imaginative literature, without reference to any ordered
and reasoned conception of its meaning and purpose.
_Impressionist Criticism_--Any expression of taste without
adequate guidance of knowledge or thought.
_Intellectualist (or dogmatic) criticism_--Criticism based on
the conception that art is a product of thought rather than
of imagination, and that the creative fantasy of the artist
can be limited and judged by the critic’s pre-conceived
theories; or in the more ornate words of Francis Thompson,
criticism that is “for ever shearing the wild tresses of
poetry between rusty rules.”
_The Intellectuals_--All who lay undue stress on the place of
intellect in life, and assume that the turbulent flux of
reality can be tied up in neat parcels of intellectual
formulæ.
_Poetry_--All literature in which reality has been transfigured
by the imagination, including poetry in its narrower sense,
the novel, the drama, etc.; used instead of “imaginative
literature,” not merely for the sake of brevity, but as
implying a special emphasis on creative power.
_Poet_--A writer of imaginative literature in any of its forms;
not used in this essay in the narrower sense of a writer of
verse.
_Learning_--The accumulation of certain forms of knowledge
as a basis for scholarship, but no more the main purpose
of scholarship than his preparatory training is the sole
object of the athlete or soldier.
_Scholarship_--The discipline and illumination that come from
the intellectual mastery of a definite problem in the
spiritual (as opposed to the practical) life of man.
_Pedant_--Any one who thinks that learning is the whole of
scholarship.
J. E. S.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE
Should we ever entertain an intelligent explorer from Mars, we should
of course importune him, in season and out, for his impressions of
America. And if he were candid as well as intelligent, he might
ultimately be interviewed somewhat as follows:
“At first I thought the most striking fact about you was your
passion for education. While I have been enjoying your so thorough
hospitality I have met a minority of Americans who express themselves
less complacently than the rest about your material blessings; I have
talked with a few dissidents from your political theory; and I have
even heard complaints that it is possible to carry moral enthusiasm
too far. But I have yet to meet that American who is sceptical about
education as such, though on the other hand I have found few of
your citizens quite content with the working of every part of your
educational establishment. And this very discontent was what clinched
my first impression that schooling is the most vital of your passionate
interests.
“Yet as I have travelled from one to another of your cities, a second
fact about you has struck me so forcibly as to contest the supremacy
of the first. You Americans more and more seem to me to be essentially
alike. Your cities are only less identical than the trains that ply
between them. Nearly any congregation could worship just as comfortably
in nearly any other church. The casts of almost any two plays, the
staffs of almost any two newspapers, even the faculties of almost any
two colleges could exchange ‘vehicles’ with about the same results that
would attend their exchanging clothes.
“And in nothing are you so alike as in your universal desire to be
alike--to be inconspicuous, to put on straw hats on the same day,
to change your clothes in Texas in accordance with the seasons in
New York, to read the books everybody else is reading, to adopt the
opinions a weekly digests for you from the almost uniform opinions of
the whole of the daily press, in war and peace to be incontestably and
entirely American.
“Now, I should scarcely make bold to be so frank about these
observations if some of my new friends had not reassured me with the
information that they are not novel, that a distinguished Englishman
has put them into what you have considered the most representative and
have made the most popular book about your commonwealth, that in fact
you rather enjoy having outsiders recognize the success of your efforts
in uniformity. There is, of course, no reason why you should not be
as similar to each other as you choose, and you must not interpret my
surprise to mean that I am shocked by anything except the contradiction
I find between this essential similarity and what I have called your
passion for education.
“On Mars it has for a long time been our idea that the function of the
school is to put our youth in touch with what all sorts of Martians
have thought and are thinking, have felt and are feeling. I say ‘put
in touch’ rather than ‘teach,’ because it is not so much our notion
to pack their minds and hearts as to proffer samples of our various
cultures and supply keys to the storehouses--not unlike your libraries,
museums, and laboratories--that contain our records. We prefer to
think of schooling as a kind of thoroughfare between our past and our
present, an avenue to the recovery and appreciation of as many as
possible of those innumerable differences between Martian and Martian,
those conflicting speculations and cogitations, myths and hypotheses
regarding our planet and ourselves that have gone into the warp and
woof of our mental history. Thus we have hoped not only to preserve
and add to the body of Martian knowledge, but also to understand
better and utilize more variously our present minds. So it seems to us
perfectly natural, and has rather pleased than distressed us, that our
students should emerge from their studies with a multitude of differing
sympathies, beliefs, tastes, and ambitions. We have thought that such
an education enriched the lives of all of us, lives that ignorance
could not fail to constrict and subject to hum-drum monotony.
“So when I return to Mars and report that I found Earth’s most
favourable continent inhabited by its most literate great people,
a people that has carried the use of print and other means of
communication to a point we Martians have never dared dream about;
that this people has at once the most widely diffused enthusiasm for
education and the most comprehensive school equipment on Earth; and
finally that this people is at the same time the most uniform in its
life--well, I fear I shall not be believed.”
On subsequent visits the Martian might, as a wise man does who is
confronted by a logical impasse, re-examine the terms of his paradox.
As regards our uniformity, fresh evidence could only endorse his first
impressions. The vestigial remnants of what regional cultures we have
had are rapidly being effaced by our unthinking standardization in
every department of life. The railroad, the telephone and telegraph,
the newspaper, the Ford, the movies, advertising--all have scarcely
standardized themselves before they have set about standardizing
everything within their reach. Not even our provinces of the
picturesque are immune, the places and things we like to think of as
“different” (word that betrays our standard sameness!) and glamorous
of our romantic golden age. In the Old South, Birmingham loves to
call herself the Pittsburgh of the South; our railroads have all but
hounded the packets from the Mississippi; it is notorious that our
apostles to the Indians, whether political, religious, or pedagogic,
wage relentless war on the very customs and traditions we cherish in
legend; the beautiful Missions that a kindlier evangelism bequeathed
to them are repeated and cheapened in every suburb and village of the
land, under every harsher sky; those once spontaneous fêtes of the
plains, the “Stampede” and the “Round-Up,” have been made so spurious
that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West Show made in
the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’ Mardi Gras will
be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St. Louis and elsewhere.
As with these adventitious and perhaps not very important regional
differentiations, so with the one fundamental demarcation our people
have all along recognized as conditioning the give-and-take of American
life. The line between the East and the West, advancing from the
Alleghanies to the Rockies and then part of the way back, has never
stayed long enough in one zone to be precisely drawn, but it has
always been sharply felt. Since Colonial times the East has meant many
things--wealth, stability, contacts with Europe, refinement, industry,
centralized finance--and the West has meant many things--hardship
and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self-reliance, agriculture, vast
enterprise; but they have never been so close to meaning the same
things as to-day. To-morrow they will merge. Even now the geographical
line between them may be drawn anywhere in a belt two thousand miles
wide, in which it will be fixed according to the nativity of the critic
rather than by any pronounced social stigmata. East or West, there is
a greater gulf between the intelligent and the unintelligent of the
same parish than divides the intelligent of different parishes. East
or West, Americans think pretty much the same thoughts, feel about the
same emotions, and express themselves in the American tongue--that
is, in slang. If the slang, the accent, the manner differ noticeably,
as they still do, there are not wanting signs that another generation
will obliterate these differences too. Publishing, to be sure, tends
to concentrate in the East, though without impoverishing the West,
since all notable circulations have to be national to survive. The
very fact that the country’s publishing can be done from New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston demonstrates our national unanimity of opinion
and expression.
Before it overleapt the geographical walls, this national unanimity
had wiped out every class distinction but one, which it has steadily
tended to entrench--the money line. Families may continue to hold their
place only on the condition that they keep their money or get more; and
a moderate fortune, no matter how quickly come by, has only to make a
few correct strokes, avoid a few obvious bunkers, and it will found a
family by inadvertence. The process is so simple that clerks practise
it during their vacations at the shore.
Besides money, there is one other qualification--personal charm. Its
chief function, perhaps, is to disguise the essentially monetary
character of American social life. At any rate, Americans are almost as
uniformly charming as they are uniformly acquisitive. For the most part
it is a negative charm, a careful skirting of certain national taboos:
it eschews frank egoism, unfavourable criticism, intellectual subtlety,
unique expressions of temperament, humour that is no respecter of
persons, anything that might disturb the _status quo_ of reciprocal
kindliness and complacent optimism. The unpopular American is unpopular
not because he is a duffer or a bore, but because he is “conceited,”
a “knocker,” a “highbrow,” a “nut,” a “grouch,” or something of that
ilk. We do not choose, as the Martian suggested, to be as similar as
possible; we choose _not_ to be dissimilar. If our convictions about
America and what is American sprang from real knowledge of ourselves
and of our capacities, we should relish egoists, disinterested
critics, intellectuals, artists, and irreverent humourists, instead of
suppressing them when we cannot mould them. That we do not relish them,
that we protect ourselves from them, is evidence that we fear them.
What reason should we have to fear them save a secret distrust of our
asseverated convictions? Our unanimity, then, would seem to the Martian
to be an artificial substitute for some natural background we lack but
should like to have; and a most dangerous wish-fulfilment it is, for it
masks our ignorance of what we are and what we may reasonably become.
Far from being self-knowledge, Americanism would seem to him to be a
hallucination, an article of faith supported only by our determination
to believe it, and to coerce others into believing it. The secret of
our uniformity would be a stubborn ignorance.
At which point our critic would have to re-examine his earlier
impressions about our “passion for education,” and strive to understand
the uses to which we actually put our educational establishment, to
appraise its function in our life.
Beginning with the kindergarten, it provides us a few hours’ relief
from our responsibility toward our youngsters. Curiously, the Americans
most given to this evasion are the Americans most inveterately
sentimental about the “kiddies” and most loath to employ the nursery
system, holding it somehow an undemocratic invasion of the child’s
rights. Then somewhere in the primary grades we begin to feel that
we are purchasing relief from the burden of fundamental instruction.
Ourselves mentally lazy, abstracted, and genuinely bewildered by the
flow of questions from only one mouth, we blithely refer that awakening
curiosity to a harassed young woman, probably less well informed than
we are, who has to answer, or silence, the questions of from a score to
three score mouths. So begins that long throttling of curiosity which
later on will baffle the college instructor, who will sometimes write a
clever magazine essay about the complacent ignorance of his pupils.
A few years, and our expectation has shifted to the main chance. We
begin worrying over grade reports and knotting our brows over problems
in arithmetic by way of assisting our offspring to the practical
advantages of education. For the child, we now demand of his teachers
solid and lasting preparation in the things whose monetary value
our office or domestic payroll keeps sharply before us--figures,
penmanship, spelling, home economics. For us, the vicarious glory of
his “brightness.” But we want this brightness to count, to be in the
direct avenue to his career; so we reinforce the environment that
gently discourages him from the primrose paths of knowledge. Nothing
“practical” is too good for the boy at this moment--tool chests,
bicycles, wireless, what not. Thank God, we can give him a better start
than we had. As for arts and letters, well, we guess what was good
enough for his dad is good enough for him. Meanwhile we are rather
pleased than not at the athletics and the other activities in which the
grammar school apes the high school that apes the college.
The long spiral of repetitive schooling in study and sport has now
commenced its climb: year by year reviews and adds its fresh increment
to last year’s subject-matter in the classroom and on the field.
Is it so strange that when the boy meets his college professors he
is cock-sure of knowing to a hair the limits of what is normal and
important in life, beyond which lie the abnormal interests of the
grinds? That mediocre _C_ is a gentleman’s mark? Not his to question
the system that, in season and out, has borne down on passing instead
of on training, and that ends somewhere, soon or late, with a diploma
and, amid family plaudits, graduation from family control.
The high schools are expected to fit ninety-five per cent. of their
charges for life and five per cent. for college. If our boy and girl
are of the ninety and five, we demand very early specialization toward
their precious careers, wax enthusiastic over the school’s model
mercantile and banking establishment, expand to know our children are
being dosed with a course in “Civics,” generously admire the history
note-books in which they have spread much tinted ink over a little
stereotyped information, and in what we fool ourselves into believing
are the margins to all these matters proudly watch them capture a class
numeral or a school letter, grumblingly pay for real estate signs that
have gone up in flame to celebrate some epochal victory, and bear with
their antics during hazings and initiations. It’s a democratic country,
and if the poor man’s son cannot go to college, why the college must
come to him. Nor are we without a certain undemocratic satisfaction in
the thought that he has stolen a four years’ march into business over
the rich man’s son, who spends his college hours, we assure ourselves,
acquiring habits that will leave him weak in the hour of competition.
Meanwhile the straddling masters are cramming the other five with all
the dates and rules and verbs and prose passages which long and bitter
experience has demonstrated to be likeliest on entrance examinations.
From the classrooms, as term follows term with its endless iteration
of short advances and long reviews, there rises the bruit of rivalry:
masters decorously put forward the claims of their own colleges; pupils
rejoice when their future alma mater notches another athletic victory
to the well-remembered tally; the weak of heart are urging upon their
bewildered parents the superior merits of the “back-door” route to some
exacting university--by certificate to a small college and transfer at
the end of the first year.
There are high schools in whose cases all this is understatement;
and of course there are innumerable others, especially in these days
when the most rigorous colleges have lost a little of their faith in
entrance examinations, where it is absurd overstatement. Nevertheless
your son, if he goes to a representative Eastern college from a
representative high school, goes as a man steals second in the seventh.
And his subsequent instructors marvel at the airy nonchalance with
which he ignores “the finer things of life”!
The private secondary schools, save those that are frankly designed to
relieve parents of recalcitrant boys when the public schools will have
no more of them, are pretty much without the ninety-five per cent. of
non-college men. Frequently they have their charges for longer periods.
So they are free to specialize in cramming with more singleness of
mind and at the same time to soften the process as their endowments
and atmospheres permit. But at bottom the demand you make of the “prep
school” is the same demand your bookkeeper puts on his son’s high
school: you want your boy launched into college with the minimum of
trouble for yourself and the maximum of practical advantage for him;
your bookkeeper wants his boy launched into business with a minimum of
frippery and a maximum of marketable skill. One boy is experted into
college, the other is experted into business. You are both among those
passionate believers in education who impressed the Martian on his
first visit.
Some educator has announced that the college course should not only
provide preparation for life but should itself be a satisfactory
portion of life. What college student so dull as not to know
that? For the most part, he trusts the faculty to provide the
preparation--sometimes it would seem that he dares it to--but he
takes jolly good care that the four years shall give him life more
abundantly. He has looked forward to them with an impatience not even
the indignity of entrance examinations could balk; he will live them
to the top of his bent; and he will look back on them tenderly, even
sentimentally, as the purplest patch of his days. So the American
undergraduate is representative of the American temper at its best. He
is the flower of our youth at its moment of perfect bloom, its ideals
not yet corrupted, its aspirations unwithered. As he thinks and feels,
all America would think and feel if it dared and could.
At this point, therefore, the Martian’s inquiry into what we expect
from our educational establishment would have to shift its point of
view from the older to the younger generation. The Martian would be
much in demand at our colleges, both as a sure-fire lecturer and as
a shining target for degrees certain to attract wide publicity to
the donors. Let us imagine him setting aside a page in his notebook
for a scheme of undergraduate emphases, grouped and amended as his
triumphant progress permitted him to check up on his observations.
Athletics would of course head the list. Regarded as play--that is, as
they affect the spectator--college sports proffer a series of thrilling
Roman holidays extending from the first week or so of term-time to
the final base-ball game and crew race of Commencement week the next
June, and for some colleges there may be transatlantic sequels in
midsummer or later. It is by no means all play for the spectator,
whose loyalty to his institution makes it his duty to watch the teams
practise, follow the histories of the gladiators who are at once his
representatives and his entertainers, and drill himself in songs and
yells at noisy mass meetings; to bet on his college according to his
purse and without any niggardly regard for his sober judgment as to
the event; then to deck himself in the colours, march to the field,
and watch the fray from the cheering section, where his attention will
be perpetually interrupted by the orders and the abuse of a file of
insatiable marionettes who are there to dictate when he may and when
he may not give throat to his enthusiasm; and finally, if Providence
please, to be one of the snake-dancing celebrants of victory. If he
have the right physique or talent for one of the sports, he will
find himself conscripted by public opinion to enter upon the long
and arduous regimen that turns out the annual handful of athletic
heroes--to slave on freshman squads, class teams, scrub and third and
second teams, and finally perhaps, if he has been faithful, to play
a dull minute or two of a big game that is already decided and so
receive his coveted letter and side-line privilege as a charity. Or at
the dizziest pinnacle of success, a “star,” to endure the unremitting
discipline of summer practice, incessant training, eating with his
fellow-stars at the training table, in season and out to be the butt of
instruction and exhortation from all the experts of the entourage. As
they affect the participant, then, college sports are to be regarded as
work that differs from the work of professional sportsmen chiefly by
being unremunerated.
The student’s next most vivid concern is the organization of the social
life in the academic commonwealth of which he is a citizen. Every
American college has, or fancies it has, its own tone, its ideal
type of man; and good citizenship prescribes conformity to the spirit
of the place and observance of the letter of its unwritten code. For
the type is defined by a body of obligations and taboos transmitted
from generation to generation, sometimes through the mouthpiece of
the faculty, sometimes by way of the college “Bible” (to use the
slang name for those handy manuals of what to do and what to avoid
which the college Y.M.C.A. issues for the guidance of newcomers), but
most often by a rough process of trial and error which very speedily
convinces the freshman that the Fence is for seniors only, or that
it is impracticable to smoke his pipe in the Yard, or that it is
much healthier to take the air in a class cap than bareheaded. The
cherished “traditions” of a college are for the most part a composite
of just such privileges and prohibitions as these, clustering round the
notion of the type and symbolizing it; and, curiously, the younger the
institution, the more insistent it is likely to be about the sanctity
of its traditions--a college feels the need of a type in much the same
degree that a factory needs a trademark.