him to play it, it was precisely the lack of a common concept of the
good life which made it impossible for him to be anything else. It is
not that Americans make money because they love to do so, but because
there is nothing else to do; oddly enough, it is not even that the
possessive instincts are especially strong with us (I think the French,
for instance, are naturally more avaricious than we), but that we
have no notion of a definite type of life for which a small income
is enough, and no notion of any type of life from which work has been
consciously eliminated. Never in any national sense having had leisure,
as individuals we do not know what to do with it when good fortune
gives it to us. Unlike a real game, we must go on playing _our_ game
even after we have won.
But if the successful pioneer did not know what to do with his own
leisure, he had naïve faith in the capacity of his women to know
what to do with theirs. With the chivalric sentimentality that often
accompanies the prosperity of the primitive, the pioneer determined
that his good luck should bestow upon his wife and sisters and mother
and aunts a gift, the possession of which slightly embarrassed himself.
He gave them leisure exactly as the typical business man of to-day
gives them a blank check signed with his name. It disposed of them,
kept them out of his world, and salved his conscience--like a check to
charity. Unluckily for him, his mother, his wife, his sisters, and his
aunts were of his own blood and breeding; they were the daughters of
pioneers like himself, and the daughters of mothers who had contributed
share and share alike to those foundations which had made his success
possible. Although a few developed latent qualities of parasitism,
the majority were strangely discontented (strangely, that is, from
his point of view) with the job of mere Victorian ornament. What more
natural under the circumstances than that the unimportant things of
life--art, music, religion, literature, the intellectual life--should
be handed over to them to keep them busy and contented, while he
confined himself to the real man’s job of making money and getting on
in the world? Was it not a happy and sensible adaptation of function?
Happy or not, it was exactly what took place. To an extent almost
incomprehensible to the peoples of older cultures, the things of the
mind and the spirit have been given over, in America, into the almost
exclusive custody of women. This has been true certainly of art,
certainly of music, certainly of education. The spinster school-marm
has settled in the impressionable, adolescent minds of boys the
conviction that the cultural interests are largely an affair of the
other sex; the intellectual life can have no connection with native
gaiety, with sexual curiosity, with play, with creative dreaming, or
with adventure. These more genuine impulses, he is made to feel, are
not merely distinguishable from the intellectual life, but actually at
war with it. In my own day at Harvard the Westerners in my class looked
with considerable suspicion upon those who specialized in literature,
the classics, or philosophy--a man’s education should be science,
economics, engineering. Only “sissies,” I was informed, took courses
in poetry out in that virile West. And to this day for a boy to be
taught to play the piano, for example, is regarded as “queer,” whereas
for a girl to be so taught is entirely in the nature of things. That
is, natural aptitude has nothing to do with it; some interests are
proper for women, others for men. Of course there are exceptions enough
to make even the boldest hesitate at generalizations, yet assuredly
the contempt, as measured in the only terms we thoroughly understand,
money, with which male teachers, male professors (secretly), male
ministers, and male artists are universally held should convince the
most prejudiced that, speaking broadly, this generalization is in
substance correct.
In fact, when we try to survey the currents of our entire national
life, to assess these vagrant winds of doctrine free from the
ingenuousness that our own academic experience or training may give
us, the more shall we perceive that the dichotomy between the cultural
and intellectual life of men and women in this country has been
carried farther than anywhere else in the world. We need only recall
the older women’s clubs of the comic papers--in truth, the actual
women’s clubs of to-day as revealed by small-town newspaper reports of
their meetings--the now deliquescent Browning Clubs, the Chautauquas,
the church festivals, the rural normal schools for teachers, the
women’s magazines, the countless national organizations for improving,
elevating, uplifting this, that, or the other. One shudders slightly
and turns to the impeccable style, the slightly tired and sensuous
irony of Anatole France (not yet censored, if we read him in French)
for relief. Or if we are so fortunate as to be “regular” Americans
instead of unhappy intellectuals educated beyond our environment,
we go gratefully back to our work at the office. Beside the stilted
artificiality of this world of higher ethical values the business
world, where men haggle, cheat, and steal with whole-hearted devotion
is at least real. And it is this world, the world of making money,
in which alone the American man can feel thoroughly at home. If the
French romanticists of the 18th century invented the phrase _la femme
mécomprise_, a modern Gallic visitor would be tempted to observe
that in this 20th century the United States was the land of _l’homme
mécompris_.
These, then, are the cruder historical forces that have led directly
to the present remarkable situation, a situation, of course, which I
attempt to depict only in its larger outlines. For the surface of the
contemporary social structure shows us suffrage, the new insights into
the world of industry which the war gave so many women for the first
time, the widening of professional opportunity, co-education, and, in
the life which perhaps those of us who have contributed to this volume
know best, a genuine intellectual camaraderie. Nevertheless, I believe
the underlying thesis cannot be successfully challenged. Where men
and women in America to-day share their intellectual life on terms of
equality and perfect understanding, closer examination reveals that
the phenomenon is not a sharing but a capitulation. The men have been
feminized.
Thus far through this essay I have by implication rather than direct
statement contrasted genuine interest in intellectual things with
the kind of intellectual life led by women. Let me say now that no
intention is less mine than to contribute to the old controversy
concerning the respective intellectual capacities of the two sexes.
If I use the adjective “masculine” to denote a more valid type of
intellectual impulse than is expressed by the adjective “feminine,” it
is not to belittle the quality of the second impulse; it is a matter of
definition. Further, the relative degree of “masculine” and “feminine”
traits possessed by an individual are almost as much the result of
acquired training as of native inheritance. The young, independent
college girl of to-day is in fact more likely to possess “masculine”
intellectual habits than is the average Y.M.C.A. director. I use
the adjectives to express broad, general characteristics as they are
commonly understood.
For a direct examination of the intellectual life of women--which,
I repeat, is practically the intellectual life of the nation--in
the United States shows the necessity of terms being defined more
sharply. Interest in intellectual things is first, last, and all the
time _disinterested_; it is the love of truth, if not exclusively
for its own sake, at least without fear of consequences, in fact
with precious little thought about consequences. This does not mean
that such exercise of the native disposition to think, such slaking
of the natural metaphysical curiosity in all of us, is not a process
enwrapped--as truly as the disposition to make love or to get
angry--with an emotional aura of its own, a passion as distinctive as
any other. It merely means that the occasions which stimulate this
innate intellectual disposition are of a different sort than those
which stimulate our other dispositions. An imaginative picture of
one’s enlarged social self will arouse our instincts of ambition or a
desire to found a family, whereas curiosity or wonder about the mystery
of life, the meaning of death, the ultimate nature of God (objects
of desire as truly as other objects) will arouse our intellectual
disposition. These occasions, objects, hypotheses are of necessity
without moral significance. The values inherent in them are the
values of satisfied contemplation and not of practical result. Their
immediate utility--although their ultimate, by the paradox that is
constantly making mere common sense inadequate, may be very great--is
only subjective. In this sense, they seem wayward and masculine; and,
cardinal sin of all, useless.
Perhaps the meaning of the “feminine” approach to the intellectual life
may be made somewhat clearer by this preliminary definition. The basic
assumption of such an approach is that ideas are measured for their
value by terms outside the ideas themselves, or, as Mrs. Mary Austin
recently said in a magazine article, by “her [woman’s] deep sense of
social applicability as the test of value.” Fundamentally, in a word,
the intellectual life is an instrument of moral reform; the real
test of ideas lies in their utilitarian success. Hence it is hardly
surprising that the intellectual life, as I have defined it, of women
in America turns out on examination not to be an intellectual life at
all, but sociological activity. The best of modern women thinkers in
the United States--and there are many--are oftenest technical experts,
keen to apply knowledge and skill to the formulation of a technique
for the better solution of problems _the answers to which are already
assumed_. The question of fundamental ends is seldom if ever raised:
for example, the desirability of the modern family, the desirability
of children glowing with health, the desirability of monogamy are not
challenged. They are assumed as ends desirable in themselves, and what
women usually understand by the intellectual life is the application of
modern scientific methods to a sort of enlarged and subtler course in
domestic science.
This attitude of contempt for mere intellectual values has of course
been strengthened by the native pioneer suspicion of all thought that
does not issue immediately in successful action. The remarkable growth
of pragmatism, and its sturdy offspring instrumentalism, where ideas
become but the lowly handmaidens of “getting on,” has been possible to
the extent to which we see it to-day precisely because the intellectual
atmosphere has been surcharged with this feminized utilitarianism.
We are deeply uncomfortable before introspection, contemplation, or
scrupulous adherence to logical sequence. Women do not hesitate to
call these activities cold, impersonal, indirect--I believe they have
a phrase for them, “the poobah tradition of learning.” With us the
concept of the intellect as a soulless machine operating in a rather
clammy void has acquired the force of folklore because we have so much
wished to strip it of warmth and colour. We have wanted to discredit
it in itself; we have respected it only for what it could do. If
its operations lead to better sanitation, better milk for babies,
and larger bridges over which, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, we might
cross more rapidly from one dismal, illiberal city to another dismal,
illiberal city, then those operations have been justified. That the
life of the mind might have an emotional drive, a sting or vibrancy of
its own, constituting as valuable a contribution to human happiness as,
say, the satisfied marital felicity of the bacteria-less suburbanite
in his concrete villa has been incomprehensible. Every science must be
an _applied_ science, the intellect must be _applied_ intellect before
we thoroughly understand it. We have created an environment in which
the intellectual impulses must become fundamentally social in quality
and mood, whereas the truth of the matter is that these impulses, like
the religious impulse, in their pristine spontaneity are basically
individualistic and capricious rather than disciplined.
But such individualism in thought, unless mellowed by contact with
institutions that assume and cherish it and thus can, without
patronizing, correct its wildnesses, inevitably turns into
eccentricity. And such, unfortunately, has too often been the history
of American intellectuals. The institutional structure that might
sustain them and keep them on the main track of the humanistic
tradition has been too fragile and too slight. The university and
college life, the educational institutions, even the discipline of
scholarship, as other essays in this volume show us, have been of
very little assistance. Even the church has provoked recalcitrance
rather than any real reorientation of religious viewpoint, and our
atheists--recall Ingersoll--have ordinarily been quite conventional
in their intellectual outlook. With educated Englishmen, for example,
whatever their religious, economic, or political views, there has been
a certain common tradition or point of departure and understanding,
i.e., the classics. Mr. Balfour can speak the same language as Mr.
Bertrand Russell, even when he is a member of a government that puts
Mr. Russell in gaol for his political opposition to the late war. But
it really is a strain on the imagination to picture Mr. Denby quoting
Hume to refute Mr. Weeks, or Vice-President Coolidge engaging in an
epistemological controversy with Postmaster-General Hays. There is no
intellectual background common to President Harding and Convict Debs or
to any one person and possibly as many as a hundred others--there are
only common social or geographical backgrounds, in which the absence of
a real community of interests is pathetically emphasized by grotesque
emphasis upon fraternal solidarity, as when Mr. Harding discovered that
he and his chauffeur belonged to the same lodge, regarding this purely
fortuitous fact as a symbol of the healing power of the Fathers and of
American Democracy!
In such an atmosphere of shadowy spiritual relationships, where the
thinness of contact of mind with mind is childishly disguised under the
banner of good fellowship, it might be expected that the intellectual
life must be led not only with that degree of individualistic isolation
which is naturally necessary for its existence, but likewise in a
hostile and unintelligent environment of almost enforced “difference”
from the general social type. Such an atmosphere will become as
infested with cranks, fanatics, mushroom religious enthusiasts, moral
prigs with new schemes of perfectability, inventors of perpetual
motion, illiterate novelists, and oratorical cretins, as a swamp with
mosquitoes. They seem to breed almost overnight; we have no standard
to which the wise and the foolish may equally repair, no criterion
by which spontaneously to appraise them and thus, by robbing them of
the breath of their life, recognition, reduce their numbers. On the
contrary, we welcome them all with a kind of Jamesian gusto, as if
every fool, like every citizen, must have his right to vote. It is
a kind of intellectual enfranchisement that produces the same sort
of leadership which, in the political field of complete suffrage,
we suffer under from Washington and our various State capitals. Our
intellectual life, when we judge it objectively on the side of vigour
and diversity, too often seems like a democracy of mountebanks.
Yet when we turn from the more naïve and popular experiments for
finding expression for the baulked disposition to think, the more
sophisticated _jeunesse dorée_ of our cultural life are equally
crippled and sterile. They suffer not so much from being thought and
being “queer”--in fact, inwardly deeply uncomfortable at not being
successful business men, they are scrupulously conventional in manner
and appearance--but from what Professor Santayana has called, with his
usual felicity, “the genteel tradition.” It is a blight that falls on
the just and the unjust; like George Bernard Shaw, they are tolerant
before the caprices of the mind, and intolerant before the caprices of
the body. They acquire their disability from the essentially American
(and essentially feminine) timorousness before life itself; they seem
to want to confine, as do all good husbands and providers, adventure
to mental adventure and tragedy to an error in ratiocination. They
will discant generously about liberty of opinion--although, strictly
speaking, _opinion_ is always free; all that is restricted is the right
to put it into words--yet seem singularly silent concerning liberty of
action. If this were a mere temperamental defect, it would of course
have no importance. But it cuts much deeper. Thought, like mist, arises
from the earth, and to it must eventually return, if it is not to be
dissipated into the ether. The genteel tradition, which has stolen from
the intellectual life its own proper possessions, gaiety and laughter,
has left it sour and _déraciné_. It has lost its earthy roots, its
sensuous fulness, its bodily _mise-en-scène_. One has the feeling, when
one talks to our correct intellectuals, that they are somehow brittle
and might be cracked with a pun, a low story, or an animal grotesquerie
as an eggshell might be cracked. Yet whatever else thought may be in
itself, surely we know that it has a biological history and an animal
setting; it can reach its own proper dignity and effectiveness only
when it functions in some kind of rational relationship with the more
clamorous instincts of the body. The adjustment must be one of harmony
and welcome; real thinkers do not make this ascetic divorce between
the passions and the intellect, the emotions and the reason, which
is the central characteristic of the genteel tradition. Thought is
nourished by the soil it feeds on, and in America to-day that soil is
choked with the feckless weeds of correctness. Our sanitary perfection,
our material organization of goods, our muffling of emotion, our
deprecation of curiosity, our fear of idle adventure, our horror of
disease and death, our denial of suffering--what kind of soil of life
is that?
Surely not an over-gracious or thrilling one; small wonder that our
intellectual plants wither in this carefully aseptic sunlight.
Nevertheless, though I was tempted to give the sub-title “A Study in
Sterility” to this essay, I do not believe that our soil is wholly
sterile. Beneath the surface barrenness stirs a germinal energy that
may yet push its way through the weeds and the tin-cans of those
who are afraid of life. If the genteel tradition did not succumb to
the broad challenge of Whitman, his invitations have not been wholly
rejected by the second generation following him. The most hopeful
thing of intellectual promise in America to-day is the contempt of
the younger people for their elders; they are restless, uneasy,
disaffected. It is not a disciplined contempt; it is not yet kindled
by any real love of intellectual values--how could it be? Yet it is
a genuine and moving attempt to create a way of life free from the
bondage of an authority that has lost all meaning, even to those
who wield it. Some it drives in futile and pathetic expatriotism
from the country; others it makes headstrong and reckless; many it
forces underground, where, much as in Russia before the revolution
of 1905, the _intelligentsia_ meet their own kind and share the
difficulties of their common struggle against an environment that is
out to destroy them. But whatever its crudeness and headiness, it is
a yeast composed always of those who _will not_ conform. The more
the pressure of standardization is applied to them the sharper and
keener--if often the wilder--becomes their rebellion against it. Just
now these non-conformists constitute a spiritual fellowship which is
disorganized and with few points of contact. It may be ground out of
existence, for history is merciless and every humanistic interlude
resembles a perilous equipoise of barbaric forces. Only arrogance and
self-complacency give warrant for assuming that we may not be facing
a new kind of dark age. On the other hand, if the more amiable and
civilized of the generation now growing up can somehow consolidate
their scattered powers, what may they not accomplish? For we have a
vitality and nervous alertness which, properly channelled and directed,
might cut through the rocks of stupidity with the precision and
spaciousness with which our mechanical inventions have seized on our
natural resources and turned them into material goods. Our cup of life
is full to the brim.
I like to think that this cup will not all be poured upon the sandy
deltas of industrialism ... we have so much to spare! Climb to the top
of the Palisades and watch the great city in the deepening dusk as
light after light, and rows of lights after rows, topped by towers of
radiance at the end of the island, shine through the shadows across the
river. Think, then, of the miles of rolling plains, fertile and dotted
with cities, stretching behind one to that other ocean which washes a
civilization that was old before we were born and yet to-day gratefully
accepts our pitiful doles to keep it from starvation, of the millions
of human aspirations and hopes and youthful eagernesses contained
in the great sprawling, uneasy entity we call our country--must all
the hidden beauty and magic and laughter we know is ours be quenched
because we lack the courage to make it proud and defiant? Or walk down
the Avenue some late October morning when the sun sparkles in a clear
and electric air such as can be found nowhere else in the world. The
flashing beauty of form, the rising step of confident animalism, the
quick smile of fertile minds--must all these things, too, be reduced to
a drab uniformity because we lack the courage to proclaim their sheer
physical loveliness? Has not the magic of America been hidden under a
fog of ugliness by those who never really loved it, who never knew our
natural gaiety and high spirits and eagerness for knowledge? They have
the upper hand now--but who would dare to prophesy that they can keep
it?
Perhaps this is only a day-dream, but surely one can hope that the
America of our natural affections rather than the present one of
enforced dull standardization may some day snap the shackles of those
who to-day keep it a spiritual prison. And as surely will it be the
rebellious and disaffected who accomplish the miracle, if it is ever
accomplished. Because at bottom their revolt, unlike the aggressions
of the standardizers, is founded not on hate of what they cannot
understand, but on love of what they wish all to share.
HAROLD E. STEARNS
SCIENCE