earth” by the “creative power” of the imagination to call
forth paradisiacal beauties, “shadowy beings and unknown worlds,” in the
“vast void beyond real existence.” He exalted a genius which was to “wander
wild” in “the fairy land of fancy,” “reign arbitrarily over its own empire
of chimeras,” and “sport with its infinite objects uncontrolled.” Thus in
_Vathek_ Beckford created a sensuous and erotic paradise with its five
palaces which he destined “for the particular gratification of each of the
five senses.” “The light that never was, on sea or land,” enthralled the
youthful Wordsworth, but he soon questioned it as a “fond illusion.” Keats
sought to escape on “the viewless wings of Poesy” from the “weariness” of
actuality to the “charmed magic casements.” Shelley, the high priest of
this ceaseless and aimless quest for the unattainable, tells us that only
his “fearful and monstrous” story of _The Cenci_ is “a sad reality”;
otherwise he “dreams of what ought to be, or what may be.” For him the
Spirit of Beauty leaves “This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate.”
His is a longing indeterminate, a “devotion to something afar From the
sphere of our sorrow.” “I loved I know not what--but this low sphere, And
all that it contains, contains not thee.” _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_ are
matchless records of his fruitless quest for the phantom of desire.
DeQuincey’s fantasies are “filled with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of
forgotten deliriums.” _The Lady of Shalott_ and _The Palace of Art_ testify
to Tennyson’s reluctant renunciation of the life of illusion. Swinburne
characterised himself in _A Nympholept_, while his friend, the author of
_The Earthly Paradise_, strove to “build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost
the beating of the steely sea.” With this background in mind, let us see to
what extent the American story-tellers’ hope for a paradise of supernal
beauty coincides with the idyllic, indeterminate hope of the English
romanticists. In _The Author’s Account of Himself_, Irving, our first
master of the short story, states his Old World longing “to escape, in
short, from the common-place realities of the present,” to “the shadowy
grandeurs of the past,” the “earthly paradise” of “Bellissima Granada” and
the legend-haunted Alhambra. _The Legend of Prince Ahmed al Kamel_, dealing
with the quest for the phantom of desire, illustrates the idyllic quality
of his imagination. The Prince, called the “Perfect” on account of his
“super-excellence,” receives from a dove tidings of a fair princess--“no
flower of the field could compare with her for loveliness.” In the Spanish
spring-time the Prince, a “pilgrim of love,” resolves to “seek this unknown
princess throughout the world.” Guided by a parrot and an owl, he
eventually finds her in the court of her hostile father. The lover produces
his “silken carpet of the throne of Solomon,” and after confessing his
devotion, “the carpet rose in the air, bearing off the prince and princess
... and then disappeared in the blue vault of heaven.” Irving, however,
sought “escape ... from the common-place” not only in the picturesque
fantasies of Old Spain but also in the glamorous aspects of the American
past, as illustrated in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. In “a remote period
of American history,” among “some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty
Hudson,” Ichabod rides on a “fine autumnal day” through the “rich and
golden livery” of a natural paradise to win the “peerless,” “ripe and
melting and rosy-cheeked Katrina” and her “unimaginable luxury.” Introduced
by lines from _The Castle of Indolence_, _The Legend_ illustrates Irving’s
somewhat sentimental and humorous continuation of the merely recreational
Arcadianism of earlier days. And the ruse of the Headless Horseman, in
connection with the “twilight superstitions” of one who was “a perfect
master of Cotton Mather’s _History of New England Witchcraft_,” suggests
the interesting tendency of the native Puritan interest in things
unearthly, with the waning of faith, to become a subject for the æsthetic
imagination as in the case of Hawthorne and Poe. Unlike Irving, Poe takes
the idyllic dream seriously. He defines the Poetic Principle as “simply the
Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” manifested “in an elevating
excitement of the Soul.” Of course, as every one knows, his vigorous reason
controlled the decadent imagination and emotion of the earlier Gothic
school and made him perhaps our greatest master of the short story
technique. But let us illustrate and define the content of his
“aspiration,” his “elevating excitement of the Soul.” Where does he seek
happiness? One thinks of the “delirious bliss” of “the Valley of the
Many-Coloured Grass” in _Eleanora_. We might better, however, turn to _The
Domain of Arnheim_, where Ellison, with “_a fortune of four hundred and
fifty million dollars_,” seeks to satisfy his passion for an exclusively
“physical loveliness,” his “four elementary conditions of bliss,” which are
“free exercise,” “the love of woman,” “contempt of ambition,” and “an
object of unceasing pursuit.” After a four year quest he finds in the
“luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands” “an elevated tableland of
wonderful fertility and beauty”; it was the “Paradise of Arnheim,”
combining everything rich and voluptuous. Ellison, however, sought to
gratify the “one passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty,” “above all
... in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness and love
enveloped his existence in the pure atmosphere of Paradise.” Thus the
content of Poe’s aspiration, as well as his references here to the “chimera
of the perfectionists” “Turgot, Price, Priestley and Condorcet,” to
“Fonthill,” the birthplace of _Vathek_, and to the “rapt day-dreams of De
Staël,” suggest that his aspiration is essentially one with that ceaseless
and aimless sensuous longing already illustrated in the English
romanticists. Or take _The Island of the Fay_, which deals with the
contemplation of “the glory of God” in “natural scenery”--“all within the
Spirit Divine”--in a “rivulet and island,” “all one radiant harem of garden
beauties.” Shelley-like, he sees approach the “enchanted” island a gentle
Fay in a “fragile canoe” with a “phantom of an oar.” This vision of
loveliness, however, passed “disconsolately with her boat into the region
of the ebony flood,” and “darkness fell over all things and I beheld her
magical figure no more.” Thus, as Professor Foerster has so finely said,
Poe gives us only “shuddering harmonies of the murky subconscious, and
roseate harmonies of sensuous longing posing as spirituality.... His vision
oscillated not between the earthly and the supernal, but between the
infernal and the Arcadian.” But what did Poe report regarding the success
of his aspiration for supernal beauty? “To be thoroughly conversant with
Man’s heart,” he concludes, “is to take our final lesson in the
iron-clasped volume of Despair.” Thinking of writing a book on his life, he
said: “No man will ever dare write it. No man could write it, even if he
dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”
Perhaps the most vigorous and passionate Arcadian in American literature is
Herman Melville, mariner and mystic. Descended from Dutch and New England
parents proud and conservative, Melville was driven to “the water world,”
he tells us, by “sad disappointments ... united with a naturally roving
disposition.” He deserted his ship and found in the valley of the Typees
“perpetual hilarity. Surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature,”
the innocent natives enjoy the idyllic bliss “that springs principally from
that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau told us he at one time
experienced: the mere buoyant sense of healthful, physical existence.” This
was before the missionaries and “the worst attendances of civilisation”
drove “all peace and happiness from the valley.” In _Mardi_, frankly
idyllic and nympholeptic, devoted to the savages “as they are not,”
Melville’s nostalgic idealism and his hatred of reality become intensified.
Here he creates a dream-girl, Yillah, “the earthly semblance of that sweet
vision, that haunted my earliest thought,” and the book is a record of the
allegorical quest for her through all the nations of the earth. It follows
Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, with their hope for the infinite
perfectibility of men; it is the quest of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_,
the quest of Novalis for the Blue Flower. “But fiery yearnings their own
phantom-future make, and deem it present. So, if after all these fearful,
fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;--yet, in
bold quest thereof better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar
shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” If Melville
fled, however, “not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all
havens astern”--such as the “Babylonish brick-kiln of New York,”
“Commonness and Conventionalism,” “mines and marts,” and Democracy, “the
harlot on horseback”--his first-hand experience with the reality of a sea
red in tooth and claw as well as “the mystery of iniquity” tended to clash
with his dreams of Utopia. _Moby-Dick_ was born of this clash between the
hope of a paradise of supernal beauty and the sight of a malignant reality
from the deck of a whaler. We have his own commentary on the final results
of nympholeptic longing: “Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye
cannot.... The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all
books is Solomon’s, and the Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau,
poor devils all of sick men.... And your only Mardian happiness is but
exemption from great woes--no more.... Sadness makes the silence throughout
the realms of space; Sadness is universal and eternal.” Let us skip the
realism of the later nineteenth century, most of which is essentially arid,
and approach such a figure as Floyd Dell. Born of autobiographical revery,
_Moon-Calf_ is the history of a “lonely, unhappy, desperately desiring and
bewildered child” in various Middle Western towns as he sought refuge in
dreams from “the mysterious and troublesome real world which he feared and
disliked.” The avenues of escape are two: the “gorgeous fantasies which
were unrolled for him in the pages of books,” and the quest of the
dream-girl. Lured by the hope of “freedom, of happiness, of a world
altogether new and beautiful,” Felix becomes a Socialist, only to find
later that “that garret Utopia had somehow lost its savour.” He becomes a
factory worker--in the chaste language of his boss, “the messiest,
absent-mindedest, God-damn carelessest person he had ever seen around a
factory.” And then he tries newspaper work, and is again discharged. Then
“he wanted, with a kind of nostalgia, to write that novel.” Like Shelley,
he sought refuge from a world to which he refused to adjust himself by
turning “his gaze inward upon a world of ideas and dreams.” As Wheels says,
“The world itself is hideous. You can’t do anything with it. But you can
dream beautiful dreams.... There is no other beauty.” An “incorrigible
Utopian,” a member of the Agnostic Society, Felix escaped to poetry--an
“enchanted land”--loving the “drug-like beauty” of “words, which were like
a perfumed breeze out of nowhere, or out of some strange life lived before,
affecting him with a strange nostalgia.” “Nay, I was sent a wanderer On
Beauty’s desperate quest-- To go forever seeking Her, Nor, ere I find her,
rest.” And then there is the quest for the dream-girl. First there is Rose,
the gardener’s daughter, whom he meets in the attic and to whom he reads
Rousseau’s _Confessions_. One night they stay in the woods, watching the
stars, and “awakened chill and stiff, a little before dawn.” In “the
innermost caves of fantasy” she was the “Virgin Queen” of Atlantis, and he
her Harper.... “She was ... hope that turns to despair.” And then there was
Margaret, Helen Raymond, Daisy Fisher, Emily, Mrs. Miller, Lucy, and
finally Joyce, with whom he spent the nights in the cabin. He explains to
Joyce that he seeks “something better than just ordinary, everyday
happiness,” that he doesn’t believe in private property, God, the home, or
the support of one’s wife. He wants a companionship “at once light and
gracious, irresponsible and sincere, generous and self-respecting!” Finally
he felt “a discrepancy between her and a not very distinct ideal of his
imagination.” He “clung to the memory of his shadow-land of ideas” in
preference to the “world of desperate reality,” and when his beloved Joyce
tells him she is to work out her human destiny with another the “world of
his dreams fell shattering about him.” Obviously, _Moon-Calf_ is the
creation of the sort of hope which robbed Shelley of “peace within.” Let us
turn to Willa Cather, whose main theme is the struggle for æsthetic or
emotional self-realisation amid the sordid environment of either the
frontier or an industrial society. In _O Pioneers!_ most piteous is the
fate of the fair Marie Tovesky, murdered in the arms of her lover. In _The
Song of the Lark_ Thea Kronsburg develops her rare voice in spite of a
gossipy Colorado town. “There is only one big thing--desire.” In _My
Ántonia_ the heroine says, “That is happiness--to be dissolved in something
complete and great.” Her lust for richness of experience leads to her
becoming an unmarried mother and finally the mother of a large family. In
_Youth and the Bright Medusa_ a typical story is that of Paul, whose
longing for an æsthetic paradise in a flatly stolid industrial town led him
to robbery and to suicide after a week’s fulfilment of his hopes. Most
instructive, perhaps, is _The Professor’s House_, based on the fruitless
struggle of the romantic spirit against materialism and convention. The
Professor does not “think much of science as a phase of human development”;
he resisted the new “commercialism” in education; he preferred his old
dingy study to the one in the pretentious house which his worldly wife and
daughters had planned; he loathes the petty quarrels of his daughters over
fashions; and his wife accuses him of “shutting yourself away from
everybody.” In place of materialism and convention, however, he seeks to
substitute not a central interest in what is most richly and typically
human but rather a refuge in the romantic past: in the pomp of the Middle
Ages when man was “a principal in a gorgeous drama with God”; in the bygone
glories of the Spanish adventurers; in reliving in revery his youth, “the
realest of his lives”; in the loving study of many a quaint and curious
volume of forgotten lore; and in his interest in his former student’s
worship of the ancient Cliff-dwellers. The seemingly irrelevant
interpolation of Tom Outland’s story of his inability to interest official
Washington, “so petty, so slavish,” in his “religious emotion” regarding
his discovery of the relics of the Cliff-dwellers is explained by its
paralleling and under-scoring the Professor’s own struggle--the romantic
spirit struggling in vain against materialism and convention. Finally, when
the Professor’s family departed for Europe, he “thought of eternal solitude
with gratefulness,” and “wanted to run away from everything he had
intensely cared for.” One night while he is resting in his old study a
storm blows out his gas stove and slams his window shut: he awakens to find
himself “nearly asphyxiated”; he wished to die. “He hadn’t lifted his hand
against himself--was he required to lift it for himself?” He cannot bear
the thought of his wife’s return and the continuation of their way of life.
Finally an old friend revives him, but he found that “he had let something
go--and it was gone: something very precious.” He reflects that “his
apathy” will not trouble a family “preoccupied with their own affairs.” No,
the merely romantic devotion to what is picturesque in the storied past
will never avail in the quest for peace in a conventional and materialistic
environment. Like Poe, Joseph Hergesheimer strives to escape “the dreary
and impertinent duty of improving the world” in his worship of an
unattainable beauty. His friend Mr. Cabell finds “in all the Hergesheimer
novels” “men labouring toward the unattainable, and a high questing
foiled.” For example, in _Linda Condon_, based on this theme, Peyton, a
sculptor, seeks in vain to win the beautiful Linda, who marries another.
The sculptor endeavours to sublimate his passion in the creation of a great
statue, which is destroyed by a mob, and he dies in forlorn desolation.
“Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond
the body.... The endless service of beauty. Of course, a woman--but never
the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit,
ending in the spirit. A direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common
sense, frugality and the sacred symbol of the dollar.... The old gesture
toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape from the fatality of
the flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made incredibly lovely in
actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won.” This
spiritualised beauty, however, is of course dependent upon sensuousness,
and Mr. Hergesheimer asserts that “the whole discharge of my responsibility
was contained in the imperative obligation to ... put down the colours and
scents and emotions of existence.” And, like Keats, like all who found life
on a merely sensuous beauty, he is haunted by the dread of transience, by
“that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness
of certain high pretensions, valours, maintained in the face of imminent
destruction ... in the category none was sharper than the charm of a woman,
soon to perish in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a
May-fly.” He tells us that he creates ideal beauty as a result of “the
assault of a persuasive discontent.” Nothing matters but an unattainable
sensuous beauty; and this merely impresses him with its evanescence. This
transient beauty can be arrested only by art, and he begins a later essay
on art with the words, “I am getting damned tired of art....” Perhaps the
endless and aimless longing for the unattainable has received most
elaborate treatment at the hands of Mr. Hergesheimer’s friend, James Branch
Cabell. In _Beyond Life_, a series of essays, he outlines his literary
creed, his hostility to realism. Holding that “veracity is the one
unpardonable sin,” he “perceives this race ... to be beyond all wording
petty and ineffectual,” and he follows the “instinct of any hurt animal to
seek revenge ... in the field of imagination” by retreating to Poictesme,
“that fair country ... which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast
Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the
west of course by the Hesperides.” Let us examine the quality and success
of Mr. Cabell’s aspiration as embodied in _The Cream of the Jest_. Felix
Kennaston, the hero, is actually a conventional novelist, a conservative
property-owner, a Presbyterian, and a good husband. Inwardly, however, he
is a dreamer who seeks to escape from the thralldom of actuality in his
quest of “Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston was ever able to conceive of
beauty and fearlessness and strange purity, all perfections, all the
attributes of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human faculties were
competent to understand.” “It is the cream of a vile jest,” he says, “that
I am forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you.” These magic
dreams of Ettarre are induced by a sigil--a broken disc which Felix found
on one of his walks. Finally, near his death, it is discovered that this
magic sigil is only “the metal top of a cold cream jar,” and his dreams
become a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. This is perhaps the
blackest pessimism in American literature--the conviction that reality is a
“dragging nightmare,” and the discovery that the illusion which alone makes
life bearable is founded on nothing more sacred than the broken “top of a
cold cream jar.” And it should be noted that, all Mr. Cabell’s books being
parts of a “Biography,” Felix is nothing less than a symbol of “humanity.”
“His history was, in essentials, the history of our race thus far. All I
advanced for or against him, was true of all men that have ever lived.”
_Jurgen_ may be said to deal mainly with the poignancy of the realisation
of the contrast between the veiled loveliness of youthful illusions and a
cold and ugly sensuous reality; relief is sought through an escape from
this reality in dreaming of these illusions now shattered, or in dreaming
of new illusions. In actuality, Jurgen is only a dirty little pot-bellied
pawn-broker of the Middle Ages married to a shrewish, cowardly wife.
Through magic, however, he is enabled to pack into one year “the follies of
a quarter of a century,” to seek through a land of fabulous loveliness the
phantom of desire. There he meets Dorothy la Désirée, “in all things
perfect,” as he had loved her in the “garden between Dawn and Sunrise”; in
reality she was a “horrible lascivious woman.” And there in her robe of
flaming silk is the young Guenevere, “the fairest of mortal women”; there
is the Queen Sylvia Tereu of pallid charm who vanishes at dawn; there is
Anaitis, the personification of a nature myth, with her ecstatic rites and
sensual orgies; there is the plump Chloris, loveliest of Hamadryads; there
is Queen Helen, for whose fabulous beauty he hungered even in childhood;
there is the proud Dolores, “lovely as a hawk is lovely”; there is Florimel
who dwelt by the Sea of Blood; and there is Phyllis, Satan’s wife, “the
loveliest little slip of devilishness.” Of one and all Jurgen tires. His
remark that his “tender heart and tolerably keen eyes” force him “to jeer
out of season” to avoid “far more untimely tears” reminds us of the
Bohemian Byron who finally confesses with infinite sadness: “If I laugh at
any mortal thing, ’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep, ’Tis that our
nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy.” And in the end we have
Jurgen’s Shelley-like admission of the futility and hopelessness of his
aimless longing: “Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it
is that I desire!... For I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what.... I have
gone romancing through the world, ... nowhere have I found what I
desired.... I am compact of weariness and apprehension, for I no longer
discern what thing is I, nor what is my desire, and I fear that I am
already dead.” It is evident, then, that in the hope for a paradise of
supernal beauty Americans have been lured as by a Siren to an abyss of
despair of which the English romanticists, who experimented with this
idyllic hope, warned us over a century ago. The Edward Young who sported in
his paradisiacal “empire of chimeras” “cast the total” of his life as
“despair.” Keats reported that in the romantic “Temple of Delight” “Veiled
Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” And Shelley of the iridescent dreams,
who would “Hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it
contemplates,” confessed in the end: “Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor
peace within nor calm around.” Very beautiful are these rainbow
visions--but they are conjured out of night. II Let us turn to a second
sort of hope--the hope of an American paradise of nature. Although the
paradise of nature appears in Vergil, in Renaissance pastorals by Lyly,
Sidney, and Spenser, in Perdita’s shepherd home and in the sylvan cave of
Cymbeline’s sons, its use was mainly either decorative or allegorical until
the eighteenth century. In 1711 Shaftesbury proclaimed the natural man
benevolent, compassionate, and altruistic; and as such he appears in
_Ossian_. Pope said, “The state of Nature was the reign of God.” Rousseau
broadcast the doctrine that civilisation had tended to corrupt the morals
of mankind, while he described the enchanting life of man in a natural
paradise. Cowper united literary simplicity, religious emotionalism, and
the naturalistic humanitarianism of Rousseau. Burns glorified the simple
peasant close to nature. And Coleridge and Southey dreamed fondly of an
American Pantisocracy--“A Dell of Peace and Equality”--on the banks of the
Susquehanna. In 1771, Philip Freneau, our first man of letters, deriving
his radical democracy and his devotion to the indigenous scene from
naturalism, envisaged “The Rising Glory of America”: “A new Jerusalem, sent
down from heaven, Shall grace our happy earth, ... Thence called
_Millennium_. Paradise anew Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost ... No
tempting serpent to allure the soul From native innocence.” Indeed, it is
interesting to speculate upon the extent to which this English romantic
faith in the “native innocence” of mankind, transplanted to the
inexhaustible resources of the American frontier, has under these unique
conditions furnished philosophic sanction for an unbridled materialism
which has become so characteristically national. Frontier isolation tended
to breed self-confidence, equality, self-reliance, optimism, contempt for
artificial distinctions and a dependence upon the material world. Crèvecœur
in 1782 defined “an American” as a “new man who acts upon new principles.”
“We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most
perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to
be.” Our first novelist who sought a paradise of American nature was James
Fenimore Cooper. Revolting against both the feudalism of aristocratic
Europe and the crude democracy of Jacksonian America, Cooper sought refuge
in projecting his ideals in the character of Leatherstocking and also in
such a Utopian paradise as in _The Crater_. Whatever one may think of
Cooper’s Indians, his “females,” his woodcraft, or his rhetoric,
Leatherstocking remains a great contribution to the fiction of the world,
“perhaps,” according to Professor Paine, “the greatest embodiment of native
character in American literature.” He is strangely compounded of Cooper’s
memories of his old hunter-friend Shipman, of the heroic saga of the early
frontiersman as synthesised in Daniel Boone, of the
Rousseauistic-Wordsworthian myth of the natural man spiritualised by
contact with forest and stream, and of the idealism of American manhood.
According to Cooper’s summary, “... His feelings appeared to possess the
freshness and nature of the forest in which he passed so much of his time,
and no casuist could have made clearer decisions in matters relating to
right and wrong.... In short ... he was a fair example of what a
just-minded and pure man might be, while untempted by unruly or ambitious
desires, and left to follow the bias of his feelings, amid the solitary
grandeur and ennobling influences of a sublime nature.” In 1828, however,
we find Cooper disillusioned: “All attempts to blend history and romance in
America have been comparative failures.... The baldness of American life is
in deadly hostility to scenic representation.” And in _The Crater_ (1847)
we find him creating a Utopia in a fabulous mid-Pacific island in order to
furnish a contrast to the wretchedness of contemporary American life. This
is a story of how some folk, shipwrecked on a reef which is the crater of a
volcano, succeed in causing vegetation to grow, of how they create a
“settlement surrounded with a sort of earthly paradise” which is finally
“buried beneath the ocean.” The story, as Cooper conceives it, is a
parable: “Of such is the world and its much-coveted advantages. For a time
our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect, until we forget
our origin and destination, substituting self for that divine hand ...”
Already, in _The Monikins_ (1835), born of bitter disenchantment, Cooper
the former idealist had presented the world as a country ruled by a race of
monkeys who laughed to scorn the Yahoo race of mankind. The hope of an
American paradise of nature ended for Cooper in disillusionment; natural
goodness, democracy, human ideals are revealed here as sounding brass and
tinkling cymbals. Professor Pattee compares Cooper’s final pessimism with
that of Mark Twain: “Both began as border-minded individualists,
parochial-minded, intoxicated with American idealism; both by travel and by
wide contacts with urban pessimism were educated into blasé cosmopolitanism
... and both went out at last in utter misanthropy.... It is an American
evolution!” The most significant history of our national quest for a
material happiness is perhaps embodied in the work of Mark Twain, whose
much-discussed pessimism may be explained mainly by the fact that, as the
spokesman of frontier America living exclusively “in the present,” he
served as the faithful mirror to a whole nation in which an Industrial
Revolution, philosophic mechanistic determinism, and the collapse of
illusions led to despair. His stories illustrate the changing importance of
the two planes of consciousness in the frontier mind--the consciousness of
a hopeful and radiant illusion, and the consciousness of a hopeless and
sordid reality. Take three stories, representing three different periods.
_The Jumping Frog_ (1865), dealing with the winning of a bet by roguery,
embodies in a humorous way the reckless exuberance and joyousness of the
dawning West after the Gold Rush. To this type belong also the books which
glorify the “natural man” and the free-born American--_Roughing It_ (1873),
_Tom Sawyer_ (1876), _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883), and _Huck Finn_
(1884). In contrast, his first book, _Innocents Abroad_ (1869), represents
the frontiersman’s life-long contempt for European tradition and Europe,
“one vast museum of magnificence and misery,” groping “in the midnight of
priestly superstition for sixteen hundred years.” A story of a second
period, _The Million Pound Bank Note_ (1893) mirrors a materialistic
“gilded age” in which, lured on by a fabulous hope, men bowed to the Golden
Calf while the spectre of reality haunted their thoughts. In this story the
two planes of consciousness are in equipoise until the end, when the plane
of illusion prevails. It is the tale, briefly, of how a poor tramp
masquerades as the owner of a million pound bank note; grim poverty stalks
behind him, but every one worships the illusion of his wealth, and he
finally wins the girl of his heart as well as the million pounds. The story
is a parable of the West: these were the days of illusory fortunes in
transcontinental railroads, in iron and steel, the days of the Morgans and
Carnegies and Fricks and Goulds. “I am,” said Mark Twain, “frightened at
the proportion of my prosperity ... Whatever I touch turns to gold.” In
1895 he was bankrupt. But take a story representative of the third
period--_The $30,000 Bequest_ (1907). A poor book-keeper and his wife,
learning of a promised fortune at the death of a relative, each night “put
the plodding world away, and lived in another and a fairer, reading
romances to each other, dreaming dreams, comrading with kings and princes.”
They increasingly neglect realities and scorn their associates. “The
castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit--how it grows! What a luxury
it becomes; how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate
ourselves with their beguiling fantasies--oh, yes, and how soon and how
easily our dream life and our material life become so immingled and so
fused together that we can’t tell which is which, any more.” Just as the
Golden West was unable to keep its “dream life,” its illusions, triumphant
over its “material life,” its stark reality, so with the brutal news that
the “town had to bury” the deceitful relative, the poverty-stricken
book-keeper and his wife “lived yet two years, in mental night, always
brooding, steeped in vague regrets and melancholy dreams”--like the modern
realists! What did Mark Twain report regarding his early hope for a
material paradise? In _The Mysterious Stranger_ (1916) he recorded his
final despair, his conviction that life is cruel and meaningless--a
“wandering forlorn among the empty eternities”--and in that nightmare of
the fancy cowardice, hypocrisy and slavery are all that man can hope for.
After the death of his daughter the master of comedy said, “My life is a
bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most
precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and
poor--death.” His _What Is Man?_ and _To a Person Sitting in Darkness_
express the same vein. “There is, of course, a Master Mind, but it cares
nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness ... As to the hereafter, we
have not the slightest evidence that there is any ...” To him man became “a
poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived!” Although Hamlin Garland
came to believe that “truth was a higher quality than beauty” and set
himself down as “an unflinching realist,” one must recall that he comes of
a race of “potential poets, bards, and dreamers,” that he traces in general
the disillusionment resulting from an idyllic hope based upon an idealistic
quest for an American paradise of nature. He records the “deep vein of
poetry,” the illusion, through which the pioneer viewed a sordid reality,
“the place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold.” “Beneath the sunset lay
the enchanted land of opportunity.” “When we’ve wood and prairie land, Won
by our toil, We’ll reign like kings in fairy land, Lords of the soil!” Here
is Pater’s “Sangreal of an endless pilgrimage” transferred to prairie-land.
Later he confesses, “I had idealised all the figures and scenes of my
boyhood.” “This land of my childhood,” “its charm, its strange dominion,”
he has to admit, “did not in truth exist--it was a magical world, born of
the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning
winds.” Like Wordsworth’s early “light that never was, on sea or land,”
Garland’s illusion “has all the quality of a vision, something experienced
in another world,” covered with “a poetic glamour.” However, if the Son of
the Middle Border sought a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow which did
not exist, if he is pursuing fancifully a phantom of hope, he is honest
enough to record the results of such a quest. As he grew up he noted a
“growing bitterness”--“disillusionment had begun.” The Shelleyan rainbow of
hope faded into the light of common day. What had been the “marvel of a
golden earth before a crimson sky” became merely “Uncle Sam’s domain,
bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept.” “I perceived little that was poetic,
little that was idyllic.” “What purpose does a man serve by toiling like
that for sixty years with no increase in leisure, with no growth in mental
grace?... At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of
their existence.... The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human
life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening
embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did not know that I
had found my theme.... Now, suddenly I perceived the futility of our
quest....” It is clear, also, that Garland is attempting a serious
generalised study of the outcome of frontier hope. The young orator,
meeting his father, is shocked at his sudden appearance of age and gloom:
“He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of ’66, and the change in
him was typical of the change in the West--in America.” “The almost
universal disappointment and suffering of the West was typical.” “All the
gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities came back
upon me in a flood ... Every house I visited had its individual message of
sordid struggle and half-hidden despair.” Garland, then, has given us a
cross-section of our national history; he has faithfully recorded the
“almost universal” despair which greets men who would “reign like kings in
fairyland.” Rolvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_, “A Saga of the Prairie,” is
another impressive record of the Odyssey “Toward the Sunset” of the
frontiersman and the finding of despair instead of the pot of gold. Per
Hansa and his religious wife Beret, Norwegians, journey “straight toward
the west, straight toward the sky line,” “deeper and deeper into a
bluish-green infinity--on and on, ... for Sunset Land.” Finally they halt
and raise a sod hut in “the endless solitude,” the “eternal, unbroken
wilderness”; they plant crops, and winter sets in; Beret has a child. Here
again we meet the two planes of frontier consciousness--idyllic hope built
on illusion and the dread of a sordid and terrifying reality. “That summer
Per Hansa was transported, was carried farther and ever farther away on the
wings of a wonderful fairy tale--a romance in which he was both prince and
king, the sole possessor of countless treasures. In this, as in all other
fairy tales, the story grew ever more fascinating and dear to the heart,
the farther it advanced.... Ever more beautiful grew the tale; ever more
dazzlingly shone the sunlight over the fairy castle.” On one side there is
the “divine restlessness,” the “enchanting joyousness” of Per Hansa, on the
other, Beret’s poignant yearning for human companionship and inner
spiritual peace which her dread of the stark reality cannot satisfy.
“Bleak, grey, God-forsaken, the empty desolation stretched on every hand
... How could one lift up one’s voice against such silence!” As winter came
on Beret saw only the snow, and for her the day “died in a pitch-black
night that weighed down the heart.” Her reflections give the key to the
book: “The country did not at all come up to her expectations; here, too,
she saw enough of poverty and grinding toil. What did it avail, that the
rich soil lay in endless stretches? More than ever did she realise that
‘man liveth not by bread alone.’... Even the bread was none too plentiful
at times.... “But no sooner had they reached America than the west-fever
had smitten the old settlements like a plague. Such a thing had never
happened before in the history of mankind; people were intoxicated by
bewildering visions; they spoke dazedly, as though under the force of a
spell.... ‘Go west!... Go west, folks!... The farther west, the better the
land!’ Men beheld in feverish dreams the endless plains, teeming with
fruitfulness, glowing, out there where day sank into night--a Beulah Land
of corn and wine!... Ever westward led the course, to where the sun glowed
in matchless glory as it sank at night; people drifted about in a sort of
delirium, like birds in mating time; then they flew toward the sunset, in
small flocks and large--always toward Sunset Land.... Now she saw it
clearly: here on the trackless plains, the thousand-year-old hunger of the
poor after human happiness had been unloosed!” As she expects to die in
childbirth, she pleads with Per Hansa to take the other children back to
civilisation: “Human beings cannot exist here!... They grow into beasts!”
And the magic of a fairy tale turns out to be simply nature red in tooth
and claw. In the last section of the book, entitled “The Great Plain Drinks
the Blood of Christian Men and is Satisfied,” the story is told of how Per
Hansa the faithful, the hopeful, the loving husband and father, is frozen
to death while going for a doctor to help a neighbour. “There was the Red
Son of the Great Prairie, who hated the Palefaces with a hot hatred;
stealthily he swooped down upon them, tore up and laid waste the little
settlements. Great was the terror he spread; bloody the saga concerning
him. “But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell of
sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of some. Many took
their own lives; asylum after asylum was filled with disordered beings who
had once been human.... Then, too, there were years of pestilence--toil and
travail, famine and disease.” The frontier is exhausted, but it should be
carefully noted that the quest for a physical, external paradise lives on
in the American machine-age, in the dream of an industrial Utopia. To take
but one illustration recorded in our fiction, Sherwood Anderson’s _Poor
White_--paralleling the frontier stories--traces the transition from the
optimism born of untapped resources to the despair of a standardised
industrialism. It is the tale of a stolid boy, Hugh McVey, who manages to
invent machines from which every one hopes great things; it is supposed to
be typical, to present a cross-section of American life. “In every mind the
future was bright with promise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country
... a hopeful spirit prevailed.... The youth and optimistic spirit of the
country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant, industrialism, and
lead him laughing into the land.... The thing that was happening in Bidwell
happened in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron
regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the
States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were
discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night towns grew into cities. A
madness took hold of the minds of the people.... Wealth seemed to be
spurting out of the very earth.... Farmers owning oil-producing land went
to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the
morning rich.” But Hugh McVey, “the poor white, son of the defeated dreamer
by the river,” finds mere money and the satisfaction of physical needs
insufficient. “He was unfilled by the life he led.” Conscious of “some
indefinable, inner struggle,” “he fought to accept himself, to understand
himself, to relate himself with the life about him.” For the sanctity of
the individual personality America had substituted the worship of mass
production, of material gain. “It was a time of hideous architecture, a
time when thought and learning paused. Without music, without poetry,
without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the
native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell
into a new age.” In place of the free workman, joyously expressing with his
own hands the dream of his own mind, came the factory-hand, blindly bitter
from the machine-standardisation which thwarted the self-expression which
even the farmer enjoyed. In the town of Bidwell, Jim Gibson exults in
selling machine-made harnesses and ruining Joe Wainsworth, the old harness
maker. Finally, in a fit of rage Wainsworth kills his tormentor. Clara, the
wife of Hugh McVey, points the moral: “In her mind the harness maker had
come to stand for all the men and women who were in secret revolt against
the absorption of the age in machines and the products of machines. He had
stood as a protesting figure against what her father had become and what
she thought her husband had become.... As a child she had gone often to
Wainsworth’s shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now remembered
sharply the peace and quiet of the place.... Everything worth while is very
far away.... The machines men are so intent on making have carried them
very far from the old sweet things.” And we have Anderson’s summary
indictment of industrialism: “Modern men and women who live in industrial
cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses
that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses
where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow
thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.” Thus
those who have sought an American paradise of nature, a physical paradise,
have reported finding only despair. In essentials this hope is identical
with the primitivistic and industrial hope which Europe found inadequate
over a century ago. Wordsworth, the high priest of naturalism, confessed he
had “too blindly reposed” his trust, and he had the wisdom to seek the
support of the classical and the Christian traditions. And Ruskin and
Carlyle exposed the criminal fallacies involved in setting material gain
above the sanctity of the individual personality. But when this outworn,
exploded philosophy, based upon primitivism, faith in natural goodness,
absolute liberty, _laissez faire_, and reliance upon nature and material
things, was transplanted to the vast material resources of a frontier land,
it was given a new, hysterical lease of life. Now, a century and a quarter
later, a disenchanted America agrees with the English naturalist who
testified of his infinite “dejection” and his conviction that man “may not
hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains
are within.” III If those who have entered the American Door of Hope in
quest of happiness have reported that it is to be found neither in the Land
of the Blue Flower nor in the Land of Sensuous Desire, let us inquire what
those have reported who have sought the happiness of self-perfection, of an
exalted personal life, of “A Paradise within thee, happier far.” This quest
involves a definitely focused aspiration toward, and a disciplined
imitation of what is most richly and deeply human, of what is most balanced
and poised and complete, of what has in the past been reported to yield
lasting contentment and peace. This sort of quest is very old. To Plato and
Aristotle, justice, the crown of life, consisted of the ideal balance of
all the desires. Behind the Horatian doctrine of the golden mean--_auream
mediocritatem_--and Cicero’s praise of _mediocritatem illam quae est inter
nimium et parum_ is the ideal of mediation and centrality. The Christian
tradition, according to Mr. G. K. Chesterton, is peculiar in its
reconciling of opposites, in its synthetic balance. At any rate, the
worldly classical and the other-worldly Christian traditions have united in
upholding the doctrines of imitation, restraint, of a dualistic conflict in
man between appetite and aspiration, and of a definitely focused aspiration
which culminates in inner peace. In the Middle Ages the “law for measure”
was allied to the theory of the four humours, the balance of which caused
health, the excess of any one of which caused “one-sidedness” and disease.
In the Renaissance the author of _Everyman in His Humour_ used satire to
render eccentricity ridiculous, and the Hamlet who allowed all to be
“sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” recognised that “by the
o’ergrowth of some complexion,” by “one defect,” men “take corruption.” He
honoured Horatio, his “soul’s choice,” because in him “blood and judgment
are so well commingl’d.” The Elizabethans recognised that a great man, like
a tall tower, must be balanced at all points, or be drawn down to ruin by
his own strength. If space permitted, one might trace through the impetus
given scientific specialisation and material progress by Bacon and the
Royal Society, through such figures as Congreve and Pope and Edward Young
and Rousseau, the gradual evolution of the theory of humours into the
theory of the master-passion and the “original genius” of being
idiosyncratic. But let us remember that Milton, uniting the Renaissance
passion for sensuous delight and the Puritan passion for saintliness, kept
his sublime balance, his vision of centrality, his ideal of self-mastery.
His exhortation to Adam as he leaves the physical paradise of Eden is his
exhortation to us: “Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith;
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love By name to come called Charity,
the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth To leave this
Paradise, but shalt possess A Paradise within thee, happier far.” Mindful
of the dark impulses of the natural man, the great liberal distinguished
sharply between anarchy and the true liberty resulting from the
substitution of inner for outer control: “License they mean when they cry
Liberty,” he remarks of the Cavaliers, “For who loves that must first be
wise and good.” “He who reigns within himself ... is more than a king....
Real and substantial liberty is rather from within than from without.”
Americans may well be proud that this noble hope partially lives on in
Emerson, our greatest man of letters, who found Milton “foremost of all men
... to inspire,” to communicate “the vibration of hope, of self-reverence,
of piety, of delight in beauty.” Out of materialistic America has come this
“friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit,” who strove above
all to celebrate “the Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, ... the
spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the mechanical powers and
the mechanical philosophy of this time.” It is true, of course, that
Emerson did not altogether escape the contagion of his romantic age; that
in his apparent praise of the unique and the individual, in his most
un-Miltonic faith in natural goodness, in his belittling of logic, of
tradition, and of the aid which culture can give as a guide to conduct,
Emerson has a certain kinship with Rousseau. Let us grant it--and guard
against it! One must recall, however, that part of his dubious influence
has resulted from a superficial and piece-meal reading of Emerson,
encouraged by his characteristic oracular device of presenting two
conflicting statements rather than a balanced and qualified generalisation.
If one reads all of Emerson, however, in an endeavour to relate and define
his thought, it is apparent, as Professor Harrison and Professor Foerster
have found, that his stronger affinities are not with Rousseau but with
Plato and the humanists. His central doctrine of self-reliance turns out to
be a reliance on a self which is not unique but common to all men, “a
reliance upon man’s share of divinity,” upon his higher, universal self.
“We become divine,” he says, not by eccentricity, by revolt, but by
“obedience,” by conformity to “the common heart,” to what is normally,
typically, and nobly human. In fact he strictly warns us against the
“rudeness” of failing to “distinguish between the private and the universal
consciousness.” He perceived the unity of man, the need of spiritual
concentration; his occasional assumption of good intentions is balanced by
his own Spartan virtue and his confession that “because the temptations are
so manifold and so subtle,” he agrees with Socrates and the Hindoos in
denominating the Supreme Being the “Internal Check.” In common with the
Christian tradition, he sharply severs the “law for man” from the “law for
thing.” He is aware of “the eternal distinction between the soul and the
world,” aware that too great a preoccupation with the outward, sensuous,
mundane life about us (the “work” rather than the “workman”) at the expense
of “the integrity of your own mind” and deeper spiritual needs, breeds a
dread of transience and hence “uneasiness” and despair. Behind the fleeting
scenes of daily life he perceived “that which changes not,” permanent human
elements common to every one, the cultivation of which gave him that sweet
serenity, that “cheerfulness and courage” which Arnold pronounced the
outcome of his philosophy, “his abiding word for us.” “Happiness in labour,
righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and
eternal hope;--that was Emerson’s gospel.” Here, then, in our own native
tradition is a sort of hope which led to happiness. Can such a hope,
however, be reconciled with the artist’s devotion to beauty? To Emerson, as
to the æsthetes, art is simply “the creation of beauty,” “beauty is its own
excuse for being,” and “the Beautiful is the highest.” But, unlike the
æsthetes, he proclaims the unity and parity of beauty, truth, and
goodness--“different faces of the same All.” Beauty has “its source in
perfect goodness”; it is “the mark God sets upon virtue.” In other words,
the rarest beauty is a by-product of that perfect harmony by which a man
realises his complete humanity, his complete happiness. This ideal of
beauty was given the support of a literary creed by James Russell Lowell,
who never feared to expose the weakness of a romanticism whose ultimate
fruit was a “melancholy liver-complaint.” He urged the study and creation
of a literature which should be an ideal representation of life, “stripped
of all unessential particulars” by an imagination which found “the true
ideal” not by escape but by a purposeful selection of the real. For Lowell
as for Emerson the “first duty” of the artist “is to be delightful.” He
distinguishes, however, between a merely recreational “literature as
holiday” and a literature which, ideally “representing life, ... teaches,
like life, by indirection.” Such a literature, ministering to all the
higher needs of the mind and spirit, yields the greatest delight and the
greatest beauty. Aspiration and art of this quality, however, are rare in
American fiction. We looked for them in vain in the seekers for a paradise
of supernal beauty, and in the seekers for an American paradise of nature.
Great as is Hawthorne as an artist, in my judgment he falls short of an
aspiration of the Emersonian quality on account of his penchant for the
eccentric, the fanciful, and the morbid. One seeks it in vain in the
realists’ transcripts from life, which lack the selection and focusing that
distinguish art from experience. There is evidence, nevertheless, that the
novel is no longer hostile to the specifically human destiny of normal
humanity, no longer oblivious to that rare beauty which is the by-product
of the struggle by which a noble character imposes order on the chaos of
natural desire and approaches the imaginative ideal of a life richly
varied, finely poised, and of exalted happiness. I have space for but one
example in modern fiction--Dorothy Canfield’s _The Brimming Cup_. This
deals with the “eternal triangle” in a little Vermont town. Marise
Chittenden, whose children have gradually taken her interest from Neale,
her husband, becomes lonely when her children all go to school and she
senses that “the days of her physical flowering are numbered.” She is loved
by Marsh, a wealthy man visiting her elderly neighbour Mr. Wells; Marsh
tries to convince her that she is sacrificing “a world of impassioned
living” for “an outworn ideal” of “the traditional thing to do.” The
characters, not always vividly humanised, symbolise man’s universe. Marise,
the “brimming cup,” “filled with some emotion ... gushing up in a great
flooding rush,” typifies the surge of impulse. Marsh, a “swirly brook,” to
whom life is but a moment’s “blind sensual groping and grabbing” before the
“big final smash-up,” typifies unbridled lust and greed. The “steady,
visible light” of Neale’s life, Neale who had found true freedom by
conquering his “great, fierce, unguessed appetite, the longing for
wandering, lawless freedom,” typifies centrality. Mr. Wells, who surrenders
“the happiness that comes of living as suits his nature” to help make the
world more courteous to negroes, typifies humanitarian sympathy. The
much-travelled Eugenia typifies “sophisticated cosmopolitanism,” æsthetic
escape: to her “everything’s so common-place”; she cultivates her fading
beauty by “breathing in and out through one nostril, and thinking of the
Infinite!” Cousin Hetty symbolises tradition; the Indian Touclé, mysticism.
Marise sees her conflict as one not between “routine, traditional, narrow
domestic life and the mightiness and richness of mature passion,” but as a
conflict between the lure of sensuousness and “what is deepest and most
living in you.” It is a psychological novel, a novel of introspection: it
is based on the quest, not for what is conventionally moral, but for what
in the end gives the richest human satisfaction. It presents a struggle
based on self-reliance and self-conquest. Neale “wanted her to be herself,
to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted her to attain her
full stature.” “Nothing is your own, if you haven’t made it so.” Marise
wonders if her mother-love is what Marsh calls “inverted sensuality”; Neale
says, “Look into your own heart and see for yourself.” He “longed for her
sake to have her strike out into the deep,” he knew that peace could only
come from “Marise’s acting with her own strength on her own decision.” He
urges not outer but inner control--“as few umpires as possible.” In her
conflict Marise sought “what was deepest and most living in her ...; that
was what the voices were trying to cry her down from finding.” She longed
to be “one with the great current”--Emerson’s “stream of power.” She
discovers that she is being lured by “the conventional pose of revolt,”
that separation from her children would not be true “growth and freedom,
and generous expansion of the soul.” Like Milton and Emerson, she finally
becomes free by discovering and obeying what is deepest within: “She was a
free woman, free from something in her heart that was afraid. For the
moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom.
Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for. Here was the life
more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!” Joyous in
her centrality, poise and freedom, she sees Marsh as an “undeveloped and
tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of
breadth and freedom.” “How narrow and cramped,” and “blinded to the bigness
and variety of life” seemed people who thought that “a woman of beauty and
intelligence” was wasting her life “unless she was engaged in ...
stimulating ... sexual desire.” Marise had the serene joy of her home, her
beloved children and her understanding husband; she had the marvel of her
music; and she had the surpassing wisdom to seek her happiness not in the
miraculous but in the common--in the symbolic neighbourly gathering on the
night of the blooming of the Cereus, that rite of beauty; in the calm
strength of simple folk whom experience has made wise. And this woman,
living out her “heritage, alive and rooted deep,” with her “vivid charm
like an aureole of golden mist,” “felt slowly coming into her, like a tide
of a great ocean,” the ineffable peace which comes from self-mastery, from
the quest of what is most universally and nobly human. Calm and free, she
was lifted “high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of
security in joy.” IV What are we to conclude from this cursory sketch of
the quality of three different sorts of American hope represented in our
fiction? To the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty we owe much delicate
artistry of a high order; one may maintain, however, as Emerson and Lowell
did, that other things being equal, the truthful representation of typical
humanity alone produces that harmony which yields the highest beauty. To
this hope we owe much which, when read for recreation, can give delight;
one takes issue only with those, like Poe and Cabell, who take Arcadianism
seriously as a universal way of life and would substitute it for a literary
ideal which resolutely confronts life and seeks to solve its meaning. To
the hope for a paradise of American nature, a physical paradise, we owe the
imposing of order upon the natural chaos of the wilderness; we owe the
physical “improvements,” the miracles of the machinery and science of a
great nation. Of what ultimate avail, however, are material resources,
physical comfort, time-saving machinery, and science unless the time and
energy conserved are used for higher intellectual or spiritual ends, for
the attainment of happiness? To those who have recorded this hope in
fiction we owe the faithful preservation of an important aspect of the
social history of America; but literature is greater than social history:
it aspires to embody the meaning of life in terms at once timeless and
universal and beautiful. Our frontier lands are exhausted, and those who
have sought the physical paradise of a standardized industrialism have
found nothing but boredom and despair. In place of this dead level of
repression and standardisation let us develop a new respect for
personality--for personality richly varied and healthily individual. Let us
re-direct the joy-giving passion for creation through the matchless
resources of the realm of the spirit. If both the rarest happiness and the
rarest beauty are the fruit only of the hope of a paradise within, it would
appear that American fiction would in the future be wise in dealing not
with escape or with externalities but with the infinite variety and eternal
mystery of the human soul’s conflict between appetite and aspiration on its
quest for an exalted inward happiness. Before we can expect American
fiction to do this, however, the way must be prepared by the development of
an adequate social imagination. For great art has always been organic with
and supported by the life and vision of a whole people. Shakespeare was the
“Soul of the Age,” Dante the “voice of ten silent centuries.” A hope must
have throbbed in the breasts of a whole age before a writer can body it
forth with the concentration, the brooding intensity, and the unerring
congruency to human nature demanded of great art. Such a hope, such a
social imagination, such an agreement in aspiration, can be developed best,
perhaps, through education--through our interpreters of literature in
college and university. Mindful of the heritage of heroic pioneers, we must
embark upon our intellectual pioneering with the same resolute courage, the
same loyal devotion, the same consecration to a high cause. Although our
scholars are still being lured aside either to the camp of the æsthetes or
the camp of the philologists, America must hereafter strive to develop the
“middle-of-the-road” scholar who shall be, as Emerson said, Man Thinking,
the delegated mind of society, whose major aim shall be the purposeful and
discriminating interpretation of the record man has left, in terms of
beauty, regarding “the conduct of life” and the path to peace. When such
scholar-critics have developed such a social imagination, such a popular
unanimity of hope, we shall be ready to receive the artist of genius who is
to write for us the great American novel. Note--For copyrighted evidence
used in the foregoing essay I am indebted as follows: Sherwood Anderson,
_Poor White_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1925); Dorothy Canfield Fisher, _The
Brimming Cup_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1921); James Branch Cabell, _The
Cream of the Jest_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1922); _Jurgen_ (Grosset and
Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); _Beyond Life_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1919); _Straws
and Prayerbooks_ (Robert M. McBride and Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather,
_The Professor’s House_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell,
_Moon-Calf_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1921); R. W. Emerson, _Complete Works_
(Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1903); _Journals_ (Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Boston, 1909-14); _The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle_ (Houghton
Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_ (Houghton
Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin Garland, _A Son of the Middle Border_
(Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Joseph Hergesheimer, _Linda Condon_
(Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark Twain, _Complete Works_ (American
Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903); A. B. Paine, _Mark Twain, A Biography_
(Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1912); F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper”
(_American Mercury_, Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction
to _The Deerslayer_ (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag,
_Giants in the Earth_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1929). _Dionysus in
Dismay_ STANLEY P. CHASE Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were
beginning to find their way around in the world of print and paint, a group
of us used to meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in
contemporary thought and literature. You may smile at the association of
the date 1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the
objects of our attention were fantastic enough--Elbert Hubbard, Edward
Howard Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were
delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to their
bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring Celts, or
became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the later manner
of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and Bernard Shaw and
H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we had no such
variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I should say that
our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine. For the most part,
as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail after Richard Hovey and
Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the coast, we could still
thrill to such verses as Three of us without a care In the red September
Tramping down the roads of Maine, Making merry with the rain, With the
fellow winds a-fare Where the winds remember. Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay
and Masefield, had not come into our world--much less Walter de la Mare or
Aldous Huxley or Robinson Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by
the contemporary muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats,
and “The Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the
sonnets of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of _A Shropshire Lad_;
and of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of
other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced,
bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the
“new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts. And even in that
distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, before President
Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the _Outlook_, put Edwin Arlington
Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the poet of “Tilbury Town”
(only thirty miles from our own). There was one poem of his whose meaning
used to be a great subject of dispute,--for we were than naïve enough to
think that a poem must be susceptible of some rational explanation. It was
entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared in the _Captain Craig_ volume of
1902.[45] Four o’clock this afternoon, Fifteen hundred miles away: So it
goes, the crazy tune, So it pounds and hums all day. Four o’clock this
afternoon, Earth will hide them far away: Best they go to go so soon, Best
for them the grave to-day. Had she gone but half so soon, Half the world
had passed away. Four o’clock this afternoon, Best for them they go to-day.
Four o’clock this afternoon Love will hide them deep, they say; Love that
made the grave so soon, Fifteen hundred miles away. Four o’clock this
afternoon-- Ah, but they go slow to-day: Slow to suit my crazy tune, Past
the need of all we say. Best it came to come so soon, Best for them they go
to-day: Four o’clock this afternoon, Fifteen hundred miles away. The
half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the curious
way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now stealing its
attention from the very grief they point to, and now flashing upon it a new
aspect of that grief--something like that, I suppose, accounts for the
fascination the poem had for us. But a number of us were dissatisfied with
an explanation so simple. No, we wanted to know, first, who and how many
persons were being buried at four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to
the poet (was it, for instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and
whether “she” in the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what
sense it could be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half
so soon” meant--was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even
calculated that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles
to the _west_, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held
commonly at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of
four afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions. Only a
few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old agitations of
ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness of
interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my
admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for one
member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had been
twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that the poem
was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This ingenious view
having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr. Robinson, he settled
the matter quite simply with the following note to the inquirer: “I have
long given up attempting to interpret my own poetry, but in this instance,
would go so far as to suggest a funeral rather than a marriage. I remember
this poem chiefly as a more or less reprehensible experiment in sound and
feeling--a performance more pardonable thirty years ago--perhaps--than it
would be to-day.” Of course, it was not Mr. Robinson’s performance, but
ours, which was reprehensible. We were treating an “experiment in sound and
feeling” as we might have treated a deposition in court or an application
for the payment of life-insurance; we were bringing to a poem an attitude
of mind alien to its character _as a poem_. It was as if one should read
Mr. Frost’s “The Thatch” and demand to know _why_ he “would not go in till
the light went out.” For “Cortège” in essential matters is not cryptic in
the least; it is only irrelevant, external details that are left
unexplained. And ultimately, I suppose, what we call a taste for poetry, of
any except a very elementary sort, depends upon the possession of tact or
intelligence to perceive just such a distinction. I have used this personal
recollection because much more frequently to-day and to a greater degree a
somewhat similar feeling of puzzlement assails the reader of contemporary
poetry. This simple instance of an obscurity gratuitously created by
readers may lead to the consideration of a problem of poetic form more
comprehensive than any question of mere technique (though technical
elements of poetry are involved in it too), I mean the question of those
necessities which are laid on poetry from its being a form of communication
between mind and mind. For, I believe, from misapprehension and confusion
in this matter, on the part now of poets and now of their readers, springs,
to some extent, the unsatisfactory state of poetry at the present time. On
the one side, there is reported a feeling of exasperation, by readers
competent enough in other kinds of literature or in the older poetry, who
“can make nothing of this modernist stuff,” and on the other side the
modernists’ rejoinder that such readers are precisely in the position of my
group of twenty-five years ago--lacking the intelligence to grasp what is
essential and to disregard non-essentials. Surely a consideration of the
nature and limits of that community of mind which must be assumed to
subsist between the poet and his readers is not foreign to the subject of
this book. I At the outset we encounter the Crocean view of all art,
including poetry, as expression merely, and conversely of all expression as
art. But leaving the confusions of Signor Croce to be dealt with by
others,[46] we are warranted in assuming, I think, that, generally and
typically, the poet desires communication with other persons,--conceivably
only one other person, or persons of the future, but at any rate
communication and not merely self-expression. Otherwise, he wouldn’t
publish or circulate or read his poems, as generally and typically poets
do. The theory of Laura Riding and Robert Graves[47] that the poet
publishes (or “externalises”) only out of consideration for the rights of
the poem, which, like physical offspring, has attained an independent
status with a life of its own, is a naïve and superfluous bit of
mystification, sufficiently answered by the query, “Why then sign one’s
name?”--and I have not remarked any unusually wide return to the practice
of anonymity. And one is led to wonder, as one turns the pages of our more
advanced periodicals, what possible readers some of these poets are
addressing. After a moderate success in comprehending, let us say, such
diverse productions as those of the mediæval mystics, the wits of the Roman
Empire and the Restoration, the English metaphysical poets, and the
symbolist group in France, and after a period of conscientious schooling in
the pronouncements of this newest movement, it is disconcerting to find
oneself completely balked by the innocent-appearing contents of the latest
anthology of verse. Among the ten possible but improbable interpretations
of some poem, it seems somehow less than a sporting chance that the one you
finally choose as the least implausible will be what was intended. Take,
for instance, this poem of Mr. Wallace Stevens, which I select not as an
example of that writer’s often delightful connoisseurship in verse, but as
fairly representative of this decline in what has been called
“communicative efficacy.” ANECDOTE OF THE JAR[48] I placed a jar in
Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no
longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in
air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was grey and bare. It did not
give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. Now the elements of
this experience--the jar, its shape, colour, and quality, the hill in
Tennessee where it is placed, the behaviour or appearance of the
wilderness, the bird, the bush--stand doubtless in some kind of relation
with each other in the poet’s mind, have possibly certain symbolic values.
Since we have no clues to these relationships and values, our mind is free
to do anything it pleases with the bare grey jar, the hill, and the
wilderness. This freedom, however, and any pleasure we may take in the
separate images, in the rhythms, or the placing of the words, are not
sufficient compensation for the state of uncertainty and slight irritation
in which we are left. Very likely the little poem is meant to suggest
nothing more than the superiority, to an intensely civilised person, of the
simplest bit of handicraft over any extent of unregulated “nature,” but it
has been seriously interpreted to me, by devotees of recent poetry, as,
respectively, an _objet d’art_, a sex-symbol, and a burial-urn containing
the remains of a valued friend. And so it must remain, for me, not only
like nothing else in Tennessee but like nothing else in the universe.
Considerable damage was done to this shallow affectation of knowingness of
the last few years by Max Eastman’s witty article in the April (1929)
_Harper’s_. A young intellectual from one of our well-known private schools
told me that members of his group were observed to discontinue their
perusal of _transition_[49] upon the appearance of Mr. Eastman’s “The Cult
of Unintelligibility.” But contemporary poetry is still afflicted by an
acute attack of that extreme of Puritanism--separatism: it asserts the
right not only of private judgment, but of a private symbolism,--which is,
æsthetically, of much graver consequences. My point here, of course, has
nothing to do with the values or qualities of the experience which the
writer is presumably seeking to share. I am simply saying that, in the
reading of the slightest as of the most profound poem, a sense of
singleness or wholeness is the most essential part of the experience, and
that this totality of effect cannot be achieved if all clues to the way the
poem is organised are withheld or too casually indicated. The enigmatic
character of Dr. William Carlos Williams’s poems, we are told, is due in
part to his habit of jotting down free-verse impressions in the intervals
between his professional visits to patients. I can only hope that in
writing out his prescriptions he makes a greater allowance for the mental
capacity of the pharmacist than he seems to make for mine. To speak
bluntly, the difficulty of reading much “modernist” verse is due less to
the superior sophistication or cleverness of these writers than to their
essential lack of art. By contrast, in the following lyric of Elinor Wylie,
even though it is a repudiation of something accustomed, beautiful, and
comforting, there is so clear and deft an employment of symbol, so perfect
a fusion of mood with image, that the effect of totality is achieved; the
peace denied to this orthodox landscape (or universe) is momentarily
attained in the very denial of it, and thus one of the functions of poetry
is discharged. INNOCENT LANDSCAPE[50] Here is no peace, although the air
has fainted, And footfalls die and are buried in deep grass, And
reverential trees are softly painted Like saints upon an oriel of glass.
The pattern of the atmosphere is spherical, A bubble in the silence of the
sun, Blown thinner by the very breath of miracle Around a core of loud
confusion. Here is no virtue; here is nothing blessèd Save this foredoomed
suspension of the end; Faith is the blossom, but the fruit is cursèd; Go
hence, for it is useless to pretend. “The transport ... that the poet
kindles in us,” observes Professor De Selincourt in his Inaugural Lecture
at Oxford, “springs from our instinctive recognition that his form, a term
that includes both rhythm and diction, is an entirely faithful rendering of
his experience, so that we gain from it a sudden clear sense of fulfilment,
such as we can hardly hope to gain outside the ideal world of art.” That
may be a rather narrowly æsthetic interpretation of Longinus’s doctrine of
the poetic “transport,” but certainly “a sudden clear sense of fulfilment”
is an experience which it is easy to miss in the poetry of our
contemporaries. In fact, this “sense of fulfilment” is precisely what the
typical modernist, experiencing nothing of the sort in life itself and
disdaining an “ideal world” thus cut off from reality, avoids giving us. He
would regard it as part of the old hocus-pocus of orthodoxy. Life being to
him fragmentary, inchoate, he would say that his poetry, if it is to be “an
entirely faithful rendering of his experience,” must itself produce an
effect of inchoateness, fragmentariness. THE END OF THE WORLD[51] Quite
unexpectedly as Vasserot The armless ambidextrian was lighting A match
between his great and second toe And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum Pointed, and Teeny was about to
cough In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb-- Quite unexpectedly the
top blew off: And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over Those
thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, There in the starless dark the
poise, the hover, There with vast wings across the cancelled skies, There
in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing,
nothing,--nothing at all. Here Archibald MacLeish, who stands somewhere
between the centre and the extreme left wing in poetry, employs a
traditional verse-form in a poem the theme of which is the absurdity of the
spectacle of human antics in a cosmos without intelligibility or
significance. He guards against any specious effect of “fulfilment” by the
unexpected reiteration of the word _nothing_. Yet there remains the
regrettable necessity of rounding out the sestet and capping the rhyme;
and, more important, the method of presentation has imposed an adventitious
kind of order on a scene which, in the poet’s apprehension of it, is an
even wilder scramble and jumble of absurdities. And so the sonnet,
thoroughly “modern” in spirit, is quite conservative in technique. The
distinctiveness of this new poetry, indeed, is less a matter of measures,
whether new or old, than of the principle of association by which it is
governed. It aims at an organisation of images and a succession of rhythms
which spring more immediately from the poet’s stream of consciousness. In
attempting to divert this stream through the reader’s mind, without
spilling over or filtering, some recent poets have adopted startling
innovations in typography, including punctuation, use of capitals and small
letters, spacing, and line-division. The fashion is prompted in part by a
spirit of mere impishness, but back of it also is a certain amount of
genuine experimentation in the resources and the graphical representation
of language, the object being to prod the reader out of the lethargy and
complacency which, it is alleged, are fostered by the conventions of
verse-form and page-arrangement. Undeniably, if one is willing to play this
game and doesn’t mind having the rules made up as one goes along, some of
the results are amusing. You will understand most readily what it is all
about if you first take one of these poems down from some one’s dictation,
then attempt to write it as you think the poet would do to bring out the
subtler shadings and nuances, and finally compare your representation of
the poem with his. Here, for instance, are the words (written as ordinary
prose) of a poem by E. E. Cummings from a group called “Impressions.” “I
was considering how, within night’s loose sack, a star’s nibbling
infinitesimally devours darkness, the hungry star, which will eventually
jiggle the bait of dawn and be jerked into eternity, when over my head a
shooting-star burst into a stale shriek like an alarm-clock.”[52] On the
chance that at this point the reader may wish to try the experiment which
has been suggested, I postpone to a later page Mr. Cummings’s original
arrangement of the words. If you will compare his printing of the poem with
that above, you will see how the tininess and the quick little repeated
nibbles of the mouse at the grain-sack are suggested by the short, broken
lines; how ingeniously the shooting-star is made to interrupt the poet’s
revery; how the effect of flare, streaking, and slower fading is conveyed
in the printing of “bursts”; and how the new simile of the alarm-clock
impinges upon the retinal image of the meteor.[53] But--“the pleasures of
sudden wonder are soon exhausted.” After scrambling up a hundred or so of
these typographical escarpments, I found that there was seldom a view from
the summit commensurate with the discomforts of the climb, and my interest
in the new sport began to flag. It is hard to imagine a mature artist
interesting himself for long in this sort of preciosity. Though each
individual’s inner life is in a measure unique, the mere attempt to convey
some fraction of it to others by written or printed words presupposes a
certain shared and common ground of human experience. Freshness, piquancy,
gusto, can be properly savoured only when they are delicately blended with
“human nature’s daily food.” The importance of a common understanding upon
essentials is clear in the sphere of our personal relationships, which
become rich and satisfying only with the mutual recognition of things that
may be _taken for granted_; oddities and varieties are most engaging in
those with whom we already own a fundamental bond. Now the forms and
conventions of poetry may be regarded as so many aids to the speedier
establishment of such understanding between reader and poet,--the
indispensable means by which an original experience is so shaped and
clarified that it has significance for others. No one of these conventions,
naturally, is absolutely fixed or static, and skilful manipulation of their
elements is constantly yielding new and unsuspected possibilities of
æsthetic pleasure, and even of social comprehension. For this reason we may
look with a tolerant and not unfriendly eye upon such experimentation by
some of our younger poets as I have described.[54] Nevertheless, it is
imperative that persons who wish to modify or to replace the accepted
vehicles of poetic expression should have a clear understanding of what
convention in literature or art is _for_. Adequate treatment of this
subject would require a separate book, and here I must content myself with
a mere statement of faith: that some set of assumptions as to the
experiences most valuable and important for mankind--in other words, of
universals in the Aristotelian sense--is as necessary in the establishment
or the maintenance of an æsthetic convention as in any purely social or
political activity. Indeed, the most promising development in American
poetry at the present time, I believe, is to be found, not in these
centrifugal and eccentric movements, but in the considerable amount of
genuine if less spectacular work which is being done upon the lines of a
firmly rooted literary tradition.[55] II In the last few paragraphs, though
concerned primarily with the aspect of communicability, I have been
skirting the topic which lies at the centre of all movements of thought and
feeling in our day, and with which I shall be concerned through the rest of
this essay. I refer to the prevalent spirit of disillusionment, a state of
mind which in America has made itself felt, acutely and widely, only within
the last three or four years. Certainly the mood of the younger generation
of poets (the men and women now in their twenties or early thirties) is
very different from the poetic temper of fifteen years ago--those exciting,
strained, exalted, painful years that witnessed, among other things, the
rise of the “new poetry” in England and America and, somewhat later, the
beginning of the war. Any comprehensive view of the stream of poetry warns
us not to make too much of these twists and turns between one decade and
the next; yet there is some reason to think that we have now reached or are
approaching one of the major bends in the course. The “poetic renascence”
of 1912-1917 was, it is true, in reaction against certain
nineteenth-century attitudes,--against its Puritan code in morals and its
tradition of gentility in belles-lettres; as some one has said, it
delighted in hurling bricks at the silk hat of Hamilton W. Mabie; but to
the most characteristic force of nineteenth-century thought and
life--namely, an expansive philosophy of naturalism, embraced with
enthusiasm and glorified by a romantic imagination--it merely gave a fresh
impetus. The serene and humble mould Does in herself all selves enfold--
Kingdoms, destinies, and creeds, Great dreams, and dauntless deeds, Science
that metes the firmament, The high, inflexible intent Of one for many
sacrificed-- Plato’s brain, the heart of Christ; * * * * * Out of the earth
the poem grows Like the lily, or the rose; And all man is, or yet may be,
Is but herself in agony Toiling up the steep ascent Toward the complete
accomplishment When all dust shall be, the whole Universe, one conscious
soul.[56] These lines by John Hall Wheelock epitomise the thought that had
been the main inspiration of the nineteenth century. Despite their regular
metrical form, with its reminiscence of Emerson, we recognise in them the
ecstatic evolutionary naturalism of Walt Whitman. Indeed, it was the spirit
of Whitman, more than any other, that presided over our “poetic
renascence.” Not, of course, that all the poets who made their appearance
in those years were akin to him. Frost, for instance, was hardly more like
Whitman than he was like Pope; consciously, in his living and in his
poetry, he was facing and he has continued to move in just the opposite
direction. Nor perhaps in the work of Masters or of Robinson[57] is the
relation to Whitman at once apparent, for superficially neither the _Spoon
River Anthology_, that sardonic record of stunted human growths, nor
Robinson’s sombre studies of the thwarted lives of his New Englanders
suggest the tolerance, the breadth and human warmth of the older poet’s
sympathies. But the analysis of these unfortunate victims of a repressive
and unhumane morality (for such is the way the poetry of both writers was
commonly described, and such, in one aspect, it is) was really in line with
Whitman’s gospel of emotional emancipation, as well as with the new
direction given to psychology by Freud and Jung. In the work of Lindsay and
Sandburg, and notably in that of the far less original Oppenheim (whose
disappearance from current collections is itself significant of the change
that has taken place), the influence of Whitman was patent. All the
spokesmen and contemporary critics of the movement, from Amy Lowell (1917)
to Bruce Weirick (1924), with varying degrees of emphasis, stress Whitman’s
primacy in American literature. He had had his lovers and disciples before,
but now for the first time a group of American poets could give him
whole-hearted welcome with no inner abashment to overcome. Throughout the
earlier productions of the movement, even in the poems of the Imagists,
whose theory and practice of verse were so different from his own, is
diffused the vibrant spirit of Walt Whitman. It is experienced as a certain
buoyancy and expectancy of mood, and most characteristically as an
underlying trust in a life-force which is felt to be working here in
America to high, unforeseen ends. It would be an over-simplification, but
somewhere near the heart of the matter, to say that the presence we are
most aware of in the poetry of to-day is not Walt Whitman, but Thomas
Hardy--his desolating irony, at least, if not his artistic and personal
elevation. These younger poets accept, but coldly and without enthusiasm,
the account which contemporary science offers of the universe and of the
human make-up, and they are as hostile to the glowing affirmations of the
great romantics as they are to the evasions and tepidity of the Victorians.
Perhaps this is but an inversion, a different guise, of that restless and
changeable temper which we call romanticism, but to me at least its
emergence seems to be more significant than were any of the varied energies
released by the last poetic movement. This new spirit is not more
characteristic of poetry, of course, than of other expressions of the age.
To some extent, though less here than abroad, it is an after-effect of the
war--the inability of nervous organisations overstrained by the excitements
of those years to respond to normal stimuli. It may be briefly described as
a despair of achieving any reading of life in its totality which will be
tolerable in the light of all we know and feel. “In the course of a few
centuries,” writes Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in _The Modern Temper_, “[man’s]
knowledge, and hence the universe of which he finds himself an inhabitant,
has been completely revolutionised, but his instincts and his emotions have
remained, relatively at least, unchanged. He is still, as he always was,
adjusted to the orderly, purposeful, humanised world which all peoples
unburdened by experience have figured to themselves, but that world no
longer exists.” This modern sense of frustration differs from states of
disillusion or pessimism experienced in the past in two respects. It is,
for one thing, more widespread, producing a considerable body of poetry of
sheer negation, turning some writers to mere elaboration of surfaces and
appearances, and making itself felt as an undercurrent, now cynical, now
passionate, in much writing which seems superficially to be almost free of
philosophical implications. And secondly, this spirit of denial is a more
positive and uncompromising thing than we have known in the past. Not only
is it unable to effect any synthesis of its intelligence and its emotional
promptings; it has come to believe that such a synthesis is in the nature
of things impossible. It grows “more and more likely,” continues Mr.
Krutch, “that [man] must remain an ethical animal in a universe which
contains no ethical element.” His dilemma is that he cannot either feel as
his intelligence bids him or think as his emotions would have him. Even the
highest of the personal emotions, love itself, which had somehow eluded the
cold touch of nineteenth-century science, has not been able to withstand
the psycho-analysis of the twentieth. “Have you not heard,” asks the lady
in _Cavender’s House_, “Have you not heard yet, anywhere, death-bells
ringing For Love and poor Romance? Biologists And bolshevists are ringing
them like mad-- So loud that Love, we’re told, will soon be lost With
dodos, dinosaurs, and pterodactyls.” Specifically, a feeling is abroad that
poetry is at some kind of crisis or turning-point, and there are even
predictions that poetry of a sort that the past would recognise as such
cannot continue much longer to be produced. The poetry of T. S. Eliot has
been praised for its seizing of just this aspect of the modern situation,
the sense of frustration, of insignificance. “The passions which swept
through the once major poets,” writes Mr. Krutch, “no longer awaken any
profound response, and only in the bleak, tortuous complexities of a T. S.
Eliot does [the present age] find its moods given adequate expression.”
Love-making carried on with an accompanying sense of its futility and
ridiculousness, an acquaintance with art and poetry which serves only to
confirm misgivings as to their relevancy for us to-day, the employment of
religious symbols to arouse a poor mirthless mockery--in such experiences
our young intellectuals find mirrored the age and body of their time. The
cryptic character of the writing, the sometimes arbitrary connection
between one image and the next, the casual allusions to one person’s
recondite reading, are all indications of the contemporary sense of the
individual’s isolation. The broken rhythms, the fragmentariness of the
scenes or movements, the deliberate foregoing of any rational principle of
organisation, reflect the feeling of the fragmentariness of life itself,
the modern inability to effect any kind of integration of experience. And
this, we are told by some, is the only kind of poetry which an honest and
sensitive mind in an age like ours can be expected to produce. Mr. Eliot,
though no longer belonging even nominally to American literature, is worth
attention because of his present high reputation in intellectual circles.
He has written literary criticism of a kind especially needed at the
present time, based as it is on a wide knowledge of literature, informed by
a delicate taste, and guided by severe yet humane standards. And in his
poetry he has shown himself capable of finding a comedy of the mind in
these hesitations and inhibitions of modernity,--as in the early “Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock.” By the haunting, individual rhythms of his poems
alone, we are apprised of an exceptional poetic endowment. Yet Mr. Eliot’s
literary output, poetry and prose, constitutes, to my mind, one of the most
arresting paradoxes of this paradoxical age: an advocate of the sterner
disciplines of the past (“classicist in literature, royalist in politics,
and anglo-catholic in religion”), who gives to these causes all the
organising power of a firm intelligence, and is content to let his poetry
express chiefly the states of confusion, doubt, faintness, with which the
positive principles of his thought have had to wrestle. “We are the hollow
men, We are the stuffed men.” In a recent essay Mr. Eliot has ventured the
opinion that a great event in the intellectual world would be the
conversion of Professor Irving Babbitt to Roman or Anglo-Catholicism, but,
he concludes regretfully, such a consummation, though devoutly to be
wished, is hardly likely, for Mr. Babbitt “knows too much.” Perhaps an even
more salutary conversion, in its immediate effects upon other poets, would
be Mr. Eliot’s compassing, in his creative work, of those genuinely
classical values of which, in his critical writing, he shows such fine
apprehension. For a transformation of that kind, one need not fear that any
man of letters knows too much. One may at least entertain the hope that Mr.
Eliot’s permanent reputation as a poet is not going to lie in the fact that
he has voiced, more completely than any one else in verse, the confusion
and disillusionment of this post-war generation. The humanist is aware that
poetry, like mythology, possesses no power of conferring immediate
revelation of truth; he knows that its scenes and personages, its thoughts
and passions, from the earthiest to the most ethereal, belong to the world
of unsubstantiality, of illusion--of dreams, if you will. He will go
further: this element of illusion, this impassable gulf between reality and
our comprehension or representation of reality, is not confined to poetry
and mythology; it is part of all our conscious life; it baffles us even in
our attempt to comprehend that nearest thing of all--ourself. “... beneath
the surface of all we see and feel, beneath the very act of seeing and
feeling, lies the unredeemed chaos of desires and impressions, unlimited,
unmeaning, unfathomable, incalculable, formless, dark. Life is but
appearance, and this personality we call by our name is but illusion within
illusion.”[58] But working within the illusion is also a power to control
and order these impulses, to check them or to bring them into a harmonious
co-operation, yielding a serenity and a sense of stability which, of all
human experiences, seems freest of illusion. It was the characteristic
error of much nineteenth-century poetry (of Browning’s in England, of
Whitman’s in America) to limit personality to the mere welter of desires
and feelings, to find there its central “urge” (the favourite word of
romantic criticism), and to erect upon such foundations a philosophy of the
“ideal.” But the hollowness of _this_ illusion (the philosophy which found
an immediacy of truth in natural instincts, impulses, and feelings) has
to-day become all too apparent; and when its former adherents ask where
then certainty can be found, they are bidden to direct their gaze to the
abstract world of the physicist and the mathematician. Here, in the words
of Mr. I. A. Richards, “intellectual certainty is, almost for the first
time, available, and on an unlimited scale.”[59] But even if this were
so,--and one hears of developments in these fields that appear to make the
certainty considerably less than absolute,--it would still be a certainty
about matters that have no particular relation to the behaviour and
feelings of human beings, and that give no support for poetry. The
beguiling mirage of an Absolute fostered by romantic poetry has
disappeared, only to be replaced by the mirage of another Absolute,
terrifying though incomprehensible. And so we have come to the _impasse_
already described. From the point of view of the humanist, what has so
suddenly collapsed is the towering structure of nineteenth-century
romanticism, not any dwelling necessary to the continued life of poetry.
For he has long recognised those metaphysical limitations with which
contemporary physics is so deeply entangled; and he has been unwilling to
trust metaphysics, any more completely than natural science, with the whole
determination of a philosophy of life. Instead of asserting that
intellectual certainty in the field of science is available now almost for
the first time on an unlimited scale, he would postulate a large degree of
what amounts to _practical_ certainty, in all that concerns us most nearly
as ethical beings, available now, as it has been for centuries. This
assurance is embodied, for him, in the dualism of the great historic
religions, in the teachings of Socrates and of Jesus, and in the most
persistent traditions of European literature. But its final sanctions are
not found in any “great tradition,” however imposing; they are arrived at
empirically and experimentally by any one who, divesting his mind of
shibboleths and catch-words, will honestly examine his own impulses and
springs of action. In his own soul he will find the cleavage, the dualism,
which runs through human nature. This opposition of forces, by whatever
names he calls them, by whatever symbols he represents them, may never be
resolved; but in his mysterious power of intervention in their unending
conflict lies, for him, the ultimate reality within the illusion. To the
reading of poetry, then, he will bring the same habit of discrimination
that serves him in the conduct of life, mindful that it is still a world
communicating with ours by the gate of horn and the gate of ivory, and that
the phantasms which issue therefrom may light our way a few steps nearer
truth, or may deepen for us the shadows of the dark, chaotic flux. To the
consciousness of intellectual defeat and spiritual dismay, evidenced so
widely in contemporary literature, it is not to be expected that poetry
will for the present make any very direct or explicit answer. For we do not
look to poetry for polemics, for the formulation of ethical or metaphysical
ideas; and when poetry tries to assume a burden that belongs rather to
criticism and philosophy, the result may have literary interest and
excellence, as does Pope’s _Essay on Man_, but is more likely to be merely
dull and forced, like the later work of Wordsworth or Browning. In either
case some fulness of life belonging to poetry when confident in its own
right is missing. No, what we look for in the poet is some more pervasive
or implicit evidence of his scale of values, some intuitive, and for that
reason more certain, indication of the quality of his response to life,
felt as unmistakably in his imagery, his diction, and his rhythms as in
those more ponderable elements of style which the eighteenth century called
“fable” and “sentiments.” Thus, in two stanzas[60] of A. E. Housman-- The
year might age, and cloudy The lessening day might close, But air of other
summers Breathed from beyond the snows, And I had hope of those. They came
and were and are not And come no more anew; And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue Must now be worse and few. --something that belongs to
his deepest intuition (his acceptance, without evasion and without
reconciliation, of life’s transitoriness) is caught in the very movement of
the lines and the simplicity of the words: They came and were and are not.
This pervasive sense of things chiefly valued and most deeply felt, which
every great poet’s work gives us, is surely not determined altogether by
forces external to him. The poet is something more than a highly sensitised
receiving-set for remote, scattered goings-on in the world at large. What
we prize in every poet we come to know intimately is some irreducible,
_given_ quality of the personality. We shall not easily accept, therefore,
the current argument that, in an age like ours of dissolving faiths, the
only genuine kind of poetry must be one which has cut itself off from
belief of any kind.[61] The history of English literature is not lacking in
instances of poets who have withstood the pressure of their age: to recall
only the greatest, the poems of Milton, from _Lycidas_ to _Samson
Agonistes_, are triumphant testimonies against the idea that poetry need be
so utterly subject to contemporaneous disintegrating influences. But if we
claim for poetry a certain power of immunity from such forces, neither, by
the same course of reasoning, should we expect too much from the _direct_
effect upon it of those forces which we think salutary, such as humanism. I
do not mean to suggest here the notion of poetry’s having a life of its own
in any transcendental sense, or to imply that poets possess mysterious
astral powers. My thought is simply that the new humanism, before it is
given any large imaginative expression in American poetry, must expect to
prove its worth by responding to broadly human, and not alone specifically
poetic needs. It will do this by its power of bringing harmony into lives
which are ordered in accordance with its insight, of establishing in
society “a current of fresh and true ideas,” and of creating thus “a
quickening and sustaining atmosphere” which poetry can breathe. I feel no
need of apologising for my use of these well-worn phrases of Matthew
Arnold; not only was he the best representative of the spirit of humanism
in nineteenth-century England or America, but also, in his realisation of
the hopeless disparity between natural processes and human aims, he
anticipated the very pattern of our own dilemma. The paralysis which came
over Arnold’s poetic powers in later life is sometimes attributed to the
steady growth of his humanistic interests, requiring the ampler medium of
prose. However that may be, I believe it certain that his humanism--his
sense, that is, of the worth and fruitfulness of human powers when wisely
exercised and his acceptance of the limitations which such a view
imposes--gave to his poetry nearly all that power of invigoration and
refreshment for which we chiefly value it. A contemporary critic, R. H.
Hutton, observed how frequently Arnold closes a poem on the burdensomeness
of existence by some seemingly unconnected figure or story, such as the
simile of the Tyrian trader in “The Scholar Gipsy,” instinct with the pride
and buoyancy of old world enterprise. “‘The problem is insoluble,’ he seems
to say, ‘but insoluble or not, let us recall the pristine strength of the
human spirit, and not forget that we have access to great resources
still.’”[62] In such ways to-day, indirectly and obliquely, humanism may
make itself felt as one influence among many upon contemporary poetry: by
rendering accessible and operative, for the poets as for the rest of us,
some of these moral energies from times of more robust faith and higher
intellectual vitality than our own. FOOTNOTES [45] Reprinted by permission
of The Macmillan Company, Publishers. [46] “If you disregard critical
trivialities and didactic accessories, the entire æsthetic system of Croce
amounts to a hunt for pseudonyms of the word ‘art,’ and may indeed be
stated briefly and accurately in this formula: art = intuition = expression
= feeling = imagination = fancy = lyricism = beauty. And you must be
careful not to take these words with the shadings and distinctions which
they have in ordinary or scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word
is merely a different series of syllables signifying absolutely and
completely the same thing.”--G. Papini, _Four and Twenty Minds_, quoted by
I. A. Richards, _The Principles of Literary Criticism_ (1924), p. 255, note
4. Mr. Richards adds: “It is interesting to notice that Croce’s appeal has
been exclusively to those unfamiliar with the subject, to the man of
letters and the dilettante. He has been ignored by serious students of the
mind.... [Papini] has here rendered a notable service to those who have
been depressed by the vogue of ‘Expressionism.’” _Cf._ also the following
from Gilbert Murray’s _The Classical Tradition in Poetry_ (1927), p. 243:
“Everything that a man does is self-expression. The way a man laces his
boots, the way he writes, the way he says, ‘Good-morning,’ is probably
different from the way followed by any other man, and is thus expressive of
his personality. But it need not be good art for that reason. Imagine a
pompous and egotistic man in a state of personal irritation, having to make
an after-dinner speech. It would probably express him only too well, but it
might not be a good speech.” [47] _A Survey of Modernist Poetry_, by Laura
Riding and Robert Graves, 1927, p. 125. [48] From _Harmonium_, by Wallace
Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement
with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers. [49] For the sake of
“communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind me, I should explain that
_transition_ is “an international quarterly for creative experiment,”
edited in Paris by a group of young Americans and others. [50] From
_Trivial Breath_, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and with permission
of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised
publishers. [51] From _Streets in the Moon_, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers. [52] From
_Tulips and Chimneys_. Reprinted by permission of Alfred & Charles Boni,
Inc., Publishers. [53] For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr.
Cummings’s poetry, see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, _A Survey of
Modernist Poetry_, Chapter I. [54] E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously
referred to, is printed by him as follows (_Tulips and Chimneys_, New York,
1924, p. 78): i was considering how within night’s loose sack a star’s
nibbling in- fin -i- tes- i -mal- ly devours darkness the hungry star which
will e -ven tu- al -ly jiggle the bait of dawn and be jerked into eternity.
when over my head a shooting star Bur s (t into a stale shriek like an
alarm-clock) [55] Such, for instance, as the poetry of John Crowe Ransom
and Donald Davidson in the South, and of Wilbert Snow and Robert P.
Tristram Coffin in New England. [56] From the poem “Earth,” in _Dust and
Light_, 1919, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. [57] Mr. Robinson, of
course, had been publishing poetry for nearly twenty years before the new
movement got under way, but his work was regarded as belonging to it in
temper and outlook. [58] Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section
LXXIII, in _The Drift of Romanticism_ (1913), p. 291. The next section is
almost prophetic of what has happened in American poetry of the last few
years: “In some men, especially in an age of spiritual apathy, the sense of
disillusion may spring up without the corresponding assurance of faith. To
such men nothing is real; they walk in a place of shadows, and feel that
life is continually slipping away from them into a bottomless abyss. All
their labour is to re-create for themselves the illusion which has been
shattered, or, by ceaseless occupation, to escape the dull horror of the
void.” [59] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, 1926, p. 60. [60] From
_Last Poems_, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt and Company.
[61] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, Chapter VII. [62] Richard Holt
Hutton, _Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters
of Faith_, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p. 146. _Our Critical Spokesmen_
GORHAM B. MUNSON “Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my
table, “aims to _be_ something; while criticism aims first to clarify and
then to _value_ something. Criticism is talk _about_ something with a view
to passing judgment upon it. It is an aspect of man the valuer, weighing
the actions, impulses, passions, thoughts, and imaginings of his
fellow-men. Study the criticism of a period and it will show you the state
of the general intelligence and the kind of values professed and in vogue,
and above all it will enable you to divine the amount of consciousness of
life’s processes and meanings which is current in this period.” “So,” I
remarked to the air, “the subject I have been thinking about has some
importance? It has to do with man in his most human rôle, that of valuing,
and it assists in indicating the range and depth and intensity of his
awareness of life.” But there was no reply to this, and perceiving that I
must dig with my own mind, I scratched down what I had previously decided
should be my opening sentence. I had been dwelling on the subject of
American literary criticism from 1915 to the present. About 1915 a new
phase in our national letters began to be manifest. Europe was well
drenched in blood and the _Lusitania_ was torpedoed in 1915--events that
were vitally to affect us. Mr. Dreiser’s _The “Genius”_ came out, and the
next year, 1916, it was suppressed by its publishers out of deference to
the power of a narrow censoring body soon to be effectively challenged.
American liberals in the wake of Bull Moose Progressivism had hopefully
established the _New Republic_. Mr. P. E. More in the year previous to 1915
had resigned from the editorship of the _Nation_. Afterwards there came our
participation in the war: the crushing of liberalism: post-war disillusion.
There came a ferment of new magazines and new publishers, captivating the
sons and leaving the fathers cold. There came a tide of naturalistic
novels, a foam of _vers libre_, a roar of essays attacking the genteel
tradition. Since 1915 the reputations have been made of Messrs. Sinclair
Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank, H. L. Mencken, and
Eugene O’Neill--to name only enough to establish a contrast with the
writers of the preceding period. Inevitably it happened that some excitable
journalists in the midst of the uprising promptly called this decade and a
half an American literary renaissance. To me, on reviewing these years,
they seem more like a tragi-comedy, almost a tragi-farce. So when I penned
my premeditated first sentence I spoke of the tragi-comedy of American
criticism. But even if our recent criticism has been very often foolish, we
are to take it seriously for reasons outside itself,--if my voice out of
the air is to be believed. I must now try to develop the line of thought
that moves out from the opening sentence I wrote down when my aerial
counsellor deserted me. I There have been no villains in the recent
tragi-comedy of American literary criticism. The leading critics of our
nation have not been villains--that is, amazing men of initiative,
strength, and will bent on destruction--but rather they make us think of
well-intentioned bookish gentlemen gyrating in the fields of certain hidden
sociological magnets and vociferating their reflexes to the magnetic
attractions. On behalf of a potential human greatness, there are perhaps
great errors in the present world of literary criticism to be opposed, but
there are with us no great men, no geniuses, to be overthrown. In other
words, our critics are not germinative but derivative. I mean, of course,
our professional critics. It is plain that I am not setting out to praise
them--not even by calling them villains, for villains must, to satisfy my
conception of the scale on which the intellectual drama of the race has
been played, possess a certain epical character. There is another world of
criticism, the academic world, whose faults have often been exposed
scornfully and truthfully. Lying out of the eye of the reading public, it
never bears any relation, according to the professional critics, with what
is being currently written. Yet it has its virtues of course: there is a
laudatory paper for some one to write on recent advances in American
literary scholarship: within academic circles there has grown up the only
critical movement in our land now worthy of international interest, and the
leaders of this movement, Professors Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More,
are--I have several times committed myself to the assertion--the best
living critics America can show. It is not with the academic world nor with
humanism, however, that I am here dealing, but with the critics of the past
fifteen years who have enjoyed something like popularity. First, let us
follow the figure of the late Stuart P. Sherman, once a successful
university professor, as he flies away from the campus into the full light
of public attention beating upon the world of professional criticism.
Stuart P. Sherman is of exceptional interest to us. He admired Matthew
Arnold: he wrote a popular exposition of Arnold, and a course of his
entirely devoted to Arnold is said to have been popular with the students
at the University of Illinois. Let us then, noting this affinity, measure
Sherman by Arnold. The difference in their prose is the difference between
distinction and mere competence. Sherman’s is democratic: it is as if
written in shirt-sleeves or talked with the feet on the table, the writer
or speaker deliberately putting on easy manners. Note the
“It’s-a-plain-man-speaking” effect in the following typical passage at the
beginning of Sherman’s essay, _Towards an American Type_: “When I was in
college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books
which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep
channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally
enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a
typical Tolstoy novel is, etc.”[63] Lucid writing, of course, but it is not
charming: it has none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness. I am going to try
to point out a fatal lack of austerity in Sherman, a certain ultimate
slackness of mind and purpose. The prose, so lustreless beside Arnold’s,
shows that Sherman failed to achieve any of the rarer virtues of verbal
deportment: just as clearly one realises that not so superficially, so
mushily, could Arnold have defined religion as, in Sherman’s words, “that
which binds us and holds us. Religion is that which at heart we do
earnestly believe in, whatever it is.” Nor could Arnold, doughty wrestler
with himself, so easily drop his hard questions and substitute gentler
ones. In the essay quoted from above, Sherman went on to raise the question
all great minds have most seriously confronted: “Is life worth living, and
for what purpose?” But it did not take him long to say, “Assuming that life
is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?”--a serious enough
question, but subtly veering the asker away from any tragic vision of life
and encouraging him to settle into a limited pattern of behaviour that
happens to appeal to his temperament rather than to go forth and lead the
great adventure of pursuing perfection. In his growth Sherman was
influenced by the books of three conservative critics, Mr. Paul Elmer More,
Mr. Irving Babbitt, and the late W. C. Brownell; and here again his conduct
was significant of some lack of desperation in him or of some softening
influence on the fibres of his mind. For under the pressure of the ideas of
Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt he was a little impatient. They were too austere
for his taste, whereas he could not admire Brownell sufficiently. But of
the three critics Brownell dealt least in the primary ideas of life: he
elaborated with a great deal of fine sense secondary ideas about literature
and society. He had, it appears to me, a mind more localised in the
nineteenth century than the minds of his two colleagues. And
nineteenth-century minded, rather than classical minded, was Stuart P.
Sherman: his perennial enthusiasms were for Emerson, Whitman, and
Stevenson. Sherman conceived that he was a spokesman for the “average man,”
and the point is important in estimating him. It makes it fitting that his
style should be passably good but inconspicuous in any pageant of fine
styles, fitting that his thinking should constantly deflect from issues
that require an unusual severity of discipline for meeting them to issues
that are less agitating to the pulse, and most fitting that he should seem
not out of joint with his time, like a Forest Philosopher discoursing with
men who regard motor-cars as a convincing symbol of progress, but that he
should seem to be a contemporary with a touch of conservatism, crying with
other average men for Prohibition and vituperating with them our one-time
Teutonic enemies. My reader, are you now chiding me for drawing an
unsympathetic portrait? Recall then one of the pieces in _Americans_ (1922)
and then say, if you can, that in respect to Sherman’s chief weakness I am
wrong. The piece in evidence is _An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E.
More_, wherein, after paying his respects to Mr. More’s gifts, Sherman
complained: “But he has done too little to meet his poor living
fellow-countrymen.” In fact, he said, and this is the self-incriminating
statement, “Mr. More has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by
which a master of popularity plays upon an unready public with his
personality, flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before
his substance arrives.”[64] It all depends! The genuine writer does seek to
reduce his reader by a species of white magic, he labours to compel him to
be his slave. But this is a more virile conception of the writer’s rôle
than Sherman’s ingratiator embodies. If one puts the emphasis on
ingratiation rather than on the skilful imposition of one’s values, then as
is well known something is likely to happen to one’s values. Consider the
following sad example: Said Sherman, would that Mr. More had loved the
aristocratic Plato less and Socrates more. “If,” he went on, “Socrates were
among us to-day, I am convinced that he would be a leader of the Democrats
in the House; but Plato, I suspect, would be a member of the Senate from
Massachusetts.” Quite apart from the fact, apparently forgotten by Sherman,
that Socrates at his trial spoke of his brief experience in politics and
explained scathingly why he had thereafter abstained from politics, I say
that what has occurred here in Sherman’s illustration is the domestication
of two men so uncompromisingly at variance with ourselves, so deeply
critical of us that if we really felt their presence to-day, we would be,
to put it mildly, thoroughly uncomfortable. But Senators and Congressmen do
not abash us, and Plato and Socrates transformed into them take on an
undisturbing and familiar air. This, I say, is a vicious technique of
ingratiation. But there is more and worse: in the same paper Sherman
eulogises the average man and then lets himself go deep in the sin of cant.
“If ‘P. E. M.’ had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which he is so
distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than anything else
to-day keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism is the _religion of
democracy_, consisting of a little bundle of general principles which make
him respect himself and his neighbour; a bundle of principles kindled in
crucial times by an intense emotion, in which his self-interest, his petty
vices, and his envy are consumed as with fire; etc.”[65] In the lexicon of
contemporary humanism there is a damning phrase, “unselective sympathy.” I
think it applies to what Sherman meant when he said “religion of
democracy,” else why does he base so much of his message on the statistical
average man? He could, like Mr. More, have appealed to the latent common
sense of man, which is not a visible property of the average man to-day any
more than it characterises his leaders, or he could, like M. Charles
Maurras, have tried to conceive clearly of a perfect and normal man and
argued for a closer approach to normality in human affairs;[66] but
no--there was working in Sherman an element of “unselective sympathy” and
it made his grasp relax on enterprises of perfection. It was no divine
average man he espoused. When in 1924 he became literary editor of the New
York _Herald Tribune_, Sherman had his opportunity to establish what our
milieu sorely lacks, a vigorous _conservative_ literary review. But what he
organised was essentially not different from any intelligent liberal review
with romantic tendencies: many of his regular reviewers were, for instance,
already identified as reviewers for the _Nation_. We have followed Sherman
from the academic world to the professional literary world, and it would
seem to a superficial glance that Sherman changed remarkably in his transit
from one to the other. He had been an assailant of Mr. Dreiser’s
naturalism: he was to praise _An American Tragedy_. He had sneered, and not
very well, at the “moderns”: he was to become their friendly counsellor. He
had learned, he said, that it was a certain “vitality,” no matter under
what guise, that he wanted in letters, and this platform enabled him to do
a great deal of explaining away of his altered views. He became less
provincial. But underneath there was no change. He had not the stuff of
leadership. For what was this element of “unselective sympathy” in him
which he called a “religion of democracy”? It was a fear of distinction, a
fear of standing away from the mass, a fear of striving far enough ahead to
be a leader. Was Sherman, I wonder, one of those numerous professors who
are so anxious to be taken as in spirit “one of the boys” that they will
compromise the dignity of their learning, that they will feel _defensive_
about the life of the mind? As a critic certainly he was on the defensive
in presenting his values to the average audience. Of no marked force in
himself, on him the registry of environment would be speedily and plainly
made. In an academic environment he had fought the New York critics. He
came as an editor to New York and the environment quickly persuaded him to
blend with it.[67] When Sherman died, the professional literary world
eulogised fulsomely the _émigré_ from the academy. That already tells us a
great deal about this world. Let us see more distinctly what it was with
which Sherman assimilated. II It was a tragi-comedy begun in high spirits
and closing now in disillusion and pathos. Three representative players
have been Mr. Joel Elias Spingarn, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and Mr. H. L.
Mencken: a study of their rôles will instruct us in the mediocrity of
contemporary American criticism. The influence of the first of these is a
most curious phenomenon in our recent history. In type Mr. J. E. Spingarn
is the leisured gentleman and scholar who adorns all too rarely our
national society. His interests are wide: for a number of years he was in
politics and he has distinguished himself by his generous efforts in behalf
of the Negro: he has been an army officer and has, one fancies, a spark of
the old-time gallantry of the military man. For us, however, he is the
wealthy amateur of the arts and philosophy; but what, one may still ask,
are his claims to critical leadership? Like Sherman, Mr. Spingarn spent a
number of years teaching in an academic environment. He specialised in the
history of literary criticism, producing the three-volume compilation,
_Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century_ (1909) and the volume,
_Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_ (1899), which pleased certain
Italian thinkers and began that friendship with them later to be cemented
by his championship of Croce. Neither of these works is more than the usual
competent product of academic industry and research: Mr. Spingarn himself
revolted against the type of sterile scholarship they represent. In 1910 he
delivered his famous lecture, _The New Criticism_. He declaimed it at the
climax of a spree, for he had intoxicated himself with the æsthetic theory
of Benedetto Croce: he was in full cry against academic dry rot.
Consequently his statements at the time were more extreme than those he
would probably make on the same theme to-day. Nevertheless, for the
purposes of a record, we must write down such pronunciamentos in this
lecture, in the addenda to it in _Creative Criticism_ (1917), in his
article, _The Seven Arts and the Seven Confusions_, and in his contribution
to _Civilization in the United States_ (1921) as bear on the following
topics: the essence of art, the function of the artist, the duty of the
critic. Literature, he said, pointing to the trend of nineteenth-century
criticism, “is an expression of something, of experience or emotion, of the
external or internal, of the man himself or something outside the man; yet
it is always conceived of as an art of expression.” As for the artist, he
bade him know that “madness and courage are the very life of art.... For
the madness of poets is nothing more or less than unhampered freedom of
self-expression.... To let one’s self go--that is what art is always aiming
at, and American art needs most of all.” The duty of the critic? To ask and
answer these questions: “What has the poet tried to do, and how has he
fulfilled his intention? What is he striving to express and how has he
expressed it? What impression does his work make on me, and how can I best
express this impression?” With the flourishes of a platform speaker who
knows instinctively that it is not straight hard thinking which sways an
audience so much as the verve with which possibly dubious generalities are
pronounced, Mr. Spingarn exclaimed vehemently that the new critics have
done with the whole question of standards, including genres, hierarchies,
and moral judgments. This is, of course, an unsubtilised outright statement
of romantic æstheticism. Mr. Spingarn was positive that the critic’s
essential response to a work of art must be æsthetic, but he has always
withheld what exactly he means by the æsthetic emotion or response or
judgment. (It _is_ hard to make concrete statements about the so-called
æsthetic emotion.) But that did not in the least militate against the
“æsthetic response” being used as a campaign catchword. For Mr. Spingarn
had written the proclamations for a new generation of American writers.
This is the curious phenomenon I spoke of. One is astonished not just at
the slight quantity of Mr. Spingarn’s writing in proportion to his
reputation, but more astonished at the complete lack of originality in the
documents of this apostle for originality. He added nothing to the Crocean
doctrine: he clarified nothing or modified nothing in it. He did not even
apply it, abstaining, then and since, from concrete criticism of individual
works. He merely proclaimed it. And a widespread revolt against standards
followed in American criticism. So hearty, and eventually so wilful and
silly, was the revolt that in 1922 its opponents were entertained by the
issuance from Mr. Spingarn of a restraining manifesto entitled _The Younger
Generation_. This time, recoiling from the destructiveness of the young
men, Mr. Spingarn would herd them back into an idealistic fold, back to
“discipline, character, morals, imagination, beauty, freedom.” Very often
before, romantic expansiveness has run its course into disillusion: it is a
soberer Crocean who said, “I, who once called upon young men for rebellion
and doubt, now call upon them for thought and faith.” It is not Mr. J. E.
Spingarn, enthusiastic amateur of letters, trained scholar, man of feeling,
who can detain us, for there is literally nothing in his writing for the
mind to work on: as a thinker, he is thoroughly derivative and weak on
definitions. But what Mr. Spingarn stands for, the theory of
self-expression, still needs a scotching. “Self-expression” is simply a
magical catchword of the black variety. It is a good catchword in that it
emphasises the self, but it is pernicious to the best interests of the
self. For to express one’s self means no more than just to manifest
oneself, and if we say self-manifestation instead of self-expression, we
see at once how paralysing the latter term has been. It has placed the
emphasis, one sees, on the artist _as he is_ and not on his possibilities
of growth: thus it has a static effect. Think now: impulses, people say,
arise in them or occur to them; no one claims to create his own impulses,
to self-induce his inclinations; in a manner of speaking, our impulses come
to us from the outside. Therefore, advice to be spontaneous, to let oneself
go without check, to follow one’s impulses is necessarily advice--to do
what?--_to live as unconsciously and mechanically as possible_. The
romantic may just as well hand himself over to the Behaviourist
psychologist, saying, “Here am I, a creature of whim and impulse, the
living proof of your thesis of automatism.” But the romantic is not sternly
logical. He has been proof against the question as to the value of the self
that is being expressed, and not only proof against it: self-expression as
a theory has encouraged his conceit and sometimes fostered megalomania,
thus pitching him deeper into bondage to _external_ conditions, for conceit
makes one exaggeratedly sensitive to the environment. To identify one’s
self with the mechanical temperamental flux of one’s existence and call
that freedom is surely strange, and it is no wonder that it is a strange
“science” which has risen to support this identification. I am of course
referring to psycho-analysis, spoken of respectfully by Mr. Spingarn,
utilised as a probing instrument in biography by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and
championed by Mr. Mencken. It does not seem necessary here to make a
serious attempt to discredit psycho-analysis, for that is being done
rapidly enough by such critics of it as Dr. Trigant Burrow, by the
Behaviourists, by the academic psychologists themselves. The facts have
never been other than these: that psycho-analysis is admittedly
experimental (and therefore speculative in its procedures, unsure of
itself), that its central conception, the unconscious, not to speak of its
many little metaphors like the “censor,” has never been objectively
established, and that it has no ideal of psychological health toward which
to guide its adherents (in lieu of such an ideal, the analyst has either
gone in for an excessive relativity or he has taken the “reality” of the
statistical average to be the norm). These are the undeniable facts and one
who would like to take pride in the sturdy commonsense of the literary
profession must regret that they were not kept in mind. Literary men
to-day, one must conclude, are no less gullible than any other group.
Naively, they welcomed the psycho-analytical dramatising of inhibitions as
the causes of ills, they agreed at once that thought was a sublimation of
sex energy and somehow not quite a legitimate function of man, they
wiseacred in jargon about that bastard soul, the unconscious. Ah, my highly
suggestible writers, it is easy come, easy go with your ideas: within a
decade you will be sneering at psycho-analysis as now you sneer at
Christian Science. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his social studies and
biographical interpretations came to use psycho-analysis with tact: he is
not the sort of critic whose errors will be glaring. A sensitive man but
shy of æsthetic ideas: a sociological critic of letters in control of a
persuasive and considerate prose style: a sentimental naturalist, to use
the terminology of Mr. Irving Babbitt, but far from extreme in his
humanitarian socialism and, despite his psycho-analytic superstitions,
temperate in his faith in emotional expansiveness. Who would dispute Mr.
Brooks’s central idea, namely, that an acquisitive society provides
unfavourable conditions for the development of the artistic life? Of course
it does. It badly nourishes its men of genius, and Mr. Brooks became almost
obsessed with literary failure or what he conceived to be literary failure,
as witness his books on Symonds, Mark Twain, and Henry James. He was
continually calling the attention of the new writers to the conditions in
the history of America which had hampered and throttled their predecessors:
he showed how frontier life had made the machinery of existence, the actual
getting of a living, paramount and from this necessity had originated the
contempt for the arts of enjoying existence, and how this split had
perpetuated itself in the divorce between the world of practice (“lowbrow”)
and the world of theory (“highbrow”): but he failed at the very crux of his
pleading. For struggling and unappreciated writers are too ready to believe
that the hostile environment is responsible for their shortcomings. They
are likely to wilt into self-pity and to feel victimised. That is precisely
the effect that Mr. Brooks’s writings produced, even though he casually
said: “If our literature is to grow it can only be through the development
of a sense of ‘free will’ on the part of our writers themselves. To be, to
feel oneself, a ‘victim’ is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the
nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect,
but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation.”
But Mr. Brooks has not grown eloquent on this theme. He seems rather to
have the sweet wistfulness and yearning of one pledged to a lost cause.
This mood of wistfulness and yearning, this image of oneself as an outcast,
lonely and eager, has not revived and will never, it seems to me, revive
the spirit of the American writer. Was it fortuitous, as in the example of
Mr. Spingarn, that Mr. Van Wyck Brooks should have held a certain
leadership, should have put far more than most of his generation his
impress upon American taste and thought in literary matters? It would seem
that he has been a leader _faute de mieux_, for although a charming minor
critic, he has never managed to awake an indomitable desire among his
followers to master the odds. He voiced the sentiments of a wistfully
rebellious generation but shed no light on the object of their rebellion,
the achievement in a democracy of real individuality. That is the problem
Mr. H. L. Mencken has at least perceived, and his bold tone better fits a
leader in our present straits than Mr. Brooks’s gentle accents, but alas!
He “solved” the problem of being an individual in a “democratic” nation
simply by striking an attitude of swagger, and like Midas he is cursed with
a touch that changes all objects into some one thing else. It is easy--and
this is the secret of his influence--to adopt Mr. Mencken’s attitude toward
the current affairs of men. Let me quote his _Catechism_ and you will have
it in one simple lesson. “_Q._ If you find so much that is unworthy of
reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? _A._ Why do men
go to zoos?” But let us observe the man in the zoo, traipsing open-mouthed
and superciliously from cage to cage, grinning in silly patronage at the
imprisoned beasts who at least are true to the laws of their being, and
shall we not mock at man’s cheap sense of superiority based not on what he
(poor lunatic!) has done for himself but only on what Nature has made of
him? No, no, it is not by contempt for the inferior that man will grow but
by dissatisfaction with himself. The net effect of Mr. Mencken’s writings,
however, is to produce self-satisfaction and a feeling of false
superiority, and this naturally enough makes for personal passivity. As for
the Mencken touch! It turns everything to horse sense (not to be confused
with the hard-won virtue of commonsense) and it is admirable when it is
applied to current cant, as this: “Law Enforcement becomes the new state
religion. A law is something that A wants and can hornswoggle B, C, D, E
and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying, by bluff and bluster, by
making faces. G and H are therefore bound to yield it respect--nay, to
worship it. It is something sacred. To question it is to sin against the
Holy Ghost.” But shrewdness is not enough when one is trying to cope with
master-ideas, and in their realm Mr. Mencken is, as he might say, a
clodhopper. One of the master-ideas in æsthetics and psychology, one that
has engaged great minds and been pondered upon each century since the
_Poetics_ was introduced into European thought, is the Aristotelian
conception of _katharsis_. Hear Mr. Mencken after the sages and the learned
have spoken. He is saying that capital punishment affords _katharsis_ to
modern societies. “_Katharsis_, so used, means a salubrious discharge of
emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A schoolboy, disliking his
teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and
the boy laughs. This is _katharsis_. A bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition
agent, gives him a counterfeit $10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the
collection plate on Sunday, is arrested and jailed. This is also
_katharsis_. A subscriber to a newspaper, observing his name spelled
incorrectly in the report of a lodge meeting, spreads a report that the
editor of the paper did not buy Liberty bonds. This again is
_katharsis_.”[68] And this again is cheap intellectual vaudeville or--it is
clodhopperism. Something like this always happens when Mr. Mencken fingers
the diamond ideas of the world; the process of degrading intellectual
grandeur to horse sense began when he grossly misunderstood Nietzsche years
ago. By way of a last word on this idol of the emancipated Rotarian, do not
forget that Mr. Mencken, destructive critic that he is, is also given to
fulsome and extravagant praise of certain transient artists. Mr. Edgar Lee
Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_, he says, is “the most eloquent, the most
profound and the most thoroughly national volume of poetry published in
America since _Leaves of Grass_.” Conceivably, it may be the third, but is
it eloquent, is it profound? Such judgments are not uncommon when Mr.
Mencken feels a praising mood come on. III Into the critical pond presided
over by Messrs. Spingarn, Brooks, and Mencken leapt Sherman. His academic
values were in deliquescence, and he was greeted with cheers when he began
to revise his former estimates and with eulogies when he died untimely.
Much may be said for the three critics I have taken as big frogs in this
puddle: do not forget the gusto of Mr. Spingarn’s temperament, the
historical consciousness and fine humanity of Mr. Brooks, the valuable
scavenger-work of Mr. Mencken. But after all is said there is no seed, no
fertility in the viewpoint of each. We must stress their failures: the
failure of Mr. Spingarn to offer for application and development æsthetic
ideas, the failure of Mr. Brooks to give the new American writers an image
of themselves that would effectively inspire them against the crushing
forces of their environment, the failure of Mr. Mencken to escape
sophisticated superstitions as he escaped gross superstitions. Look at
their disciples and behold clearly the limitations of the pond’s masters.
Mr. Mencken has bred a score of little Menckens, men who imitate his style,
who spend their time demonstrating, as Mr. Kenneth Burke said of Mr.
Mencken, the stupidity of many a stupidity and invariably showing that it
is stupid: they have no more capacity for realising great central ideas
than Mr. Mencken. Mr. Brooks has inspired Mr. Lewis Mumford, who is a
pleasing writer on architecture, a literary critic who seizes on the
romantic elements of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and repeats with spirit
what his predecessor has said, a thinker whose general terms are vague, and
who is impractical because of his credulity as to what modern letters can
actually effect in modern society. His distinguishing trait, like Mr.
Brooks’s, is a certain fine, sensitive, generous humanity, but beware here!
Without a corresponding growth of intellectual power, a corresponding
stress on deeds, this fervour may degenerate into mere emotional bluff. And
the followers of Mr. Spingarn? Are there any now? There is an æsthetic
school of young critics, but they derive rather from Mr. Ezra Pound and the
T. S. Eliot who wrote _The Sacred Wood_. For after all Mr. Spingarn only
winded a horn and left the startled and delighted self-expressionists to
hunt for themselves. We have, it would seem, come to the end of a decade
and a half of exuberance. Enter mournfully Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch to
confess the disillusioned after-thoughts of the modern romanticist. It is a
supine admission he makes, without blushes be it added, when he says in
beginning his account of the modern temper or mood: “I have been compelled
to make references to many facts or supposed facts in biology, psychology,
and anthropology. Obviously no person is qualified to assert them all with
authority and obviously I am much less qualified than many others, but when
I state them I do so not as facts, but simply as commonplaces which we have
been taught to believe. My subject is not any series of objective facts,
but a state of mind, and in the effort to describe and account for it I am
responsible not for Truth, but for the convictions, scientific or
otherwise, which I and my contemporaries have been led to hold ... if the
tenets of Freudianism or the hypotheses of the Darwinian theory are false,
they have at least been so accepted as to influence the modern temper quite
as unmistakably as if they were true ... these supposed facts have an
emotional significance. That is as far as it is necessary to go if they are
to be used as I use them, only in the effort to account for a mood.”[69]
Shades of the heroes of the mind! Here is a critic who can entertain the
possibility that much of our contemporary “knowledge” is untrue, and then
merely wring his hands elegantly in the melancholy produced by _assuming_
that it is true. In _The Modern Temper_ (1929) romantic criticism in
America culminates in weak despair. As we should expect, there have been
departures lately. There is Mr. Walter Lippmann,[70] as able a cartographer
of the Kingdom of Whirl as Mr. Krutch. He sees clearly that the bell-tent
of civilisation is in collapse because society has no common human aim, no
hold, that is, on a center-pole capable of raising the whole structure.
“The effect of modernity, then,” he says in _A Preface to Morals_ (1929),
“is to specialise and to intensify our separated activities. Once all
things were phases of a single destiny: the church, the state, the family,
the school were means to the same end; the rights and duties of the
individual in society, the rules of morality, the themes of art, and the
teachings of science were all of them ways of revealing, of celebrating, of
applying the laws laid down in the divine constitution of the universe. In
the modern world institutions are more or less independent, each serving
its own proximate purpose, and our culture is really a collection of
separate interests each sovereign within its own realm.”[71] And the remedy
he proposes, who can quarrel with it? The “good life,” he says, is an
_acquired_ disposition,--surely an advance over the implication of the
other critics we have mentioned that somehow the “good life” would
_naturally_ come to pass, if one could only eliminate puritanic inhibitions
and flow with one’s desires. No, says Mr. Lippmann, we must develop
“detachment, understanding, and disinterestedness in the presence of
reality itself.” We must enter into a new asceticism--who would have
anticipated five years ago such a phrase from our new critics?--defined as
“an effort to overcome immaturity.” This is excellent in that it perceives
the problem and the goal of the clear-insighted modern man, but does not
Mr. Lippmann underestimate the enormous psychological difficulties that
block the passage from unregenerate to regenerate man? One has the feeling
that his is a paper solution, and one is appalled to read of his hopes for
psycho-analysis as a technique for achieving the re-education of desire.
The aim of psycho-analysis is adjustment to reality, and Mr. Lippmann
adopts the dangerous phrase. It is dangerous: for what does “adjustment” in
practice mean but taking the position of maximum comfort, the following of
the path of least resistance? Continual adjustments by beings to an
environment progressively unfavourable mean the progressive deterioration
of a species: ultimately adjustment means extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs
can give us a lesson in the fallacy of adjustment. It is farcical for this
critic to patronise Pythagoras, for instance, who “could not have known any
tested method either of equipping his followers to appreciate science or
anything besides a crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline,” as
long as we can contrast the ancient perception of the human necessity of
surmounting the environment with the contemporary belief in the value of
adjusting (merely reacting) to it. Nevertheless Mr. Lippmann among others
has articulated what will probably be the fundamental position of American
criticism in the next decade, namely, the conviction that we are thinking
and acting chaotically and senselessly, and the deep surmise that man can
“learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” The brilliant
but eccentric Mr. Waldo Frank has dwelt for some time on the dissolution of
the Mediæval Synthesis of Europe. America he announces is the grave of
Europe and he hopes for a kind of miracle: a generation within the grave of
a mystical revival. He too has had his thoughts turned to the all-important
question of a method of realising Wholeness in fact as well as in concept.
You will find his method outlined at the close of _The Re-discovery of
America_ (1929). It is, I fear, hastily constructed, and more than smacks
of amateurishness and of the armchair. One wishes that he had not rushed in
where sages fear to tread, but he has at least thrown the question of a
method for the development of human potentialities into open
discussion.[72] The most impressive of the contemporary critics who offer
us “a way out” is Mr. T. S. Eliot, but before examining him, it is proper
to repeat here that I am excluding from this paper any consideration of the
formidable opposition party to all that has been described thus far, the
new humanists whom the romanticists have found raised up against them. In
passing, I may say that I have before this dipped my freelance pen to the
humanists in salutations of great respect mingled with a few misgivings,
and I have not the least hesitation in volunteering to defend them against
the oblique attack of Mr. T. S. Eliot. This painstaking critic owes much to
Professor Babbitt, far more than does Mr. Lippmann. There is in fact much
overlapping between his views and modern humanism. Yet there is an issue
between the new humanists and Mr. T. S. Eliot: it resolves itself into the
question of Authority. Let us trace out the evolution of Mr. Eliot’s ideas
and we shall see the latent weakness of his position, and those who wish
may compare it with the new humanists’ position. In _The Sacred Wood_
(1921) he began as an acute æsthetic critic, basing the exercise of
criticism upon sensibility and intellect. He professed to be a classicist.
Opposed to romantic excesses he was, in spite of an admiration for certain
decadent poets, but was he a classicist? If so, what about the essay on
_Tradition and the Individual Talent_, in which the idea of “creative
imitation” is pushed to an extreme that makes one suspicious? Matters
became explicit a few years later when he debated with Mr. J. Middleton
Murry. In this debate Mr. Eliot admitted that such were the instabilities
and insufficiencies of private judgment and private experience that a man
should discipline himself in allegiance to some outside Authority, and for
the literary critic this meant loyalty to the classical literary tradition.
Something was here given away: the strict corroboration by personal
experiment of classical wisdom was left out. Mr. Eliot was revealed as by
disposition a neo-classicist (with some romantic elements) thoroughly
dependent upon literary authority. The next step for him, as a man too
intelligent and too serious to evade the problems of social and moral
chaos, was to acknowledge that criticism in our age could not be so limited
as it was conceived to be in _The Sacred Wood_. On the contrary, the critic
he saw must become philosophic: he must be a creator of values. But here
again he was neo-classical, for he searched for external Authority in
politics and in religion. In the former he is Royalist, in the latter
Anglo-Catholic. Turn to his essays on style and order entitled _For
Lancelot Andrewes_. They are the work of a fine judicial temperament, but
not, not at all, the work of a general in the warfare of the mind. The
distinction is worth making much of. I have elsewhere[73] analysed the
structure and procedures of Mr. Eliot’s prose to show its thoroughly
judicial characteristics: its calmness and gravity, its balance and
discriminatory powers among precedents, its fulfilment in a final
elucidation arrived at by comparisons and analyses. It is not a full-bodied
prose, the weight of the whole man concentrated on the pen, but the prose
of a judge conscious of the weight of authority _behind_, not in, him. Now
observe that in _For Lancelot Andrewes_ Mr. Eliot, like a learned judge and
with an air of profundity, is continually pointing to the tradition of a
Church, set up as an authority external to himself. He is at his best when
he presents comparatively narrow ideas, ideas about literary style for the
most part, as in his exposition of the relevant intensity of Andrewes’
prose. At his most disappointing, he ventures upon a safe common-place
generality, as when he remarks, “The greatest tragedies are occupied with
great and permanent moral conflicts.” The last is true enough, but Mr.
Eliot never talks very much or directly about this occupation, about the
stuff itself of moral conflicts. Likewise Mr. Eliot, apologist for
religion, does not write about religion: he points to _a_ Church and the
intellectual riches of its history. “For us,” he declares, “religion is of
course Christianity; and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of a
Church.” And again, “And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth
life”--but we need both the letter and the spirit! Stress on the letter
gives us legalism in religious thinking, and on the spirit gives us what
Mr. Eliot calls “_Ersatz_-religion”: the two, spirit and letter, must
correspond. There we are! the last critical “leader” in this examination
turns out to be merely sitting on a judge’s bench and therefore necessarily
inactive: he points out where Authority may be found, but one may doubt
from the evidence of his writing whether Authority resides in him. IV
Following the course of Sherman, we entered the professional literary world
and explored its criticism, coming finally to Mr. T. S. Eliot, whose latest
departure turns our eyes outwards again to the academic world, to Professor
Babbitt and humanism, or to the worlds of religion or philosophy. It
appears to me that our purely literary critics have at one point or another
all failed fundamentally: they are all leaders by default only and not by
essence. Either they are bound to move towards the position of Mr. Joseph
Wood Krutch, who realises that “all the bases upon which modern despair
rests were laid joyously by people who were quite sure that they were
serving humanity, and all the chains by which we are now bound so much more
firmly to earth than we want to be were forged amidst shouts of triumph,”
or they are spying some loophole which on inspection seems not to exist.
But in either case, and this is a hopeful sign, they are all converging
toward a common realisation that King Whirl must, if possible, be deposed.
The goal is seen: the reconstructed human spirit. But without adequate
leadership how may we start to approach it? Well, it is easy to exaggerate
the power of literary criticism. If certain things in our culture have gone
dead, criticism cannot revive them. The essential “about-ness” of the
critical activity limits it to the guidance, stimulation, and judging of
things in which there is still some life. But assuming that a funeral
ceremony such as Mr. Krutch has conducted is still premature,--and it is
premature so long as any doubt exists of final decay,--we may then try to
conceive of what a genuine leader in critical thought would be like, and by
this ideal measure ourselves. Objectivity in judgment would be one of the
principal marks of the leader. That requires a sufficient scale of values
to stand outside not only the frame of one’s century but outside the frames
of all centuries. It means the ascertainment of _primary_ laws in our
field, which may be possible as it has been possible in physics to say that
a few laws are true regardless of what frame of time and space one may be
in. Objectively considered, literature may be found to have been in
decline, not just for a century and a half or just for six hundred years
but almost from its classical sources and from the Scriptures of ancient
lands. Is this depressing? It is not depressing to contemplate a
magnificent mountain from its base. On the contrary, a real view of the
heights of Parnassus and Olympus may inspire an uncommon elevation of
aim--a second mark of the critical leader; it seems to me unnecessary to
argue that the critics we have looked at do not realise how high man has
ascended in the past or can conceivably ascend now. Their ideas of human
greatness are small. Really, _are_ we practitioners of literary criticism
distinguished by any grandeur in breadth and elevation of thought? No one
can believe it. Nor can I believe that we approximate the ideal critic in
passion, in a burning unquenchable indomitable love of perfect things. This
is the spirit that giveth life to standards that otherwise would seem too
skeletal, too non-human to be glamorous and magical in their remoteness:
this is the spirit that killeth despair and compromise. Infused with it,
our imagined critic becomes single-minded and proof against deviations and
resting-places. Finally, he would, I conceive, be distinguished by an
immense capacity for relating deeds to words. His interest would not cease
with a beautiful formulation, but would continue until the formulation was
embodied in experience. Not words alone, not deeds alone, but words _and_
actions would be his great desideratum. Of whom am I thinking? It is
dangerous in calling attention to concepts or principles to cite examples
until the concept or principle or, in our case, ideal has been thoroughly
understood, and I dare not hope for that within the space of this paper.
But with a caution not to debate the achievements of him but only to study
his framework, I take the risk of nominating Matthew Arnold as having the
build of a great critic. We need in our national letters a critic of the
stamp and dimensions of Arnold. V I append _The Prayer of a Young Critic_.
But we have heard rumour of the Mistral. It is a cold wind that blows from
the heights, Day after day it sweeps steadily down, Cold and from above,
changing the air In the lowlands. We are dwellers in lowlands And our air
has been breathed before. It is A sultry air: men talk to each other In
haze and their words are close and fevered. A warm breeze crosses our
little hillocks, And then the dust settles down again. Not near the Alps do
we live. Great Genius, Grant us an electric climate! Touch us With snowy
fire, send the Mistral to sweep Bare our plain and proclaim the gaiety Of
altitudes, the glory of clear stars, The exaltation of the sun burning The
rare air. Great Genius, send the Mistral! FOOTNOTES [63] From _Points of
View_, 1924, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher. [64] From _Americans_,
1922, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher. [65] The rest of the sentence is
“and he sees the common weal as the mighty rock in the shadow of which his
little life and personality are to be surrendered, if need be, as things
negligible and transitory.” [66] Also he could have mastered the philosophy
of Mr. John Dewey and made his “religion of democracy” more respectable.
[67] A perusal of the _Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman_, published
after this essay was written, increases my confidence in the diagnosis
above of Sherman’s weaknesses. Mr. P. E. More wondered many years ago
whether his young reviewer did not have “an inclination to avoid the
central problem.” Later, he warned Sherman: “I do not like to see a man of
your ability and insight deliberately taking up the job of whitewasher” for
democracy. And finally Mr. More said: “Yours is but a sickly sort of
democracy at bottom, and needs a doctor.” [68] From _Prejudices: Fourth
Series_, Alfred A. Knopf, publisher. [69] From _The Modern Temper_,
Harcourt, Brace & Co., publisher. [70] Mr. Lippmann is not a literary
critic but his views are pertinent to this discussion. [71] The Macmillan
Company, publisher. [72] Even in a footnote I mention Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn
with some reluctance, and only because there are so few critics among us
who have any interest in trying to plot a direction for the future. Pauline
Christianity (grossly libelled by him as akin to the degenerate puritanism
of our day) must be destroyed, he preaches. Salvation lies in a fusion of
Hellenism (Science) and Judaism (which he interprets selectively and
sentimentally). He is a suggestive writer: he is also a prig, a special
pleader, and embarrassing in his frequent intervals of self-pity and in his
intrusions of hearth-side intimacies (proper for telling only to his
closest friends) into the public medium of print. One cannot take this
muddled romanticist seriously. [73] In _Style and Form in American Prose_
(1929). _Behaviour and Continuity_ BERNARD BANDLER II I Until humanism and
psychology are more suitably defined than they are at present the task of
establishing their relations is hazardous. Psychology is still in a
primitive state: its basic problems and principles are disputed, its
relation to the other sciences is undetermined, and its method is loose and
unsystematic. That it may be a science, however, is indubitable. The
constitution of human nature is open to analysis: human behaviour no less
than the stars and plants may be observed and hypothesis may be employed to
order its seeming irregularities. But the common scientific ground of
purpose which underlies the differences of psychological theories does not
unite the humanists, and the problem of stating the nature and scope of
humanism is correspondingly difficult. The absence of a common scientific
ground, of an accepted subject matter and a technique, enables any man
interested in human activities to call himself a humanist and to maintain
his contention, whereas no man, unless technically trained, will consider
himself a psychologist. He may observe society and deliver himself of
apothegms and epigrams that characterise people truly--like the French
moralists, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and Joubert. He may trace the
influence of ideas on conduct, as Mr. Babbitt has done. But that is ethics
and philosophy, not psychology. Psychology limits itself to studying how
human beings behave and to reducing their most complex actions to primitive
elements. Ethics evaluates their activities and judges them. So, however
confusing the positions of contemporary psychologists and humanists, if we
keep in mind the formal aspects of psychology and ethics, a study of the
relations of the two may be instructive. Upon psychology as a science, as
upon physics and chemistry, humanism can have nothing to say. It may
examine the logic of psychology and criticise its presuppositions, although
that is properly the task of the cosmologist, like Mr. Whitehead. But
towards the conclusion of psychology, the “laws” it may formulate,
humanism’s only possible attitude is one of interested acceptance. An
ethics should not prescribe the limits of science, nor dictate the nature
of its results. And if the science deals successfully with human actions,
ethics, instead of criticising, should respect its results, that ideals may
not be founded on ignorance and fancy but rather on knowledge.
Unfortunately, the amount of psychology which is scientific and relevant to
human nature is small. Much of it reduces to physiology. The chemistry of
the glands and blood, the nature of sensation, feeling, emotion, and of the
thinking processes, and those predispositions of the body which we call
instincts are ultimately problems of physiology and await the development
of that science for their solution. What distinguishes psychology from
physiology is the study of behaviour in society: the transmutation of the
instincts and temperament into habits and sentiments. Of psychology proper
we have, so far, elaborate programmes, a bewildering variety of
theories,--part epistemology, part logic, part metaphysics, and part
mythology,--a vast accumulation of data, some classifications, and hardly
any science. Yet the studies of “types,” “personality,” “culture forms,”
and particularly the researches of psychiatrists contain many accurate
descriptions of human behaviour. Their endeavour to explain the most
sublimated actions, by reference to the constitution of the organism and to
the determining factors of its environment, approaches sound science. But
“behaviour in society” and “the determining factors of environment” are
vague phrases. If there is to be a science of behaviour and society two
conditions are necessary: first, that the organisms in spite of individual
variations should be essentially the same; and second, that the environment
to which they react should be stable and limited. For if each organism were
essentially unique there would be no basis for the science of psychology,
and if the environment were constantly changing there would be no
conditions and no control for studying the organism. But human environment,
the totality of forces which affect us and help satisfy our needs, is not
stable and limited. It is plastic and relative. Tradition and convention
are added to the forces composing an animal’s environment. These multiply
the possibilities of behaviour indefinitely. In proportion as a man frees
himself from a blind adherence to custom, the more personal his environment
will be. To know such a man’s environment is to become acquainted with a
unique world. It is to know not only his ancestry, his history, his habits,
his occupation, and his social milieu, but also his purposes, the ends
which he consciously seeks and which are the meaning of his actions to him.
It is to know his mind. But a mind, being unique, can never be absolutely
known. Even if it were completely revealed in behaviour, conversation, and
writing, and if all the occasions that have served to form it were
discovered, one could never be certain to capture a man’s understanding of
his words, or his interpretation of his attitude and actions. Behaviourists
are therefore right in excluding consciousness, purpose, and mind from
psychology. These are inaccessible to science: first, because they can
never be precisely seized; and second, because they introduce an indefinite
number of objects which preclude a limited and stable environment. Mind can
reflect upon all objects of experience, and these in turn can become
objectives of action. So soon as this happens the exact control which
experimental science demands is prevented and the progress of psychology is
blocked. It thus seems impossible for psychology to deal with the most
interesting aspect of human behaviour, those where action is guided and
dominated by thought and is not blindly reflexive. To avoid this limitation
of psychology certain behaviourists, in the name of what they conceive to
be mechanism, have denied the efficacy of purpose and mind altogether.
According to the argument, consciousness, purpose, and mind are waste
products, attendant upon natural processes, like sparks from a locomotive.
Or they are like the decorations on illuminated manuscripts, illustrating
the text, and quite superfluous. Otherwise they would be forces,
inexplicably interfering with natural processes. These arguments fail by
misconstruing the notion of purpose, which is not a force but an end.
Purpose does not direct action but _is_ the direction which action takes.
It is the rational explication of the objects of our desires and wishes.
The end has no initial power, but, once thought has discerned it as the
true object of our desires and they have attached themselves to it, as a
lover to his mistress, so that satisfaction cannot be found elsewhere, then
the end acquires a deputed power which it may never surrender. Since
purpose defines the objects of desire which thereby become objectives of
action, it is a determining factor of human behaviour, and the so-called
mechanistic arguments against it are invalid. Yet, since science deals with
material and efficient causes only, psychologists are compelled to
disregard formal and final causes, purposes, and ends. II The goal of
ethics, on the other hand, is to discover the most organised system of
ends, of goods, which a rational life can realise. This goal of ethics can
never be fully achieved, for so long as man acts and reflects he may pursue
and conceive novel ends. But though the most elaborate system of ethics is
in origin an expression of personal preferences, it is not therefore
arbitrary and unjustifiable by reason. My values have their roots in my
nature. I can exhibit them, demonstrate that they are mutually consistent
and do not defeat the interests which underlie them. Furthermore I can
declare that if any one honestly questioned his heart he might find that my
values represented it. It is not to psychology, then, that one must turn
for knowledge of human goods. For psychology, although it may analyse the
efficient causes of desire, cannot estimate the value of its objects, of
the ideal form of a rational life. If psychologists talk of a normal
organism, they mean one whose desires are adjusted to its environment, the
one most likely to survive. If they speak of superior organisms and
civilisation, they mean increased ability for adjustment to a more complex
environment. Thus though psychologists speak of normal and civilised they
are unable either to define or to evaluate them. Knowledge of human goods
is furnished by philosophers, when they are frank and speak for themselves;
by the founders of religions, the saints, and the mystics; by the poets,
and chiefly, as Socrates knew, by knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge,
though it may first look back upon the behaviour studied by psychology,
moves in the opposite direction toward the objects sought. These it
endeavours to comprehend, to purge of contradictions, to regard intently
_sub specie mortalitatis_. From the vantage point of death one becomes a
spectator of human life. Thought acquires the prestige of impersonality,
without the sacrifice of its warm interest in life. The point of view of
death differs from seeing things _sub specie æternitatis_ both in essence
and in purpose. It does not abolish time or elevate mind to the
contemplation of a necessary order, which is the function of seeing things
_sub specie æternitatis_, although consideration of death (as in the Phædo)
may do this. It enables one to regard life in its totality and, without
projecting it against the background of nature, to estimate each partial
aim in the perspective of all others, and thus to distinguish the objects
one truly desires. The effort to detach oneself from the present and to
incorporate it with the past and future in a satisfactory whole, which
psychology does not attempt, is what makes action ethical. In the unique
self the past exists in memory, which is one’s personal tradition. Thus
memory, besides being the mother of the muses, is the mother of ethics and
of rational action. It enables us to confront our present condition, its
projects, hopes, and fears, with the past, and by comparison to evaluate
the present action. It enables us to utilise the whole of our experience in
the active organisation of our life and thus to attain a continuity of
being. Consequently a succession of full moments does not, as Pater
thought, constitute a full life. For each of those separate selves which a
past moment represented and which the subsequent one renounced lives in
memory to advance its claim to existence against the present; and only
similar circumstances are needed, a chance odour, or gesture, or phrase, to
revive it, and make one feel the desolation of its loss. These
intermittances of the heart, as Proust calls them, are dependent on the
infinite passive occasions of sensation, and since they never represented
an ideal actively striven for, no analysis is able to penetrate to an
underlying unity. On the other hand the consequence of dispossessing
oneself of the past in order to live in the moment is a reduction of the
personality to indecision and apathy. Besides, the past preserved in memory
and the future that we anticipate enrich the present and give it its
fulness of being, as a musical phrase has more significance in a symphony
than when played in isolation. As one interrogates the present, with its
What shall I do? What shall I be? it expands to absorb the relevant
testimony that relates it to the past and to the future. Ordinarily the
present includes a fairly definite content, some concrete situation and
prospect, often trivial, as a dinner to be ordered. Choice when it is not
automatic can easily review the relevant factors; one’s favourite dishes,
the season of the year; possible illness on the morrow. At other times the
relevant relations are endless, particularly when an irrevocable choice
forces us to discriminate among all the elements of our being: love,
honour, country, and religion each claiming our allegiance. The infinite
variety of situations that may arise and the impossibility of relating them
to a definite past and a definite future are responsible for the
differences of ethical systems. A philosopher’s conception of the typical
situation will define his problems and dictate the general terms of his
solution. Buddha saw sorrow and suffering as the main portion of human
existence. His endeavour, therefore, was to emancipate mankind from them.
Aristotle started with man’s desire for happiness. Therefore he analysed
the actions of men, the pursuit of wealth, of honour, and of knowledge to
see which conformed most with the essential nature of man. Amiel’s
situation was intensely personal, but he stated his problem in universal
terms. Amiel recognised from his youth the necessity of an organising
purpose and a continuous effort. His culture and sympathies, however,
extended to all human actions; to limit his life to one of the manifold
beings he felt contained within himself seemed a violation of the ideal.
Now what is the context, the appropriate situation and problem, from which
ethics should start? Is it some general aspect of life common to all
people, like sorrow or suffering, or the generic nature of man, or the
attempt to discover an organising purpose? Or is it our immediate context,
the world to which our traditions, conduct, desires, and ambitions have
engaged us? It is this world that confronts us daily. Our actions in it are
the theme of the novel, the drama, and the epic, which are an almost
inexhaustible field for ethical study. Each work is a representation of an
action, and in proportion as the writer concentrates his imagination on the
situation before him, on his _donnée_, and reveals its possibilities, the
action will illustrate some ideal. Literature always retains the concrete
immediacy of life, the movement of an action never being from a situation
to a principle. But all the comprehensiveness of a principle, the
innumerable unsuspected relations which it opens when once intuition has
leapt the gap between a formula and the fact it covers is implied by an
action at its close. The characters are still flesh and blood, but as they
finally define themselves their situation includes all their relevant past
and all that is significant in their future, so that they become
transparent, and the whole moral world which they represent shines clearly
through them. Hence it is possible that a profound ethics and a great work
of art may introduce us to the same moral world, so that the orientation of
our being, emotional and intellectual, after reading the _Ethics_ of
Spinoza and _The Wings of the Dove_ say, will be identical. If ethics is to
be persuasive and reasonable it must be founded on the most complete
experience possible. The context from which it arises, as in life and
literature, should be rich and concrete. The defect of most ethical systems
is that they quit life too abruptly. Instead of studying the complex
conditions which underlie any achieved good, as psychology is contented to
do, philosophers ignore them, except in their generality, and so attain a
factitious unity. Consequently rationalistic philosophers invert the proper
procedure of thought. They start from the typical, the general, and the
rational, whereas these are the ultimate fruits of reflection. When an
ethics, however, repudiates the purpose of rationalism as well as its
method, it severs itself from all connection with the good. If it speaks of
goods and ideals, it speaks of them only provisionally and instrumentally.
Its excessive preoccupation with the conditions marks the return of ethics
to that immersion in the present from which it initially arose. Humanism
differs from other ethical systems by its data and by its method. Its data
are each individual in his context; his inherited values, his body, his
capabilities, and the relations formed by them. It is the task of each
individual to preserve himself in the world, and to establish a continuity
of being. The essence of humanism is the refusal to allow any sudden break
of development, any shift of basis that arbitrarily repudiates one’s past,
such as breaking one’s word. Its method is to survey life in the light of
death. By this means one’s personal situation can be enlarged by history,
and by the contemplation of the ideals which men pursue. The more vivid the
conception of an ideal society and a rational life within it, so long as it
does not weaken one’s personal reality, the more likely is life to yield
happiness. Psychology and ethics deal with the same subject matter, human
behaviour, but they regard it from opposite points of view. Psychology
regards it externally as a physical phenomenon having already taken place
in time. Like any other science psychology tries to correlate its diverse
data and to reduce them to the simplest elements possible. But since
psychology requires that the organisms which it studies should be
essentially the same and that the environment to which they react should be
stable and limited, it cannot deal with the behaviour dominated by mind.
For mind is unique and its possible objects are infinite. Its language is
that of meaning, purpose, end. The effort of a moral individual is to know
what he wants, to know his mind. Hence ethics regards human behaviour
internally and as directed towards the future. The goal of ethics is the
satisfactory synthesis of the unique perspectives of different minds. It
approximates this synthesis by studying the dialectic of desire, the
logical implications of each purpose in relation to all other objects. In
this way ethics will describe ideally how an individual may harmonise with
himself and with society, which psychology can never do, and thus point the
way to happiness. _The Well of Discipline_ SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS The
lapidary precedes the historian, and the sound of the mallet is heard in
the land chipping _Hic Jacet_ on the monuments which humanism has erected,
with an epitaph which runs blithely thus: “Humanism enjoyed four hundred
years of prosperity in the later world and then gave way to Modernism. From
Mid-Fifteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century, Humanism traced the patterns of
the Occident. Then, with a dramatic flourish comparable to that of the
Renaissance, a new pattern was superimposed on the palimpsest of the West,
based on the concepts and methods of Natural Science.” Meantime, while the
historian waits for a deeper perspective, I am writing in the belief that
there is more vitality in humanism than the lapidaries have given it credit
for. Humanity, at all events, is perennial, and men are not likely to
forget for long that science is not ineluctable nature itself, but only
human knowledge, and that all knowledge, even knowledge of nature, is
pursued at will for whatever it is worth to them in their own esteem--that
behind the pursuit of natural science lies the authority of the evaluating
mind. The human worth of the sciences, I ardently echo, is beyond compare.
They have, it is true, played a sardonic trick on their pursuers, and have
seemed for the moment honestly to nullify any significant worth in human
existence. But men may still recollect that it is they themselves who have
made the nullifying discovery. They are worth at least what that discovery
implies--an intelligence, a power to think and judge, and an impulse to act
selectively on the basis of a sense of values--or why have they pursued the
sciences at all? With these resources to start with, and science in their
scrip, they may also have the humour to see that there remains to them, as
of old, the eternal task of making the best of it--the very task to which
science itself is a contribution. When this perception shall have grown
lively enough, humanism will again come into its own. Granted a will to
return to humanism, however, the return itself will not be simple.
Something, we shall find, has been lost in the meantime. Value and
significance are not handed to us on a platter; they are themselves
products of thought. If life, then, has seemed to be emptied of them by the
findings of natural science, it is equally possible to suppose that this
bathos is due to a diluted capacity for thought in precisely the field of
thought where value and significance are conceived. This is the possibility
that I have set out to examine. The broad hint of it lies on the surface.
If discipline of the mind has any virtue--and modernism itself with its
austere regimen is its current champion--that virtue has been lifted from
the field of thought where human values are explicitly involved, to a field
of thought from which they are explicitly banned. By every calculation,
therefore, the minds thus affected should have lost something of their
capacity to think in the undisciplined area, and should have lost something
of their powers to conceive or discover the values that, under happier
auspices, give life its significance. I In imagination we dramatise the
Renaissance as a sweeping revolution. Whether humanists or modernists, we
look upon it as a beginning, or a resumption, at all events as the
turning-point from which we are the continuators in a straight line.
Historians of philosophy, of letters, of politics, of science all concur.
More impressively still the men of the Renaissance themselves were quite
conscious of the change--Bessarion, Aldus, Erasmus, da Vinci, Galileo,
Bruno, to take names at random. The shift of curiosity from the divine to
the secular, and the responsive shift of discipline from scholasticism to
humanism opened out new vistas to the voyaging mind. It would be hard to
exaggerate the almost theatric reversals which the times witnessed and
welcomed. Sweeping as it was, however, the revolution of the Renaissance
was less radical than that of the second half of the nineteenth century. In
contrast to the latter the changes wrought by the Renaissance were on the
level of explicit ideas. The essential stuff of thought was unchanged. New
ideas were astir, but the elements of which they were built were the old
elements. Theology gave way to humanism; God as the centre gave way to man
as the centre. But after all, God had been conceived as a father and man as
a child of God, and, God or man, their psychology was the same. The very
literature which had laid the premisses of mediæval thought--the
Bible--permeated the consciousness of the humanistic period yet more
deeply. The shift of discipline from sacred to profane letters, as a
consequence, made no profound break in the consciousness itself. The major
impulses of the two periods blended easily and naturally. The religious
impulse of the Middle Ages lent itself triumphantly to literary expression;
there was the _Divine Comedy_. The literary impulse of the Renaissance lent
itself no less triumphantly to religious themes; there was _Paradise Lost_.
Natural science, indeed, began its modern course under the impulse of the
Renaissance. Still, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the
common discipline of the West was humanistic, natural science did not
profoundly alter the minds of men. It was an incident, a special play of
curiosity and thought on the part of men whose minds were formed and
informed in the medium of humane letters. Even Doctor Johnson had his
chemical apparatus. Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century did
the common discipline of letters begin to give way. Up to that time,
therefore, there had been a basic continuity in the cultivated
consciousness of the West, not only from the Middle Ages but from high
antiquity itself. For the Renaissance was avowedly a resumption of the
broken threads of ancient thought. And its humanism, however loosely it
spliced the break, was evidence that here too the essential elements of its
reason were the same. What so intoxicated the Renaissance mind was the very
spontaneity of its grasp of ancient ideas. And this affinity has been the
mark of humanism ever since. Now continuity is not necessarily a virtue.
Nothing, alas, is so persistent as error and evil. One aspect of the shift
to modernism, however, seems to me itself an evil, promising persistence--a
rupture at the basis of reason. Modernism, indeed, also had its dramatic
confrontations, its moments of intense self-consciousness. New conceptions
came into tragic conflict with old, yielding many a Robert Elsmere, and
many a family cleavage like that between the elder and the younger Gosse.
Such conflicts are disconcerting and painful, and for a generation or two
terribly impressive. It is not to such overt changes, however, that I
refer. They belong to the normal life of the mind. It is the very function
of intellect to incur and mediate them. One is inclined to bid the
intellect be a man and face the frank hazards of the life of reason. I
refer rather to a change, not in ideas, but prior to ideas, among the
ultimate premisses of thought, in the discipline by which the powers of the
mind and the fortunes of ideas are themselves in a large measure disposed.
And this change, it seems to me, has proved a scotching of the goose that
lays the golden egg. II Where is the bottom of the well into which
discipline--vaunted so highly by both humanist and modernist--is poured?
Discipline, as distinguished from any guise of propaganda, is a delicate
affair. Its concern is not for the specific ideas with which perforce it
must do its deed, and which it pours into the depths in an unremitting
stream. Its subtle task is to enrich and enhance the powers of thought and
yet leave them free--free to think, and free to judge even the ideas by
which they are enriched. The bottom lies deeper, therefore, than the level
at which the Huxleys, the Spencers, the Eliots placed the controversy--the
relative merits of two sorts of knowledge, of Homer and Sophocles, of
Plato’s Ideas and Cæsar’s battles, of _Jerusalem Recovered_ and _Paradise
Lost_, as against the constitution of matter and the laws of nature. These
relative merits are themselves matters of judgment, as the controversy
witnesses. And it is precisely the quality of such judgment that is
momentously at stake. Of course the Hellenist must know his Greek and the
astronomer his physics. They are specialists, and the question is not of
them. It is a question of that common humanity of which Hellenist and
astronomer, poet and chemist, man of leisure and man of affairs are alike
responsible members. As between humanist and modernist a sort of official
decision has already been rendered, and the common discipline, together
with the faith that animates it, has gone over to the sciences. Is it
ill-humoured to point out that the decision itself has been arrived at and
progressively confirmed in that field of judgment from which discipline has
been progressively withdrawn? At all events, it is toward that deeper level
that I am delving, to get at the roots of that common humanity. The
Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man is a biological way of dealing
with a reflection old in the tradition of humanism. From Plato down,
curiosity has toyed with theories of the origin of language. Language is
patently artificial, a device, a product of human ingenuity. That a child
is born without speech might mean nothing, since there are instincts that
emerge only in the course of development. But language differs from
language; every term in every language is arbitrary; the child, whatever
his blood, picks up the speech of his community; individuals differ in the
extent and character of their deliberate acquisition. All these
considerations point to its artificiality. One speaks, indeed, before one’s
mind is mature enough to reflect upon the accomplishment. But that is the
very point, as will appear in a moment. Whatever the theory, the origin of
speech implies ancestors before speech. And those ancestors--is it
fantastic to identify them, in a slightly modified version of our
evolutionary history, with the prehuman race of the Darwinian rendering? We
should not, I think, have called them men. For bound up with language is
all that we think of as human--the power of communication, the fixation and
tradition of thought, the comparison and criticism of ideas, co-operation
on the basis of common principles, all history and philosophy, all
literature and science, the very process of reason itself prior to its
expression. I say reason, not intelligence. Intelligence itself--a primary
mystery--is scarcely the monopoly of men. The cat here on the hearth has a
share of it, and the mouse of which she is apparently dreaming. It is not
intelligence that distinguishes the human species sweepingly from the
brute, but a particular deployment of it, a way of using it or managing it,
that we call _reason_. To linger in imagination over this moment of
evolution is to linger over a transition from the dumb fluidity of animal
consciousness to its articulation by the use of language. Sheer animal
consciousness may alight, perhaps, upon any imaginable concept. Its
rational defect is its inability to return after departure to the same
spot. Who by taking pains could return again to precisely the number 91 but
for the articulating, identifying, stabilising symbol? The rational use of
the native intelligence thus hangs upon an ability to identify particles of
consciousness arbitrarily shaped, to quit them, and then to return. And
speech serves this end; so far as it is carried it precipitates fluid
consciousness into stable, negotiable blocks for the architectural
structures of thought. Now it is true that what is original, what is new,
what is invented or discovered by the thinking mind itself emerges, not in
the articulate particles--they are perforce old stuff--but in the
perception by the intelligence of relations between them. This spontaneous
perception of relationships is the play of reason; thought is a sort of
creative miracle. On the other hand--and this is the point I am driving
at--just because thought is the perception of relationships between
particles of old stuff, the particles themselves condition these
perceptions. I see only such relationships as hold between the particles I
happen to possess; certainly I can see none between such as I do not
possess. And those I have are none of my own creation. They are handed down
to me. In this sense the power of thought the “faculty” of reason, is a
_tradition_. In fancy I may picture a Romulus--abandoned on a hillside and
suckled by a wolf--inventing for himself a system of symbols with which to
articulate his own fluid consciousness, conning them into spontaneity, and
building them into thought. But in reality he would not--he could not. The
actual articulations with which one thinks are not native to the
consciousness. Who of us can count more than a stray one or two of his own
invention, even with the hint and model of a whole armory of them already
in possession? They are, on the contrary, a heritage. And what one can
think is conditioned by that heritage--such items of it as through hap or
care one has previously acquired. All that I, for instance, can think in
the field of chemistry is sharply limited to what I can construe with the
articulate particles in that area of my consciousness. In my actual
experience that area has been poorly endowed. All that I can think there I
could say in a bad quarter of an hour. And what I can think there is
cabined and cribbed by the special particles I happen to possess. This
analysis, so obviously valid in any special field of thought in which one
is aware of one’s ignorance, holds no less, it seems to me, for that
universal ignorance in which all of us are born. If it does hold there, it
may stand as one version of the hypothesis of human evolution--rational
mind out of animal consciousness, man out of brute. The change that
effected this evolution was not accomplished, however, once for all in some
remote past. The outer device was transmissible, and hence became a racial
characteristic. But the change itself must still be re-enacted in every
growing child. Something of it is re-enacted in the emergence of every idea
in the rational mind. How far it is carried and how complete the evolution
depends upon deliberate cultivation. Intelligence is pure gift, the prior
condition and animating agent of all thought. Whether intelligence itself
may be increased by exercise is a matter of faith or doubt, as one chooses.
In face of a primary mystery one can only be humble and dumb. But of that
ingenious artifice, the arbitrary articulation of the consciousness into
stable particles, there can be no doubt. It is a human invention in human
hands. What can be done with these particles by way of thought depends in a
given mind upon their range, the richness of their substance, their
stability, and their clarity. And they can, with care, be extended,
enriched, stabilised, clarified. That there are larger units, whole
structures of thought, with which discipline may be occupied goes without
saying. Not all the heritage of the civilised mind is deposited in these
particles. But the larger units are themselves built of the smaller, and
what any mind makes of them hangs on its prior possession of the elements
of which they are built, and the quality of those elements. In childhood
one may have read, say, _Gulliver_, or _Through the Looking Glass_, with
delight, and in maturity may still read them with delight. The outer
symbols are the same now as then, but the responsive thoughts are not. In
response to each symbol now there rises richer substance than the mind then
possessed, grounds for relationships which then escaped detection. The two,
indeed--particle and structure--are inseparable in practice. It is in use
that the particles have accumulated their substance and quality; it is by
finding them in use that the mind identifies and enriches and clarifies
them for itself. But it is they, I think--the ultimate premisses of all
thought and the basis of all understanding--that lie at the bottom of the
well into which discipline is poured. For in the first place they lie at
the deepest level to which discipline can go. That is something. But by a
happy fortuity there, at the very node between animal consciousness and
rational thought, they occupy a strategic position. Through them the fluid
streams of consciousness, rising from below, are articulated for
thought--and one thinks what he can with the shapes thus formed. And
through these same shapes come the chief enrichments of the consciousness
from above. For in reality what I apprehend of the thoughts of others is
not their thoughts but my own. It is what I build in my own mind with the
particles of my own consciousness called up by the symbols they have used.
They are the determinants, coming and going, and a discipline that thickens
and deepens and clarifies them enhances at one stroke both the give and the
take of the mind, its power to think and its power to learn. They lie at a
strategic point, moreover, in another and no less momentous transaction.
They not only articulate the individual mind for thinking; coming from a
common tradition they tend, in the measure in which that tradition is
mastered, to articulate disparate minds alike. Only so can two minds think
the same thought. It is here that mind comes together with mind--or forever
fails to come together. And situated between two realms of freedom--the
wild realm of animal consciousness and the cultivated realm of reason--they
alone are amenable to coercion. Arbitrary agreements, sheer conventions,
subsequent to all native idiosyncrasies and prior to all conflict of
prejudice or opinion, they are open to utter community. And since in
relation to all thinking they are the ultimate premisses, they afford the
unquestioned common grounds imperative for mutual understanding and
community of idea. Discipline can thus bring its pressures to bear upon
them with a clear conscience, assured that here it can do its essential
task without violating its own principles--cultivate the individual
judgment without infringing upon its freedom, and bring mind into community
with mind without the weakness of assumption or the affront of dogmatism.
Assured, too, that in a sort of beneficent circle community itself breeds
both mind and further community. For given a broad community in these
particles, the common legacy comes the purer to its inheritors; recurrence
of each particle confirms and enriches and clarifies it in the experience
of each mind. In a community without community, on the other hand,
occurrence and recurrence tend rather to lead it astray and confuse it; and
though men talk in common symbols, they build them into tacit obliquities
of mutual incomprehension. Is it too much to suggest, in passing, that the
phenomenon of the brilliant period, the curious clustering of great names
in the bead-roll of history, may be explained as a moment when by a
community of mind with mind, here at the basis of all thought, a fine
individual clarity and a lively spontaneity of mutual understanding have
lifted the current of ideas to a high level? At all events, by such
community the capacity of the mind both to think and to learn is heightened
and the ardour of thought is stimulated, expression meeting comprehension,
and comprehension quickening the impulse to think. III I have gone a long
way about and brought up with a conclusion that on its own showing should
be as valid for modernism as for humanism. That, indeed, is my own sense of
it--that here is the organic economy of thought in whatever field. And in
fact, as I have intimated, its application is likely to be most obvious in
the sciences, which we come upon after the mind is in some measure formed.
Each science has a special articulation and nomenclature outside our normal
experience, without which we can think but meagrely and vaguely in that
area. The part they play there is evident. To these articulate particles it
gives precise definition, at once for the sake of accuracy of calculation
and for the sake of mutual understanding and wide co-operation among those
who pursue it. Incidentally by its technology it escapes the loose
corruptions with which lay usage always threatens a vernacular. The
extraordinary results of the discipline which establishes these
articulations, these precisions, and these communities need no bush. It is
perhaps less obvious that discipline is even more imperative in that other
area which the casual, voluble experience of living begins to articulate
before we are aware, laying the premisses of that common mind which we tend
to take for granted as a native gift. Though it is not a native gift, no
man feels deficient in it, as Descartes pointed out. What it yields him is
life as he knows it; it is his apprehension of reality. In one sense this
trust is his intellectual virtue. It marks his faith in the judgments of
reason--the best reason he knows. He may be aware of his ignorance in this
or that field of knowledge--know that he knows nothing of astronomy, of
Homer, of plumbing, of torts. But no one knows everything; these ignorances
are comparable to those of other men; by turning his mind to them he could
master them. By turning his mind! This contrast between _mind_, on the one
hand, and on the other hand specific knowledge to which a _mind_ may be
turned, is the very heart of the conflict between humanist and modernist.
To the modernist, justifiably proud of his special methods, that mind which
comes to him unaware is a casual and amateur affair. As a process of reason
it is the way fools think, and asses, and the cohorts of stupidity. Well,
it is. To the humanist, however, this liability is precisely its momentous
importance. Here is mind itself by which man becomes human out of brute,
mind in symmetry as it develops by confronting life and carrying on the
adventure. According to its competence it apprehends the scene, the play,
and the players, conceives the significance of the plot, exercises its
judgment, lays its guiding principles, and conducts its affairs in wisdom
or unwisdom, justice or injustice, harmony or inharmony. That it may be the
mind of a fool is always its tragic possibility. In shifting the basic
common discipline from humane letters to natural science, then, modernism
has, in so far, _abandoned the mind_. I say this in conscious enjoyment of
hyperbole. There remains just so much of mind as develops in casual
experience--that corrupting casual experience which science so sedulously
avoids in its technology. But the point at issue is one of discipline, the
conscious extension of mental competence beyond the limits of casual
experience. Plainly the discipline of natural science neglects much of the
mind as irrelevant. For natural science is an attempt to picture and
understand the material universe as it still would be if the knower were
not in it--things and their relations to each other. The virtue sought by
the man of science is the ability to ignore what he, by the accident of his
conscious existence, thrusts into the situation. Obviously this discipline
will articulate the consciousness for thought only here within this field
of knowledge--among things and their relations, to the rigid exclusion of
the knower and his affairs. Humane letters, on the other hand, make no such
exclusion. They too deal with things and their relations. But they include
what natural science ignores--the knower and his responsive evaluation of
what he knows. Literature looks out from the common centre at which the
experience of life itself places us. It is an imaginative, reflective
extension of that experience. And it does directly what experience itself
does only indirectly if at all, for being articulate or nothing--symbol and
meaning forever hand in glove--it specifically articulates the reader’s
mind, enriching and clarifying the premisses of consciousness with which in
turn that mind thinks in the field of common human responsibility. Here is
the telling difference between the literate and the empiric mind--not in
intelligence, not in specific knowledge, but in the substance and quality
of the premisses of thought. Literature uses the unprecise vernacular, it
is true; but that is its virtue. For the vernacular, in contrast with any
and all technologies, is the idiom of the mind itself, its fundamental
humanising tradition. It is the essential historic feat of any
civilisation, not so much perhaps to have conceived its guiding
ideas--ideas change--as, in conceiving them, to have slowly evolved the
articulate elements by which its heritors may conceive their own. Nature
cares nothing for them or for what is made of them. They are none of hers.
We come by them only through familiar contact with the tradition which has
shaped and accumulated them. Here, then, is the great human task--now for
the first time in the history of the West abandoned to the mercies of
casual experience. Man is a social being in more than his habits and his
institutions. His humanity itself hangs on his sociability. Deprive him of
his social legacy of articulations and he is once again the sub-human
animal. It was the essence of humanism as a discipline that it attempted,
not to inculcate a doctrine, but to carry on and on this ultimate
humanising process. And in this it served three ends, distinct but
interdependent--mind, community, and the tradition on which both mind and
community depend. IV From Plato to Irving Babbitt humanists have been
occupied with the idea of leadership, since men are social beings, unhappy
and self-destructive in mutual hostility, happiest and greatest when
co-operating in community in the wisest available ideas. Whose ideas? Plato
proposed the leadership of philosophers. But he himself did all that a
philosopher can do. He was of the greatest; in one of the high masterpieces
of human thought he proposed a scheme for the salvation of Greece--and
while he wrote and Athens read, Greek civilisation declined. Something had
departed that but an age before had made of Athens the supreme exemplar of
what human existence may come to at its best, in zest of life and ardour of
co-operation, in brilliance and profundity of thought, something that had
created a society more lovely than any other in recorded history, and
produced a literature and a full free current of ideas that are still the
model and despair of all our aspirations. May this loss have been loss of
disciplined community at the basis of all thought? Each man thinks not what
he will but what he can with the articulate particles of his consciousness.
Only by community here can one mind think the same thoughts as another. In
such community minds will hold their common ideas with heightened ardour,
as in friendship a common thought rises to new vitality by being shared in
utter comprehension. It was not an accident that friendship played so
profound a part in Greek life, not an accident that thought and letters so
flourished. For expression had met understanding, and understanding had
enriched the common premisses of thought. One among them, at all events,
made the association. “Not long afterwards,” says Thucydides, “nearly the
whole Hellenic world was in commotion. When trouble had once begun in the
cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and
further.... _The meanings of words had no longer the same relations to
things_....” And he goes on to detail wherein the confused meanings of
terms unsettled the mutual comprehension upon which the harmony of
civilised life depends. As for us, we are in something of a like
predicament. The most striking aspect of contemporary life is the contrast
between the fruitfulness of the scientific world, its vitality, its
harmony, its world-wide co-operation, and our frankly acknowledged moral
bankruptcy--vigour and fecundity in the area to which discipline has been
shifted, and futility and chaos in the area from which discipline has been
withdrawn. It is not that men have ceased to be concerned with moral
choice. So long as they pursue on reflection what seems to be good, so long
are they exercising their moral nature. Never, I dare say, has there been a
wilder play of reflection on what seems to be good. If we are suffering a
moral chaos it is not from the abandonment of morals but from a helpless
discrepancy, an incapacity to think the same thoughts. Given another Plato,
our only chance of accord under his leadership would be such community with
him and with each other in the articulate elements of his utterance as
would evoke the same living thoughts in our various minds. The task of
creating such community is a subtle one, immeasurably more difficult than
the corresponding task of modernism. The particles of consciousness with
which we think here are quick with feeling--with sentiment, impulse,
passion, and desire, drawn in each individual from his own native depths.
They are neither such sheer conventions as the units of measure that make
up the syntax of scientific thought, nor objective and tangible like the
data of nature with which science deals. They are the dynamic forces of
life itself, spontaneous and imperious, and they impel us whether or no.
Whether they are to drive us in anarchy or in harmony, however, depends
upon our ability so to channelise them, so to articulate and identify them
for thought, as to bring us into mutual understanding of those ideas in
which they play a part. The first service of the humanistic discipline was
that it put the individual mind into intimate contact with the tradition of
humane letters in which were embodied and shaped the articulate elements of
such ideas. It was the second and no less significant service of this
discipline that in clinging sedulously to the great tradition of that
literature it tended to give to all minds thus imbued _the same_ elements
filled with _the same_ substance, and so put mind into community with mind.
In abandoning the common discipline of this area of the consciousness
modernism has not only done something to dilute our powers of thought
there, but has left us, mind and mind, out of community and in a moral
confusion that lies, not in the open conflict of ideas, but in tacit
disparities of idea that never meet. Modernism reaches its ultimate goal in
a knowledge of nature. But nature has no need of our knowledge. It is _we_
who need it, for our own ends. In the measure in which, for the conception
of those ends, we lose our powers of thought, so precariously wrought in
the long travail of the past, and so dependent upon unremitting reconquest,
we shall in fact have killed the goose that lays the golden egg. _Courage
and Education_[74] RICHARD LINDLEY BROWN 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. FOOTNOTES [74] A
Senior paper read at Bowdoin College, Commencement, 1929.--Editor. _A List
of Books Published Since 1900_ Note--The following list contains most of
the recent books that are humanistic in a strict sense, together with a few
books humanistic in a sense more general and indefinite. Magazine articles
have been excluded; but illuminating articles dealing with various aspects
of humanism may be found in the 1928 and 1929 volumes of _The Forum_, _The
Bookman_, _The Hound and Horn_, _The Criterion_, and _The Nineteenth
Century and After_. Helpful recent critiques of the work of Irving Babbitt
and Paul Elmer More are those by a young English critic, Philip S.
Richards, in _The Nineteenth Century and After_ for April, 1928, May, 1928,
and April, 1929, and an article on “Mr. More and the Gentle Reader” by G.
R. Elliott in _The Bookman_ for April, 1929. Santayana, George.
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. 1900. Brownell, W. C. French Art,
Revised ed. 1901. ---- Victorian Prose Masters. 1901. More, Paul Elmer.
Shelburne Essays, First Series. 1904. Chesterton, G. K. Heretics. 1905.
Cox, Kenyon. Old Masters and New. 1905. More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays,
Second Series. 1905. ---- Shelburne Essays, Third Series. 1905. Woodberry,
George Edward. The Torch: Eight Lectures on Race Power in Literature. 1905.
More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, Fourth Series. 1906. Cox, Kenyon.
Painters and Sculptors. 1907. Lasserre, Pierre. Le Romantisme français.
1907. Babbitt, Irving. Literature and the American College: Essays in
Defence of the Humanities. 1908. Frye, P. H. Literary Reviews and
Criticisms. 1908. More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, Fifth Series. 1908.
Seillière, E. Le Mal romantique. 1908. Brownell, W. C. American Prose
Masters. 1909. Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. 1909. More, Paul Elmer.
Shelburne Essays, Sixth Series. 1909. Babbitt, Irving. The New Laokoon: An
Essay on the Confusion of the Arts. 1910. More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne
Essays, Seventh Series. 1910. Cox, Kenyon. The Classic Point of View: Six
Lectures on Painting. 1911. Babbitt, Irving. The Masters of Modern French
Criticism. 1912. More, Paul Elmer. The Drift of Romanticism (Shelburne
Essays, Eighth Series). 1913. Brownell, W. C. Criticism. 1914. Cox, Kenyon.
Artist and Public. 1914. More, Louis Trenchard. The Limitations of Science.
1915. More, Paul Elmer. Aristocracy and Justice (Shelburne Essays, Ninth
Series). 1915. Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. Estimates in Art. 1916. Brownell,
W. C. Standards. 1917. More, Paul Elmer. Platonism (The Greek Tradition,
Introduction). 1917, 1927. Sherman, Stuart P. Matthew Arnold: How to Know
Him. 1917. ---- On Contemporary Literature. 1917. Shorey, Paul. The Assault
on Humanism. 1917. Adams, George Plimpton. Idealism and the Modern Age.
1919. Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and Romanticism. 1919. Gass, Sherlock
Bronson. A Lover of the Chair. 1919. More, Paul Elmer. With the Wits
(Shelburne Essays, Tenth Series). 1919. Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood:
Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920, 1928. Inge, W. R. The Idea of
Progress. 1920. Patrick, G. T. W. The Psychology of Social Reconstruction.
1920. Lasserre, Pierre. Cinquante Ans de Pensée française. 1921. More, Paul
Elmer. A New England Group and Others (Shelburne Essays, Eleventh Series).
1921. ---- The Religion of Plato (The Greek Tradition, Vol. I). 1921.
Canby, Henry S. Definitions. 1922. Frye, P. H. Romance and Tragedy. 1922.
Shafer, Robert. Progress and Science: Essays in Criticism. 1922. Foerster,
Norman. Nature in American Literature: Studies in the Modern View of
Nature. 1923. Houston, Percy H. Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth
Century Humanism. 1923. Massis, Henri. Jugements I. 1923. Mather, Frank
Jewett, Jr. A History of Italian Painting. 1923. More, Paul Elmer.
Hellenistic Philosophies (The Greek Tradition, Vol. II). 1923. Waterhouse,
Francis A. Random Studies in the Romantic Chaos. 1923. Babbitt, Irving.
Democracy and Leadership. 1924. Brownell, W. C. The Genius of Style. 1924.
Canby, Henry S. Definitions, Second Series. 1924. Criticism in America.
(Essays by Irving Babbitt and others, ed. by J. E. Spingarn.) 1924. Eliot,
T. S. Homage to John Dryden. 1924. Hulme, T. E. Speculations (ed. by
Herbert Read). 1924. Massis, Henri. Jugements II. 1924. More, Paul Elmer.
The Christ of the New Testament (The Greek Tradition, Vol. III). 1924.
Seillière, E. J.-J. Rousseau. 1924. Gass, Sherlock Bronson. Criers of the
Shops. 1925. More, Louis Trenchard. The Dogma of Evolution. 1925. Cerf,
Barry. Anatole France: The Degeneration of a Great Artist. 1926. Ferrero,
Guglielmo. Words to the Deaf. 1926. Giese, W. F. Victor Hugo, The Man and
the Poet. 1926. Shafer, Robert. Christianity and Naturalism: Essays in
Criticism, Second Series. 1926. Brownell, W. C. Democratic Distinction in
America. 1927. Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. The American Spirit in Art (The
Pageant of America, Vol. XII). 1927. ---- Modern Painting. 1927. More, Paul
Elmer. Christ the Word (The Greek Tradition, Vol. IV). 1927. Munson, Gorham
B. Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense. 1927. Von Hügel,
Baron Friedrich. Selected Letters, 1896-1924. 1927. Babbitt, Irving. French
Literature (A. L. A. booklet). 1928. Benda, Julien. La Trahison des Clercs.
1928. (Trans., The Treason of the Intellectuals. 1928.) Eliot, T. S. For
Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. 1928. Elliott, W. Y. The
Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. 1928. Foerster, Norman. American Criticism: A
Study in Literary Theory from Poe to the Present. 1928. Maritain, Jacques.
Three Reformers: Luther--Descartes--Rousseau. 1928. Mercier, Louis J. A. Le
Mouvement humaniste aux États-Unis. 1928. More, Paul Elmer. The Demon of
the Absolute (New Shelburne Essays, Vol. I). 1928. Munson, Gorham B.
Destinations: A Canvass of American Literature Since 1900. 1928. Rand, E.
K. Founders of the Middle Ages. 1928. Sherman, Stuart P. Shaping Men and
Women: Essays on Literature and Life. 1928. Benda, Julien. Belphégor
(Trans., Introduction by Irving Babbitt). 1929. Canby, Henry S. American
Estimates. 1929. Chesterton, G. K. Generally Speaking. 1929. ---- The
Thing. 1929. Elliott, G. R. The Cycle of Modern Poetry: A Series of Essays
toward Clearing our Present Poetic Dilemma. 1929. Foerster, Norman. The
American Scholar: A Study in Litteræ Inhumaniores. 1929. Frye, P. H.
Visions and Chimeras. 1929. Munson, Gorham B. Style and Form in American
Prose. 1929. Warren, Austin. Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist. 1929.
Wickham, Harvey. The Impuritans. 1929. Zeitlin, Jacob, and Woodbridge,
Homer. Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman. 2 vols. 1929.