It is odd how words recur. There has been more talk about culture,
among educated people in America, during the last months, than there
had been for years. To be sure, the culture discussed since August,
1914, has been German Kultur; but that does not matter. We have
actually been talking about culture once more; rehabilitating it, if
only for the sake of denying that the Germans, by and large, have a
monopoly of anything so good. To some of us, this recurrence of a word
so long _tabu_ is welcome--and as side-splittingly funny as it
is welcome. For the fact is that for twenty years--ever since Matthew
Arnold went out of fashion--to speak of culture has meant that one
did not have it. The only people who have talked about it have been
the people who have thought you could get it at Chautauquas. To use
the word damned you in the eyes of the knowing. Now I have always,
privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word should go
out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you
are very apt to lose the thing it stands for. Indeed, it has seemed
only too clear that we were doing all in our power to lose both the
word and the thing. I fancy we ought to be grateful to the Germans for
getting “culture” on to all the editorial pages of the country; though
I admit it sometimes seems as if the Germans bore out the rule that
only those people talk about it who have it not. I should really like
to make a plea for the temporary reversal of the rule. Indeed, I think
we are getting to a point where we are so little “cultured” that we can
really afford to talk about it. When the plutocrat goes bankrupt, he
may once more, with decency, mention the prices of things. Culture has
ceased to be a passionate American preoccupation. Perhaps we shall not
offend modesty if we use the word once more.
Now there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best
of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than
to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly
be found to have more of it than we had a generation since; and that if
we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth
seeking. Having, myself, a congenital case of agoraphobia, I habitually
say nothing to the professional optimists in the public square. The
wilderness is a good place to cry in; the echoes are magnificent. So
I shall not attempt to deprive any one of Candide’s happy conviction.
If any person is kind enough to listen, I will simply ask him to
contemplate a few facts with me. No one will be too optimistic, I
fancy, to grant that there are _proportionally_ fewer Americans
who care about culture--and who know the real thing when they see
it--than there were one or two generations ago. Contact with “the best
that has been thought and said in the world” is not desired by so
large a proportion of the community as it was. That there are new and
_parvenu_ branches of learning, furiously followed, I, on my part,
shall not attempt to deny. But culture is another matter. Perhaps the
sociologists can show that this is a good thing. I do not ask any one
to deplore anything. I only ask the well-disposed to examine the change
that has come over the spirit of our American dream.
If I were asked to give, off hand, the causes of the gradual
extirpation of culture among us, I should name the following: