bearing, expression, betray a man, customs show character, all these
various utterances mingle and merge into the general tone which is the
voice of a national temperament; private motive is lost in it.
This tone penetrates and envelops everything in America. It is
impossible to condemn it altogether. This desire to please, which has
so much of the shopman’s smile in it, graduates at one end of the scale
into a general kindliness, into public benefactions, hospitals, and
college foundations; at the other end it is seen melting into a desire
to efface one’s self rather than give offence, to hide rather than be
noticed.
In Europe, the men in the pit at the theatre stand up between the acts,
face the house, and examine the audience at leisure. The American
dares not do this. He cannot stand the isolation, nor the publicity.
The American in a horse car can give his seat to a lady, but dares
not raise his voice while the conductor tramps over his toes. It
violates every instinct of his commercial body to thrust his private
concerns into prominence. The American addresses his equal, whom he
knows familiarly, as Mr. Jones, giving him the title with as much
subserviency as the Englishman pays to an unknown Earl.
Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history
of civilization. Who cares whether Cæsar stole or Cæsar Borgia cheated?
Their intellects stayed clear. The real evil that follows in the wake
of a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual
dishonesty it generates. One need not mind stealing, but one must cry
out at people whose minds are so befuddled that they do not know theft
when they see it. Robert Walpole bought votes. He deceived others, but
he did not deceive himself.
We have seen that the retailer in the small town could not afford
to think clearly upon the political situation. But this was a mere
instance, a sample of his mental attitude. He dare not face any
question. He must shuffle, qualify, and defer. Here at last we
have the great characteristic which covers our continent like a
climate--intellectual dishonesty. This state of mind does not merely
prevent a man having positive opinions. The American is incapable
of taking a real interest in anything. The lack of passion in the
American--noticeable in his books and in himself--comes from the same
habitual mental distraction; for passion is concentration. Hence also
the flippancy, superficiality, and easy humor for which we are noted.
Nothing except the dollar is believed to be worthy the attention of a
serious man. People are even ashamed of their tastes. Until recently,
we thought it effeminate for a man to play on the piano. When a man
takes a living interest in anything, we call him a “crank.” There is
an element of self-sacrifice in any honest intellectual work which we
detect at once and score with contumely.
It was not solely commercial interest that made the biographers of
Lincoln so thrifty to extend and veneer their book. It was that they
themselves did not, could not, take an interest in the truth about
him. The second-rate quality of all our letters and verse is due to
the same cause. The intellectual integrity is undermined. The literary
man is concerned for what “will go,” like the reformer who is half
politician. The attention of every one in the United States is on some
one else’s opinion, not on truth.
The matter resolves itself at last into Pilate’s question: What is
truth? We do not know, and shall never know. But it seems to involve a
certain focussing and concentration of the attention that brings all
the life within us into harmony. When this happens to us, we discover
that truth is the only thing we had ever really cared about in the
world. The thing seems to be the same thing, no matter which avenue we
reach it by. At whatever point we are touched, we respond. A quartet, a
cathedral, a sonnet, an exhibition of juggling, anything well done--we
are at the mercy of it. But as the whole of us responds to it, so it
takes a whole man to do it. Whatever cracks men up and obliterates
parts of them, makes them powerless to give out this vibration. This is
about all we know of individualism and the integrity of the individual.
The sum of all the philosophies in the history of the world can be
packed back into it. All the tyrannies and abuses in the world are only
bad because they injure this integrity. We desire truth. It is the only
thing we desire. To have it, we must develop the individual. And there
are practical ways and means of doing this. We see that all our abuses
are only odious because they injure some individual man’s spirit. We
can trace the corruption of politics into business, and find private
selfishness at the bottom of it. We can see this spread out into a
network of invisible influence, in the form of intellectual dishonesty
blighting the minds of our people. We can look still closer and see
just why and how the temperament of the private man is expressed.
We study this first in social life; for social life is the source and
fountain of all things. The touchstone for any civilization is what one
man says to another man in the street. Everything else that happens
there bears a traceable relation to the tone of his voice. The press
reflects it, the pulpit echoes it, the literature reproduces it, the
architecture embodies it.
The rays of force which start in material prosperity pass through
the focus of social life, and extend out into literature, art,
architecture, religion, philosophy. All these things are but the
sparks thrown off the gestures and gaits, the records of the social
life of some civilization. That is the reason why it has been useful
to pause over a club-house and study its inmates. The ball-room, the
dinner-table, would have been equally instructive. The deference
to reigning convention is the same everywhere. The instinct of
self-concealment, the policy of classing like with like, leads to
the herding of the young with the young only, the sporting with the
sporting only, the rich with the rich only, which is the bane of our
society. The suffocation is mitigated here and there by the influence
of ambitious and educated women. They are doing their best to stem the
tide which they can neither control nor understand. The stratification
of our society, and its crystallization into social groups, is little
short of miraculous, considering the lightning changes of scene. The
_nouveaux riches_ of one decade are the old _noblesse_ of the
next decade, and yet any particular set, at any particular time, has
its exclusions, its code of hats and coats and small talk, which are
more rigid than those of London.
The only place in the country where society is not dull is Washington,
because in Washington politics have always forced the social elements
to mix; because in Washington, some embers of the old ante-bellum
society survived; because the place has no commerce, and because the
foreign diplomats have been a constant factor, educating the Americans
in social matters. But Washington is not the centre of American
civilization. The controlling force in American life is not in its
politics, but in commerce. New York is the head and heart of the United
States. Chicago is America. And the elements of this life must be
sought, as always, in the small towns. Find the social factors which
are common to New York, to Poughkeepsie, and to Newport, and you have
the keynote to the country. We began with a city club. But it would
have made no difference what gathering we entered--a drawing-room at
Newport, a labor union in Fifteenth Street--we should have found the
same phenomena,--formalism, suppression of the individual, intellectual
dishonesty.
The dandy at Newport who conscientiously follows his leaders and
observes the cab rule, the glove ordinance, and the mystery of the
oyster fork, is governed by the same law, is fettered by the same
force, as the labor man who fears to tell his fellows that he approves
of Waring’s clean streets. Each is a half-man, each is afraid of his
fellows, and for the same reason. Each is commercial, keeps his place
by conciliatory methods, and will be punished for contumacy by the
loss of his job. Neither of them has an independent opinion upon any
subject.
The charge brought against our millionaire society is that it is
vulgar. The houses are palaces, the taste is for the most part
excellent, the people are in every sense but the commercial sense more
virtuous than the rich of any other nation. Wealth is poured out in
avalanches.
Why is all this display not magnificent? The millionaire society is not
vulgar, but it is insignificant. The reason is, that you cannot have
splendor without personal and intellectual independence, and this does
not exist in America. The conversation on the Commodore’s steam yacht
is tedious. The talk at the weekly meeting of the amalgamated glaziers
is insipid, and impresses you with the selfishness of mankind.
Now what is at the bottom of this identity? We are passing through the
great age of distribution. It is not confined to America. It qualifies
European history. All the different kinds of Socialism are mere proofs
of it. Every one either wants to get something himself, or, if he is
a philosopher, wants to show other people how to get it. Even Henry
George thought that man lives by bread alone; at least, he thought
that if you only give every one lots of bread, that is all you need
provide for; the rest will follow. In America we are leading the world
in the intensity with which this phase of progress goes on, because in
America there is nothing else to occupy men’s minds. Let us return to
our social focus and its relation to the arts.
The world has groped for three thousand years to find the connection
between morality and the fine arts. It may be that we stand here on the
borderland of discovery. We can at least see that they are not likely
to arise in an era of subserviency and intellectual fog.
The fine arts are departments of science, and the attitude of mind of
the artist toward his work, or of the public toward his product, is
that of an interest in truth for its own sake. It is the attitude of
the scientific man toward his problems. The scientists do not waver or
cringe. They are the great bullies of this era. They draw their power
from their work. They seek, they proclaim, they monopolize truth. There
is in them the note of greatness, not because of their discoveries, but
because of their pursuit.
Commercial or sexual crime or violence, that does not unman the
artist, ought not to extinguish art, and it never has done so. Anything
that has made him time-serving or truthless ought to show in his work,
and it always has done so.
Any system of morality or conjunction of circumstances that tends to
make men tell the truth as they see it will tend to produce what the
world will call art. If the statement be accurate, the world will call
it beautiful. Put it as you will, art is self-assertion and beauty is
accuracy. Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.
Anybody can see that fiction depends upon social conditions; for it is
nothing but a description of them.
Take his clubs and his routs away from Thackeray, his hunting away from
White-Melville, his peasantry away from Scott, his street life away
from Dickens, and where would their books be? Vigorous and picturesque
individuality must precede good fiction. The great American novel,
except as the outcome of a vigorous social life, is the dream of an
idiot. You must have an age of ebullition, where the spontaneous life
about the novelist forces itself into his books, before you can have
good fiction. Architecture depends so plainly upon social life, that
we have only to look at our country houses from Colonial times down,
to read the hearts of the inmates. And so with the other fine arts and
decorations, they are mere languages.
It is thought that our modern life is more complex than that of the
eighteenth century, because the machinery by which it is carried on is
expanded. Transportation, newspapers, corporations, oceans of books
and magazines, foreign cables, have changed the forms by which power
is transmitted. But the manifestations of humanity in government, in
social life, and in the arts proceed upon the same principles as ever.
Everything depends as completely on personal intercourse as it did in
Athens. The real struggle comes between two men across a table, my
force against your force. The devices which political philosophy has
always approved, are those which protect the spirit of the individual,
and enable it to grow strong. The struggles for English liberty have
been struggles over taxation. The rights of the sovereign to seize
a man’s property, or imprison his body without form of law, were
abolished. This comparative financial independence of the English
subject has been valued as the basis of spiritual independence. It
has no other claim to be thought important. Yet while we have been
praising our bills of rights and bulwarks of liberty, commerce in the
United States has been bringing power after power, battalion after
battalion, to bear upon the integrity of spirit of the individual man.
Here is a situation which no legislation can meet. Civil liberty has
been submerged in the boss system. But this is a mere symptom. It is
valuable only because it brings strikingly into view the intellectual
bondage it denotes. It is valuable only because it gives us a fighting
ground, an educational arena in which the fight for intellectual
liberty may be begun.
It is unnecessary to go over the steps of the argument backward, and to
show how our citizen movements are a mere sign that the individual is
becoming more unselfish. How, partly through the settling of commerce
into more stable conditions, partly through revulsion in the heart of
man against so much wickedness, a reign of better things is coming.
The Christian Endeavorers, the University Settlements, the innumerable
leagues and propaganda which bring no dogmas, but which stand for
faith--speak for multitudes, affect every one. Their influence can
already be traced into business, into social life, and out again into
every department of our existence. The revolution is going forward on a
great scale, and the demonstration is about to be worked out throughout
the continent as if it were a blackboard.
* * * * *
The man who has subscribed $1,000 to the reform campaign, the man
who has worked for the cause, and the man who has voted the ticket,
have met. This personal meeting, this social focus, exists and is
indestructible. These people who have been kept apart by the old
political conditions, by the boss system, and the capitalist; these
men whom every element of selfishness and corruption fought with the
instinct of self-preservation to keep separate, have come together.
The downfall of the old social system, and the redistribution of every
force in the community, is inevitable. In the first place, every
individual in the community has talked about the movement with an
intensity proportionate to his power of good. Our form of government
throws the moral idea with terrible force, as a practical issue, into
the life of each man. “Thou art the man.” The extreme simplicity of
our social fabric makes it impossible for any one to get behind his
institution, his class, his prejudice. There is no one who cannot
be shown up. We are as defenceless before virtue as we were before
selfishness. Our politics can be worked as effectively by one passion
as by the other--but we are only just beginning to find this out.
Free speech and the grouping, classing, and mingling of men according
to intellect, and not according to income, have begun already. They
are not more the outcome than they are the cause of these citizens’
movements. They are the same elemental thing. The love of truth is the
same passion as the veneration for the individual. It is impossible
to really want reform and to remain socially exclusive or socially
deferential. And so, a social life is beginning to emerge in New York,
based on the noblest and the most natural passion that can stir in the
heart of man The results in the field of practical politics, will be
that “society”--at least such of our drawing-rooms and dinner tables
as any one, whether foreigner or native, knows or cares anything
about--will resume the political importance which such places have
always held in civilized times, and of which nothing but extraordinary
and transient conditions have deprived them. Let any one who doubts
this, compare the club talk and dinner table talk of to-day, with the
talk of ten years ago. It would be childish to guess the positive
results on the arts, theatres, novels, verse which will follow; but you
can no more keep the spirit of freedom out of these things than you can
keep it out of personal manners. These are changing daily. The decorums
and codes of behavior, the old self-consciousness and self-distrust
are dropping off. Steadily the flood of life advances, inspiring all
things.
EDUCATION: FROEBEL
III
EDUCATION: FROEBEL
I have two boys, aged seven and four. They required a governess and I
got one. After a couple of months during which the usual experiences
in the training of young children were gone through, I discovered that
it was I who was being educated. My mind was being swayed and drawn
to a point of view. I was in contact with a method so profound that
it seemed as if I were dealing with, or rather being dealt with by
the forces of nature. I was in the presence of great genius. What was
it? The text book on Froebel by Hughes in the International Series on
Education made the matter clear.
Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of the
German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was
studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He lived in an
age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and before they had
received their conclusive proof by being applied to morphology.
This application has for a time killed philosophy, for it has
identified the new ideas with the physical sciences, and led men to
study the human mind in psychology and from without. Whereas the mind
and its laws can, in the nature of things, be studied only through
introspection. Froebel had a scientific intellect of the very first
calibre; he had the conception of flux, of change, of evolution to
start with; and he took up introspectively the study of the laws of the
human mind, choosing that province of the universe where they are most
visibly and typically exposed,--the mind of the growing child.
The “laws” which he states are little more than a description of the
phenomena that he observed. They are statements of the results of his
experiments, and the language he employs can be translated to suit
the education of almost any one. His attention was so concentrated
upon fact that his terminology does not mislead. It can be translated
into the language of metaphysics, of Christian theology, or of modern
science, and it remains incorruptibly coherent.
His method of study was the only method which can obtain results in
philosophy, self-study unconsciously carried on. He observed the
child, and guessed at what was going on in its mind by a comparison
with what he knew of himself. He was anxious to train young children
intelligently, and he found it necessary to describe and formulate
his knowledge of the operation of their minds. It turns out that he
made a statement of the universe more comprehensive, a philosophy more
universal, than any other of which we have any record.
But this is not the most important thing he did. He devised a method
based upon his experiments and set agoing the kindergarten upon
its course in conquest of the world. If it had not been for this,
he might never have been heard of, for the world has small use for
systems of philosophy, however profound, expressed in terms which have
been superseded and are become inexpressive. But Froebel started a
practice. He showed the way. He put in the hands of persons to whom his
philosophy must ever remain a mystery, the means of working out those
practical ends for which that philosophy was designed.
The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he saw the essential. What
sort of an animal is man, asks the morphologist, for he is beginning
to reach this point in his studies, and before he has asked it, Froebel
has answered him.
‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.’
It may be said at once that the substance of everything Froebel says
was known before. Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson, and
all of us have known it. Otherwise Froebel would be unimportant. It is
his correlation and his formulation of the main facts about human life
that make him important. It is as a summary of wisdom, as a focus of
idea, as a lens through which the rest of the ideas in the world can be
viewed, that he is great.
* * * * *
The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is a
growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative activity.
It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in
proportion as it is unselfishly employed.
Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are
the most important truths about the child; and let us see how they
must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion,
conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to be
a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable
time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature, as an organism, has
here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously
studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is
a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the
days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions,
useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings
of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a
history: this thought of Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver.
The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into
human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of
some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are
interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are
pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation
through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the
mystic, as the only conceivable point of view.
“That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have
come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphysical
language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it
independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous,
that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life
completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it.
Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual
existence are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort,
occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you,
merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource,
individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else
will.