“student activities,” avocations as opposed to the preceding vocations.
There are the minor sports which are not so established in popularity
that they may conscript players--lacrosse, association football, trap
shooting, swimming, and so on. There are the other intercollegiate
competitions--chess and debating and what not. The musical clubs,
the dramatic clubs, the magazines, and many semi-professional
and semi-social organizations offer in their degree more or less
opportunity to visit rival institutions. Then, too, there is in the
larger colleges a club for almost every religious cult, from Catholic
to Theosophist, whose devotees may crave a closer warmth of communion
than they realize in the chapel, which is ordinarily non-sectarian;
a club apiece for some of the great fraternal orders; a similar club
for each of the political parties, to say nothing of a branch of the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, with another organization forming
to supply the colleges with associated Liberal Clubs. Moreover, all
the important preparatory schools, private and public, are certain
to be represented by clubs of their alumni, some of which maintain
scholarships but all of which do yeoman service scouting for athletes.
Frequently there is a Cosmopolitan Club for foreign students and
travelled Americans. And, finally, there are clubs to represent the
various provinces of knowledge--the classics, philosophy, mathematics,
the various sciences, and so on indefinitely. Then, in colleges in
or near cities, there are well-organized opportunities for students
who care to make a hobby of the Uplift and go in for social service.
While, for amateur and professional sharks and grinds, there is the
honour roll of prizes, scholarships, fellowships, distinctions, and
other academic honours. Verily a paradise for the joiner. Day by day,
the calendar of meetings and events printed in the university paper
resembles nothing so much as the bulletin board of a metropolitan hotel
which caters to conventions.
If at first glance all this welter of endeavour looks to be anything
but evidence of uniformity, at second will appear its significant
principle. Every part of it is cemented together by a universal
institutionalizing of impulses and values. There is scarcely a college
activity which can serve for a hobby but has its shingle and ribbon and
certificated niche in the undergraduate régime.
Even the undergraduate’s extra-collegiate social life, which would
probably stand next on the Martian’s list, is thoroughly regimented.
Speaking broadly, it is incorrect to call on girls at the nearest
girls’ college; and, speaking still more broadly, there is usually
one correct college whereat it is socially incumbent to pay devoirs.
In coeducational institutions the sex line is an exacting but
astonishingly innocent consumer of time and energy, of which the
greater part is invested in the sheer maintenance of convention. Along
both these social avenues the student practises a mimicry of what seems
to him to be the forms regnant in secular society and, intent on the
forms, tends to miss by a little what neighbourly ease really exists
there, so that he out-conventionalizes the conventional world. The
non-college American youth, of both sexes, would scarcely tolerate the
amount of formalism, chaperonage, and constraint that our college youth
voluntarily assumes.
The word “fussing” is the perfect tag for the visiting, the taking to
games and dances, the cherishing at house-parties, and the incessant
letter-writing that are the approved communications across the sex
line. You make a fuss over a girl, and there it ends; or you make a
fuss over a girl and get engaged, and there it ends; or--and this is
frequent only in the large Western universities where well-nigh all the
personable youths of the State’s society are in college together--you
make a fuss over a girl, you get engaged, and in due time you get
married. So far as fussing is concerned, sex is far more decorous
among collegians than among their non-collegiate fellows of the same
ages and social levels. There is a place, of course, where it is
indecorous enough; but that place is next on the Martian’s list.
Which now shifts its weakening emphasis to recreation. You will have
thought that most of the foregoing attached to recreation and that all
play and no work is the undergraduate rule. You will have erred. Above
this point almost everything on the list is recognized by the student
to be in some sort an obligation, a serious concern, a plough on which
he finds his hand gently laid by custom but which he cannot decently
relinquish till he has gained the end of the furrow.
“Nobody could be busier than the normal undergraduate. His
team, his paper, his club, show, or other activity, sometimes
several at once, occupy every spare moment which he can
persuade the office to let him take from the more formal part
of college instruction.”
The quotation is not from a baccalaureate sermon: it is from the
Harvard class oration of 1921.
The prime relaxation is talk, infinite talk--within its local range,
full of tang, flicking with deft satire the rumps of pompous asses,
burlesquing the comic (that is, the abnormal) in campus situations,
making of gossip a staccato criticism--and beyond that range, a rather
desultory patter about professional sport, shows, shallow books, the
froth of fashion, all treated lightly but taken with what a gravity!
For the other relaxations there are, according to taste, the theatre of
girls and music, the novel, bath-robed sessions at poker and bridge,
late afternoon tennis or golf or handball (very nearly the only sports
left to play for their own sake), and the bouts with Bacchus and Venus
which, though they attract fewer college men than non-college men, are
everywhere the moral holidays that insure our over-driven Puritanism
against collapse.
A favourite subject for college debates and Freshman themes argues
the case for and against going to college. You could listen to scores
of such debates, read thousands of such themes, without once meeting
a clear brief for education as a satisfaction of human curiosity.
Everywhere below the level of disinterested scholarship, education is
regarded as access to that body of common and practical information
without which one’s hands and tongue will be tied in the company of
one’s natural peers. “Institutions of learning,” as the National
Security League lately advised the Vice-President of the United States,
“are established primarily for the dissemination of knowledge, which is
acquaintance with fact and not with theory.” Consequently the universal
expectation of the educational establishment has little to do with any
wakening of appropriate if differing personalities, and has everything
to do with a standard patina, varying only in its lustre, its brighter
or duller reflection of the established scene.
Nevertheless, the essential Adam does break through and quiz the
scene. Though it come lowest in his scale of emphasis, the typical
underclassman knows the qualms and hungers of curiosity, experiments
a little with forbidden fruit, at some time fraternizes with a man
of richer if disreputable experience, perhaps strikes up a wistful
friendship with a sympathetic instructor. Then the world of normal
duties and rewards and certainties closes round him, and security in
it becomes his first concern. Sometime he intends really to read, to
think long thoughts again, to go to the bottom of things. Meanwhile
he falls into the easy habit of applying such words as “radical” or
“highbrow” to those infrequent hardier spirits who continue restless
and unappeased. Later in life you will catch him explaining that
radicalism is a perfectly natural manifestation of adolescence and the
soundest foundation for mature conservatism. Wise churchmen still talk
that way about religious doubt, and bide their time, and later refer to
the “death of doubt”--which has really been buried alive. The Martian
would conclude that the function of terrestrial education is to bury
curiosity alive.
But could he now feel that this educational establishment, this going
machine of assimilation, is responsible for our uniformity? Will not
American school and college life now seem too perfect a reflection
of American adult life to be its parent? Everything in that scale of
college values, from the vicarious excitements of football to what
Santayana has called the “deprivations of disbelief” has its exact
analogue in our life at large; and neither any college tradition nor
yet the “genteel tradition” is of so much significance as the will to
tradition that both reveal. The Martian will long since have suspected
himself guilty of a very human error, that of getting the cart before
the horse.
For we have made our schools in our own image. They are not our
prisons, but our homes. Every now and again we discipline a rash
instructor who carries too far his private taste for developing
originality; we pass acts that require teachers to sink their own
differences in our unanimity; and our fatuous faith in the public
school system as the “cradle of liberty” rests on the political
control we exercise over it. Far from being the dupes of education, we
ourselves dupe the educated; and that college men do not rebel is due
to the fact that inside a world our uniformity dominates as easily as
it dominates the school, the regimen works, college men really do get
ahead, and the “queer” really are frustrate.
Then, what is the origin of our “desperate need to agree”? There is a
possible answer in our history, if only we can be persuaded to give
our history a little attention. When we became a nation we were not a
folk. We were, in fact, so far from being alike that there were only
our common grievances and a few propositions on which we could be got
together at all, and the propositions were more like stubborn articles
of faith than like tested observations: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal ... certain inalienable
Rights ... Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... the consent
of the governed ... are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent
States.” That is not the tone of men who are partakers in a common
tradition and who share reasonable and familiar convictions. Thus under
the spur of our first national necessity we gave the first evidence of
our capacity to substitute an arbitrary and not too exacting lowest
common denominator to which men can subscribe, for the natural and
rigorous highest common multiple that expresses their genuine community
of interest. The device succeeded because we succeeded, but it was the
propositions that got the credit. The device has continued to succeed
ever since for the same reason that tradition succeeds in the modern
college--nobody who has had any reason to challenge the propositions
has been able to get at us.
Our proper job was to create a people, to get acquainted with each
other and develop a common background. But the almost miraculous
success of our lowest common denominator stood in the way of our
working out any highest common multiple. Instead of developing a common
background, we went on assimilating subscribers to the Declaration, our
arbitrary tradition, “Americanism.” We have been so increasingly beset
by aliens who had to be assimilated that their Americanization has
prevented our own.
We now believe our national job was the Conquest of the West, as if
scattering people over a continent were any substitute for creating a
People. But we have never been seriously challenged. If our good luck
should hold, the second or third generation after us will believe our
job was the subjugation of a hemisphere, including the assimilation of
genuine peoples who have done us less harm even than the Indians did.
But, whatever our practice, we shall never admit that our theory has
altered. Still lacking any common background, we shall still enclose
ourselves against the void in the painted scene of our tradition.
But our luck may not hold. We may be challenged yet.
CLARENCE BRITTEN
THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE
When Professor Einstein roused the ire of the women’s clubs by stating
that “women dominate the entire life of America,” and that “there are
cities with a million population, but cities suffering from terrible
poverty--the poverty of intellectual things,” he was but repeating a
criticism of our life now old enough to be almost a _cliché_. Hardly
any intelligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the
extraordinary feminization of American social life, and oftenest he
has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks concerning the
intellectual anæmia or torpor that seems to accompany it. Naturally
this attitude is resented, and the indiscreet visitor is told that he
has been rendered astigmatic by too limited observation. He is further
informed that he should travel in our country more extensively, see
more people, and live among us longer. The inference is that this
chastening process will in due time acquaint him with a beauty and
a thrilling intellectual vitality coyly hidden from the superficial
impressionist.
Now the thesis of this paper is that the spontaneous judgment of the
perceptive foreigner is to a remarkable degree correct. But it is a
judgment which has to be modified in certain respects rather sharply.
Moreover, even long residence in the United States is not likely to
give a visitor as vivid a sense of the historical background that
has so largely contributed to the present situation as is aroused
in the native American, who in his own family hears the folklore of
the two generations preceding him and to whom the pioneer tradition
is a reality more imaginatively plausible than, say, the emanations
of glory from English fields or the aura of ancient pomp enwrapping
an Italian castle. The foreigner is too likely to forget that in a
young country, precisely because it is young, traditions have a social
sanction unknown in an older country where memory of the past goes so
far back as to become shadowy and unreal. It is a paradox of history
that from ancient cultures usually come those who “were born too soon,”
whereas from young and groping civilizations spring the panoplied
defenders of conventions. It is usually when a tradition is fresh that
it is respected most; it is only when it has been followed for years
sufficient to make it meaningless that it can create its repudiators.
America is a very young country--and in no respect younger than that of
all Western nations it has the oldest form of established government;
our naïve respect for the fathers is surest proof that we are still in
the cultural awkward age. We have not sufficiently grown up but that we
must still cling to our father and mother. In a word, we still _think_
in pioneer terms, whatever the material and economic facts of a day
that has already outgrown their applicability.
And it is the pioneer point of view, once thoroughly understood,
which will most satisfactorily explain the peculiar development of
the intellectual life in the United States. For the life of the mind
is no fine flower of impoverishment, and if the beginnings of human
reflection were the wayward reveries of seamen in the long watches
of the night or of a shepherd lying on his back idly watching the
summer clouds float past, as surely have the considered intellectual
achievements of modern men been due to the commercial and industrial
organization which, whether or not conducive to the general happiness,
has at least made leisure possible for the few. But in the pioneer
community leisure cannot exist, even for the few; the struggle is too
merciless, the stake--life itself, possibly--too high. The pioneer must
almost of necessity hate the thinker, even when he does not despise
thought in itself, because the thinker is a liability to a community
that can afford only assets; he is non-productive in himself and a
dangerously subversive example to others. Of course, the pioneer will
tolerate the minister, exactly as primitive tribes tolerated medicine
men--and largely for the same reasons. The minister, if he cannot bring
rain or ward off pestilence as the medicine man at least pretended
he could, can soften the hardness of the human lot and can show the
road to a future kingdom that will amply compensate for the drudgery
of the present world. He has, in brief, considerable utilitarian
value. The thinker _per se_, however, has none; not only that, he is
a reproach and a challenge to the man who must labour by the sweat of
his brow--it is as if he said, “For what end, all this turmoil and
effort, merely to live? But do you know if life is worth while on such
terms?” Questions like these the pioneer must cast far from him, and
for the very good reason that if they were tolerated, new communities
might never become settled. Scepticism is an expensive luxury possible
only to men in cities living off the fruit of others’ toil. Certainly
America, up to the end of the reconstruction period following the
Civil War, had little practical opportunity and less native impulse
for the cultivation of this tolerant attitude towards ultimate values,
an atmosphere which is a talisman that a true intellectual life is
flourishing.
Consider the terrible hardness of the pioneer’s physical life. I can
think of no better description of it than in one of Sherwood Anderson’s
stories, “Godliness,” in his book, “Winesburg, Ohio.” He is writing
of the Bentley brothers just before the Civil War: “They clung to old
traditions and worked like driven animals. They lived as practically
all of the farming people of the time lived. In the spring and through
most of the winter the highways leading into the town of Winesburg were
a sea of mud. The four young men of the family worked hard all day in
the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night slept
like tired beasts on beds of straw. Into their lives came little that
was not coarse and brutal, and outwardly they were themselves coarse
and brutal.” Naturally, this intense concentration upon work is not
the whole of the picture; there was gaiety and often there was romance
in the early days of pioneering, it ran like a coloured thread through
all the story of our _Drang nach Westen_. But on the whole the period
from our confederation into a Union until the expanding industrial era
following the Civil War--roughly the century from 1783 to 1883--was
a period in which the cardinal command was, “Be active, be bold, and
above all, work.” In that century we subdued and populated a continent.
There was no time for the distractions of art or the amenities of
literature.
To be sure, a short-range perspective seems to belie this last
generalization. The colonial times and the first part of the 19th
century witnessed a valid and momentous literary and intellectual
efflorescence, and it was then we contributed many names to the
biography of greatness. Yet it was a culture centred almost wholly in
New England and wholly East of the Alleghanies; it had its vitality
because it was not self-conscious, it was frankly derivative from
England and Europe, it made no pretensions to being intrinsically
American. The great current of our national life went irresistibly
along, ploughing, and tilling, and cutting down the trees and brush,
making roads and bridges as it filled the valleys and the plains.
That was the real America, a mighty river of life, compared with
which, for instance, Emerson and the Transcendentalists seemed a mere
backwater--not a stagnant or brackish one to be sure, often a pool
of quietude in which the stars, like Emerson’s sentences, might be
reflected. But the real America was still in the heart of the pioneer.
And in one sense, it still is to-day.
The “real America,” I say, because I mean the America of mind and
attitude, the inner truth, not the outer actuality. That outer
actuality has made the fact of the pioneer almost grotesque. The
frontier is closed; the nation is the most prosperous among the
harassed ones of the earth; there is no need for the old perpetual
preoccupation with material existence. In spite of trade depressions
and wars and their aftermaths, we have conquered that problem. But we
have not conquered ourselves. We must still go on in the old terms,
as if the purpose of making money in order to make more money were as
important as the purpose of raising bread in order to support life.
The facts have changed, but we have not changed, only deflected our
interests. Where the pioneer cleared a wilderness, the modern financier
subdues a forest of competitors. He puts the same amount of energy and
essentially the same quality of thought into his task to-day, although
the practical consequences can hardly be described as identical.
And what have been those practical consequences? As the industrial
revolution expanded, coincidently with the filling up of the country,
the surplus began to grow. That surplus was expended not towards
the enrichment of our life--if one omit the perfunctory bequests for
education--but towards the most obvious of unnecessary luxuries,
the grandiose maintenance of our women. The daughters of pioneer
mothers found themselves without a real job, often, indeed, the
chief instrument for advertising their husbands’ incomes. For years
the Victorian conception of women as ornaments dominated what we
were pleased to call our “better elements”--those years, to put it
brutally, which coincided with that early prosperity that made the
conception possible. If the leisure of the landed gentry class of
colonial times had been other than a direct importation, if there
had ever been a genuine _salon_ in our cultural history, or if our
early moneyed aristocracy had ever felt itself really secure from the
constant challenge of immigrant newcomers, this surplus might have
gone towards the deepening and widening of what we could have felt to
be an indigenous tradition. Or if, indeed, the Cavalier traditions of
the South (the only offshoot of the Renaissance in America) had not
been drained of all vitality by the Civil War and its economic and
intellectual consequences, this surplus might have enhanced the more
gracious aspects of those traditions. None of these possibilities
existed; and when prosperity smiled on us we were embarrassed. We were
parvenus--even to this day the comic series, “Bringing Up Father,” has
a native tang. We know exactly how Mr. Jiggs feels when Mrs. Jiggs
drags him away to a concert and makes him dress for a stiff, formal
dinner, when all his heart desires is to smoke his pipe and play poker
with Dinty and the boys. Indeed, this series, which appears regularly
in all the newspapers controlled by Mr. Hearst, will repay the social
historian all the attention he gives it. It symbolises better than most
of us appreciate the normal relationship of American men and women to
cultural and intellectual values. Its very grotesqueness and vulgarity
are revealing.
In no country as in the United States have the tragic consequences of
the lack of any common concept of the good life been so strikingly
exemplified, and in no country has the break with those common concepts
been so sharp. After all, when other colonies have been founded, when
other peoples have roved from the homeland and settled in distant
parts, they have carried with them more than mere scraps of tradition.
Oftenest they have carried the most precious human asset of all,
a heritage of common feeling, which enabled them to cling to the
substance of the old forms even while they adapted them to the new
conditions of life. But with us the repudiation of the old heritages
was complete; we deliberately sought a new way of life, for in the
circumstances under which we came into national being, breaking with
the past was synonymous with casting off oppression. The hopefulness,
the eagerness, the enthusiasm of that conscious attempt to adjudge all
things afresh found its classic expression in the eloquent if vague.
Declaration of Independence, not even the abstract phraseology of which
could hide the revolutionary fervour beneath. Yet a few short years
and that early high mood of adventure had almost evaporated, and men
were distracted from the former vision by the prospect of limitless
economic expansion, both for the individual and the nation as a whole.
The Declaration symbolized only a short interlude in the pioneer
spirit which brought us here and then led us forth to conquer the
riches nature, with her fine contempt of human values, so generously
spread before us. The end of the revolutionary mood came as soon as
the signing of the Constitution by the States, that admirable working
compromise in government which made no attempt to underscore democracy,
as we understand it to-day, but rather to hold it in proper check and
balance. Free, then, of any common heritage or tradition which might
question his values, free, also, of the troublesome idealism of the
older revolutionary mood, the ordinary man could go forth into the
wilderness with singleness of purpose. He could be, as he still is
to-day, the pioneer _toujours_.