Only one of these is purely intellectual; two might almost be called
political. In point of fact, all four are interwoven.
I should be insultingly trite if I proceeded here to expound the
fallacy of the historic statement that all men are born free and
equal. We have all known for a long time that individual freedom
and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since
Thomas Jefferson (and may I express my doubts even of that inspired
charlatan?) has really believed it. No one could believe it at the
present day except the people who are flattered by it; and of people
who are flattered by it, it is obviously not true. The democracy of the
present day--like the aristocracy of another day--is fostered by the
people whom it advantages; and the people whom it advantages are adding
themselves, at the rate of a million a year, to our census lists. When
even democracy has to reckon with the fact that its premises are all
wrong, and that men are not born equal--that hierarchies are inherent
in human kind regardless of birth or opportunity--it proceeds to do its
utmost to equalize artificially; it becomes Procrustes. But will any
one contend that Procrustes left people free?
Now, what has this to do with culture? Simply this: that culture
is not a democratic achievement, because culture is inherently
snobbish. Contact with “the best that has been thought and said in
the world” makes people intellectually exclusive, and makes them draw
distinctions. Those distinctions, seriously speaking, are not founded
on social origins or great possessions; they are founded on states of
mind. So long as democracy is simply a political matter, culture is
left free to select its groups and proclaim its hierarchies. But it
is characteristic of our democracy that political equality has not
sufficed to it; the “I am as good as you are” formula has been flung
out to every horizon. The people with whom it has become a mania
insist that their equality with every one else in their range of
vision is a moral, an intellectual, a social, as well as a political,
equality. Let that formula prevail, and culture, with its eternal
distinction-drawing, will naturally die. For contact with the best that
has been thought and said in the world induces a mighty humility--and
a mighty scorn of those who do not know enough to be humble before
the Masters. They are an impersonal humility and an impersonal
scorn--attitudes of the mind, both, not of the heart. But humility and
scorn are both ruled, theoretically, out of the democratic court.
The pure-bred American once cared for culture, and no longer--to the
same extent, at least--does. If any one asks why America (I use the
word loosely, as meaning our United States), having always, since the
Revolution, been a democracy, can have cared for so undemocratic a
thing, the answer is simple. The democracy of our forefathers was a
purely pragmatic affair. The Declaration of Independence was framed by
men living in a world where it was almost true enough to be workable.
Roughly speaking, in pioneer and colonial days--wherever and whoever
the pioneers and colonists may be--the community is a democracy because
it is an aristocracy. In those grimmer worlds, the fittest do survive
because there is no incubator process to keep the feeble going. A
pioneer and colonial group, moreover, is apt to be like-minded; people
do not exile themselves in each other’s company unless they want
the same things. Minor differences of opinion are swallowed up in
like major needs: you form coalition governments against savages and
famine or a specially detested tyranny. In the modern “I am as good as
you are” sense, our ancestors were not democratic at all. They were
democratic for their own special group, and a pragmatic truth misled
them--as, because we admire them, we are permitting it to mislead us.
They were Brahminical in their attitude to learning; they thought it
supremely valuable, and they did not believe in--no Brahmin wants to
believe in--a royal road to it, any more than they believed in a royal
road to the salvation of the soul. They believed in intellectual, as
much as they did in spiritual, election; and they certainly did not
think that politics could influence either. Up to the last generation
or two, they looked upon the cultured man as a peculiarly favored
person; and because culture (unlike beauty, let us say) depended to
some extent on the effort of the individual, they thought it fit to
mention.
Now there is this about a pragmatic truth: like any other invention
of the devil, it smooths the road for the lazy. If it did not smooth
the road, it would not be, by pragmatic definition, truth. And the
great bulk of us have found the “free and equal” statement such a help
that, though we cannot pretend for a moment that it is true, we stick
to it. The schoolboy sticks to it because it greases his oratory; the
politician sticks to it because his constituents like the sound of it;
the detrimental sticks to it because it is his only apology. And, just
as you cannot suppress a word without eventually suppressing the thing
it stands for, so you cannot utter a statement forever without imbibing
some of its poison. Even as our reasonable national pride turned into
the spread-eagleism that Dickens and Mrs. Trollope caricatured, so
the “free and equal” shibboleth turned into the “I am as good as you
are” formula. Why trouble about anything, if you were already lord of
the world? At first, it was Europe we defied. What were the ancient
oligarchies, to impose on us their standards, intellectual, social, or
moral? We set up our own standards, because we were as good as any one
else--and also because it was a little easier.
Let me say before going further, that I am not blaming the lower
classes alone for the extirpation of culture among us. The upper
classes are equally responsible--if, indeed, not even more to blame.
We have become materialistic: our very virtues are more materialistic
than they were. It is forgivable in the poor man to be materialistic;
for unless he has bread to keep his body alive, he will presently
have no soul to cherish. Materialism is less pardonable in the man
who always knows where his next meal is coming from. He, if you like,
does have time to worry about his soul. None the less, he worries
about it very little. There used to be a good deal of fun poked
at settlement-workers who tried to read Dante and Shakespeare to
slum-dwellers. I am not sure that those misguided youths and maidens
who first carried Dante and Shakespeare into the slums were not right
as to substance, however wrong they were as to sequence. The only
morally decent excuse for wanting to have a little more money than
you actually need to feed and clothe your family, is your ambition
to have a little mental energy to spend on things not of the body.
The ultimate tragedy of the slums is that, in slum conditions, one
can scarcely think, from birth to death, of anything but the body.
The upper-class people who think of pleasing their palates instead of
relieving hunger, of being in the fashion instead of covering their
nakedness, are no more civilized than the slum-dwellers. They are apt,
it is true, to become more so; for it is a strange fact that a family
can seldom be rich through several generations without discovering
some æsthetic truths. And æsthetic truths lead to moral perceptions.
You cannot with impunity fill your ears with good music, your eyes
with good painting and sculpture and architecture. Something happens
to you, after a time, no matter how vulgar you may be. But wealth is
very fluctuating in our country; and several generations of it are not
often seen. The people who are now rich are generally people whose
grandfathers and great-grandfathers were fighting for sheer existence.
So we have the spectacle of the dominant plutocrats (no one will deny
that plutocracy is the order of the day, both here and in Europe)
either mindful themselves of the struggle for existence, or in a state
of having only just forgotten it. They are not going to push their
children into a race for intangible goods. And the more we recruit from
immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America
is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming
desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about
culture, or even know what it is. And it is another misfortune of our
over-quickened social evolution that the middle classes do not stay
middle class. They climb to wealth, or sink to indigence. Neither that
quick rise nor that quick fall is a period in which to cherish their
own or their children’s intellects.
Both from above and below, then, our colleges and schools have felt
the hostile pressure. Colleges are, on the one hand, jeered at for
doing their business badly, and, on the other, accused of being too
difficult. We are always hearing that college is of no earthly use to
a man except as he learns there to rub up against other men. We are
always hearing, also, that the college curriculum is a cruel strain
on the average boy or girl. On one score or another, the colleges are
always being attacked; and the attack usually includes the hint that
the real test of a “college education” is not the intrinsic value,
but its success or failure in preparing the youth for something that
has nothing to do with learning. Will it be of social or financial
use to him? If not, why make sacrifices to get it? Far be it from me
to assert that the intellectual flame never burns in the breast of
collegiate youth! But I do believe it provable that there is far less
tendency to regard learning as a good in itself, and far more tendency
to cheat scholarship, if possible, in the interest of some other thing
held good, than there was two generations ago. Ignorance of what real
learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a
consequent intellectual laxity--both of these have done destructive
work in the colleges.
The education of younger children is in like case. We put them into
kindergartens where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we
can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for
semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and
give them prizes for sleeping. Every one knows what a fight the old
universities have had to put up to keep their entrance standards at
all. With the great new army of state universities admitting students
from the public schools without examination, because they themselves
are part of the big public-school system, how can it be otherwise?
Now the patriotic American may see--and rightly enough--in the
public-school system which includes a college training, a relic of the
desperate desire of our forefathers that education, as a major good,
should be within the reach of all and sundry. But even the patriotic
American must see another impulse at work: the impulse to put the
college intellectually, as well as financially, within the reach of
all. The Colleges must not set up standards for themselves that the
average boy or girl, from the ordinary school, cannot reach without
difficulty, because that is undemocratic.
Now I know as well as other people that it is positively harder to get
into our old universities to-day than it was in our fathers’ day. But
granted the enormously increased facilities for preparation all over
the land, it is not relatively anything like so hard. Certainly, once
in, it is possible to get through the college course with less work
than ever before. In the first place, there is a much wider choice of
subjects on which a boy can get his degree: his tastes are consulted
as they never used to be. If he does not want to endure the discipline
of Greek, he can get an A.B. at every college in the country--except
Princeton--without knowing a word of Greek. Even at Princeton, he can
take a Litt.B. and let Greek forever alone.[A] He can study sociology,
or Spanish, or physical culture, or nearly anything he likes. I have
even heard that in one of our state universities there is a department
of hat-trimming, which contributes its quota to the courses for a
(presumably feminine) academic degree.
It may be objected at this point that the fluctuations of colleges
have nothing to do with our standards of culture. I think they have,
a great deal. No one will deny that culture can be got elsewhere,
or that colleges do not suffice in themselves to give it. But if
colleges do not consider themselves custodians of culture, warders and
cherishers of the flame, they have no reason for existence. It is a
platitude that business men consider college a worthless preparation
for business life--save as a young man may have laid up there treasure
for himself in the shape of valuable “connections.” Even the conception
of college as a four years’ paradise intervening before the hell of an
active struggle for existence, does not touch upon the original reason
for universities’ being at all. Universities were invented for the sake
of bringing their fortunate students into contact with the precious
lore of the world, there garnered and kept pure. There was no idea on
the part of their founders that every one would or could partake of
academic benefits. The social scheme would not originally have allowed
that; still less would the conception of the public intellect have
admitted the notion. Every one was not supposed to be congenitally
qualified for intimacy with the best that has been thought and said
in the world. They had no notion, until very recently, of so changing
the terms of that intimacy that every one might think he could have
it. Learning, culture, were not to be adulterated so that any mental
digestive process whatsoever could take them in.
But now, in America, there is a tendency that way. If a boy does not
feel a pre-established harmony between his soul and the humanities,
then give him an academic degree on something with which his soul will
be in pre-established harmony. And if there is no pre-established
harmony between his soul and any form of learning, then create
institutions that will give him a degree with no learning to speak of
at all. I do not mean to deny that many of our virtually valueless
colleges were founded in the pathetic inherited conviction that
learning and culture were too great goods not to be accessible to all
who cared passionately for them. But I do believe that the reverence
for learning and culture has been largely replaced by a conviction that
anything which has so great a reputation as a college degree must be
put within the reach of all, even at the risk of making its reputation
a farce. The privileged have been unwilling that their children should
be made to work; the unprivileged have been unwilling that their
children should see anything of good repute, anything with a prestige
value, denied to them. We have all demanded a royal road to a thing to
which there is no royal road. The expensive schools lead their pupils
from kindergarten to nature-study and eurhythmics, with basket-work
and gymnastics thrown in; the public schools follow them as closely
as they can. Of real training of the mind there is very little in any
school. The rich do not want their children overworked; the poor want a
practical result for their children’s fantastically long school hours.
So domestic science comes in for girls, and carpentering for boys.
Anything to make it easy, on the one hand; anything to make a universal
standard possible, on the other.
Take one example only: the attitude towards Greek. There are two
arguments against teaching our children Greek: one, that it is too
hard; the other, that it is useless. The mere fact that public opinion
has drummed Greek out of court as an inevitable part of a college
curriculum shows that these arguments have been potent. No person
who could be influenced by either has the remotest conception of
the meaning or the value of culture. Culture has never renounced a
thing because it was difficult, or because it did not help people to
make money. And the mere fact that Greek is no longer supposed by
the vast majority of parents to be of any “use”--even as a matter of
reputation--to their sons, shows that the old standards of culture have
changed. The larger number of our public schools no longer teach Greek
at all; a great many private schools have to make special arrangements
for pupils who wish to study it. And the attitude towards Greek is only
a sign of our democratic, materialistic times.
Now I have done with the colleges. I have dealt with them at all only
by way of hinting that they have been so democratized that culture
means, even to its avowed exponents, something different from what it
has ever meant before. May I speak for one moment explicitly of the
public schools? For we must trace all this back to the source--must
begin with the ostensible homes of “culture” and follow up the stream
to the latent public consciousness. Each class that comes into college
has read fewer and fewer of what are called the classics of English
literature. An astonishing number of boys and girls have read nothing
worth reading except the books that are in the entrance requirements.
An increasing proportion of the sons and daughters of the prosperous
are positively illiterate at college age. They cannot spell; they
cannot express themselves grammatically; and they are inclined to
think that it does not matter. General laxity, and the adoption of
educational fads which play havoc with real education, are largely
responsible. In the less fortunate classes, the fact seems to be that
the public schools are so swamped by foreigners that all the teachers
can manage to do is to teach the pupils a little workable English.
Needless to say, the profession of the public-school teacher has become
less and less tempting to people who are really fit for it.
It is not only in the great cities that the immigrant population swamps
the schoolroom. An educated woman told me, not long since, that there
was no school in the place where she lived--one of our oldest New
England towns--to which she could send her boy. The town could not
support a private school for young children; and the public school
was out of the question. I had been brought up to believe that public
schools in old New England towns were very decent places; and I asked
her why. The answer made it clear. Three fourths of the school-children
were Lithuanians, and a decently bred American child could simply
learn nothing in their classes. They had to be taught English, first
of all; they approached even the most elementary subjects very slowly;
and--natural corollary--the teachers themselves were virtually
illiterate. Therefore she was teaching her boy at home until he could
go to a preparatory school. Fortunately, she was capable of doing it;
but there are many mothers who cannot ground their children in the
languages and sciences. A woman who could not would have had to watch
her child acquiring a Lithuanian accent and the locutions of the slum.
An isolated case is never worth much. But one has only to consider
conditions at large to see that this has everything to make it typical.
One has only to look at any official record of immigration, any chart
of distribution of population by races, to see how the old American
stock is being numerically submerged. If you do not wish to look at
anything so dull as statistics, look at the comic papers. A fact
does not become a stock joke until it is pretty well visible to the
average man. Our forefathers cared immensely for education; they felt
themselves humble before learning; and their schools followed, soon and
sacredly, upon their churches. They stood in awe of the real thing;
and they had no illusions as to the ease of the scholar’s path. They
legislated for their schools solemnly, and if not with complete wisdom,
always at least with accurate ideals. Educational (like all other)
legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and
the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a
reproach to them. If any one chooses to say that culture must always
be in the hands of an oligarchy, and that the oligarchy has not been
touched, I will only ask him to consider the pupils and the teaching in
most private schools. In the end, prestige values are going to tell;
and the vast bulk of our population will see to it that the prestige
values are not absolutely unattainable to them. The great fortunes
have made their way to the top--yes, really to the top. In many cases
there has been time for a quick veneer of grammar to be laid over their
original English. In many cases there has not; and no one cares. The
custodians of culture cannot afford to care; for their custody must
either be endowed or be forsaken.
Oh, yes, there are a few Brahmins left; but one has only to look
at the marriages of any given season to see what is becoming of the
purity of the Brahmin caste. The Brahmins themselves are beginning to
see that they are lost unless they compound with the materialists, and
make or marry money--or increase, by aid of the materialists, what
they have inherited. In what New England village, now, is the minister
or the scholar looked up to as a fount of municipal wisdom because he
is a learned man? Is he a “good mixer”? That is what they ask: I have
heard them. Once it was possible in America for a poor man to hope to
gain for his children, if they deserved it, the life of the intellect
and of the spirit. Now it no longer is; for the poor themselves have
defiled the fount. They are a different kind of poor, that is all; and
they have become an active and discontented majority, with hands that
pick and steal. When they no longer need to pick and steal, they carry
their infection higher and give it as a free gift. And they have been
aided by the Brahmins themselves; who, having dabbled in sociology
_pour se désoeuvrer_, and then for charity’s sake, are now
finding that sociology is a grim matter of life and death, and endow
chairs of it--as if one should endow chairs of self-preservation. But
self-preservation is not culture and never will be; and no study of the
manners and customs of savages or slums can call itself “contact with
the best that has been thought and said in the world.”
We owe, too, I think, a great deal of our cultural deterioration (which
I admit is a villainous phrase) to science. Science has come in with a
rush, and is at present--why deny it?--on top. “Scientific” is a word
to charm with, even though it has already had time to be degraded.
If Mrs. Eddy had called her bargain-counter Orientalism anything but
“science,” would she have drawn so many followers? Science has done
great things for us; it has also pushed us hopelessly back. For,
not content with filling its own place, it has tried to supersede
everything else. It has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it
has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its
skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend
on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material
comforts. To the plea, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every
word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” it has retorted that no
word proceeds authentically out of the mouth of God save what it has
issued in its own translations. It is more rigorous and more exclusive
than the Index of the Roman Church. The Inquisition never did anything
so oppressive as to put all men, innocent or guilty, into a laboratory.
Science cares supremely for physical things. If it restricted itself to
the physical world, it would be tolerable: we could shut ourselves away
with our souls in peace. But it must control the soul as well as the
body: it insists on reducing all emotions, however miraculous and dear,
to a question of nerve-centres. There has never been tyranny like this.
Now I do not mean to say that all scientists despise culture. That
would be silly and untrue. But the “scientific” obsession has changed
all rankings in the intellectual world. The insidiousness of science
lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore
a subject: no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be
applied to anything within the field of consciousness. Small wonder
that the study of literature turns into philology, the study of history
into archæology, and the study of morals and æsthetics into physical
psychology. With the finer appeals of philosophy and poetry and
painting and natural beauty, science need not meddle; because about
their direct effect on the thought and wills of men if can say nothing
valuable. You cannot determine the value of a Velasquez by putting your
finger on the pulse of the man who is looking at it; or the value of
Amiens Cathedral by registering the vibration of his internal muscles;
or of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado by declaring that all perception
of beauty is a function of sex. Nor does it matter very much, at the
moment, to the enraptured reader or observer that such and such a work
of art was the logical result of a given set of conditions. The point
is that it is there; and that it works potently upon us in ways which
we can scarce phrase. Culture puts us disinterestedly in communication
with the distilled and sifted lore of the world. Science is in
comparison a prejudiced affair--prejudiced because it seeks always to
bring things back to literal and physical explanations. Far be it from
me to deny that geology, biology, physics, have given us unapprehended
vistas down which to stray--only, strictly speaking, it forbids the
straying. The moment the layman’s imagination begins to profit, begins
to get real exhilaration from scientific discoveries, it contributes
something unwelcome to science. Science has its own stern value; in
the end we are all profoundly affected by its gains in the field of
fact. One’s quarrel is not with science as such, but with science as
demanding an intellectual and spiritual hegemony. With nothing less
than hegemony, however, will science be content.
Now if it is not yet clear what effect all this must have on culture,
a few words may make it clearer. The great danger of the scientific
obsession is not the destruction of all things that are not science,
but the slow infection of those things. If the laboratory is your real
test, then most philosophies and all art are no good. The scientists
are not good philosophers, and they are not good artists; and if
science is to rule everywhere, we must shelve philosophy and art,
or else take them into the laboratory. I need not point out what
has become of literature under a scientific régime. We all know the
hopeless fiction that is created by the scientific method; fiction
that banks on its anecdotal accuracy and has in it no spiritual truth.
Literature is simply a different game: you do not get the greatest
literary truth by the laboratory method. Art is not reducible to
science, because science takes no account of the special truth which is
beauty, of the special truth which is moral imagination.
It is not only by the laboratory method that our fiction has been
ruined: a great many of our writers of fiction are not up to the
laboratory method. But all our fiction has been harmed by the prevalent
idea that no fiction is any good which is not done according to the
laboratory method, and that even fiction which attempts that method is
of little value in comparison with a card-catalogue. There were some
snobs who were not affected by the democratic fallacy; but even the
snobs have been affected by scientific scorn.
I may have seemed to be showing rather the reasons for the extirpation
of culture among us than the fact of the extirpation. Perhaps that
is not the best way to go to work. But the actual evidence is so
multitudinously at hand that it was hardly worth while beginning with
solemn proofs of the fact. In all branches of art and learning we have
a cult of the modern. Modern languages rank Latin and Greek in our
schools and colleges; practical and “vocational” training is displacing
the rudiments of learning in all of our public and many of our private
institutions for the teaching of the young; the books admitted to the
lists of “literature” include many that never have been and never
will be literature. I found, a few years ago, the following books on
a list from which students of English were allowed to choose their
reading for the course--this, in one of the old and respectable high
schools of Massachusetts, not twenty miles from Boston: _Soldiers
of Fortune_, _Pushing to the Front_, _Greifenstein_,
_Doctor Latimer_, _The Prisoner of Zenda_, _The Honorable
Peter Stirling_, _The First Violin_, and “any of the works of
Stewart Edward White.” These, and many others, may be, in their way,
good reading, but there is no excuse for offering them to the young
student of English as examples of “literature.”
Standards of beauty and truth are no longer rigidly held up. In
philosophy we have produced pragmatism; in art we have produced
futurism--and what not, since then?--in literature we have produced the
pathologic and the economic novel, and no poetry worth speaking of.
The “grand style” has gone out; and the classics are back numbers. Our
children do not even speak good English; and no one minds. They cannot
be bored with Scott and Dickens; they cannot be bored with poetry at
all. And why should they, when their fathers and mothers are reading
_Laddie_ and _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, and their clergymen
are preaching about _The Inside of the Cup_--or the latest work
dealing with the slums by some one who was slum-born and slum-bred and
is proud of it? You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve
something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be
proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be
of a continued decent tradition back of one. The cultured person must
have put in a great many years with nothing to show for it; his parents
have usually put in a great many years, for him, for which they have
nothing to show. There is nothing to show, until you get the complex
result of the disciplined and finished creature. “Culture” means a long
receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit. There is no money in
it; there is nothing striking in it; there is in it no flattery of our
own time, or of the majority.
Ours is a commercial age, in which most people are bent on getting
money. That is a platitude. It is also, intellectually speaking,
a materialistic age, when most of our intellectual power is given
either to prophylaxis, or to industrial chemistry, or to the invention
of physical conveniences--all ultimately concerned with the body.
Even the philanthropists deal with the soul through the body, and
Christianity has long since become “muscular.” How, in such an age, can
culture flourish--culture, which cares even more about the spirit than
about the flesh? It was pointed out not long ago, in an _Atlantic_
article, that many of our greatest minds have dwelt in bodies that
the eugenists would have legislated out of existence. Many of the
greatest saints found sainthood precisely in denying the power of the
ailing flesh to restrict the soul. There is more in the great mystics
than psychiatry will ever account for. But science, in spite of its
vistas, is short-sighted. It talks in æons, but keeps its eye well
screwed to the microscope. The geologic ages are dealt with by pick
and hammer and reduced to slides, and the lore of the stars has become
a pure matter of mathematical formulæ. Human welfare is a question of
microbes. Neither pundit nor populace cares, at the present day, for
perspectives. The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to
be modern is the great sin.
So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And
surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we
must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living
dog? And is it not a crime against human nature to consider negligible
“the best that has been thought and said in the world”? It is only
by considering it negligible that we can consent to let ourselves be
overrun by the hordes of ignorance and materialism--the people (God
save the mark!) of to-morrow. Let us stand, if we must, on practical
grounds: the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. As if our only
guaranty that to-morrow would be tolerable were not precisely that
it is sprung from a past that we know to have been, at many points,
noble! It is pathetic to see people refusing to learn the lessons of
history; it is a waste that no efficiency expert ought to permit. All
learning is a text-book which would save much time to him who works
for the perfection of the world. But I begin to think that our age
does not really care about perfection; and that it Would rather make a
thousand-year-old mistake than learn a remedy from history. So much the
worse for to-morrow!
But meanwhile let us--those of us who can--see to it that the
pre-eminent brains of other ages shall not have passed away in vain. M.
Anatole France, in _La Révolte des Anges_, has a good deal to say
about the absurdity of a Jehovah who still believes in the Ptolemaïc
system. Well, the Ptolemaïc system did not prevent the ancient world
from giving us Greek theatres and Roman law, or England from giving us
Magna Charta. We are still imitating Greek theatres (rather badly, I
admit) in our stadia; Roman law is still, by and large, good enough
for such an enlightened country as France; and Magna Charta--or its
equivalent--had to be there before we could have a Declaration of
Independence. Our superior scientific knowledge has not given us
our standards of beauty or justice or liberty. Let us take what the
present offers--airplanes and all. But let us not throw away what other
men, in other ages, have died for the sake of discovering. If the
lore of the past is useless, there is every chance--one must be very
overweening indeed not to admit it--that the lore of our generation
will be useless, too. Culture--whether you use the word itself or find
another term--means only a decent economy of human experience. You
cannot improve on things without keeping those things pretty steadily
in mind. Otherwise you run the risk of wasting a lot of time doing
something that has already been done. Any one, I think, will admit
that. And it is not a far step to the realization that on the whole it
is wise not to lose the past out of our minds. There is no glory in
being wiser than the original savage; there is glory in being wiser
than the original sage. But in order to be wiser than he, we must have
a shrewd suspicion of how wise he was. By and large, without culture,
that shrewd suspicion will never be ours.