behaviour. For him mind is the instrument by which we overcome
obstacles and thinking takes place only when action is checked. Hence
in the conventional sense there are no abstractions. Our concepts are
instruments by which we take hold of reality. If we need instruments to
manufacture instruments, or to facilitate their use, these instruments
are also concepts. We may call them abstract, but they are not thereby
removed from the realm of experienced fact. Since, therefore, our real
interest is not in things as they are in themselves, but in what we
can do with them, our judgments are judgments of value, and value is
determined by practice. Such judgments imply an incomplete physical
situation and look toward its completion. But the will to believe
is gone. There is no shadow of James’ faith in the practicality of
emotional satisfactions, or in his voluntaristic psychology. Our
“sensations are not the elements out of which perceptions are composed,
constituted, or constructed; they are the finest, most carefully
discriminated objects of perception.” Early critics, particularly
among the realists, have accused Dewey of subjectivism, but except in
the sense that an individual must be recognized as one term in the
reaction to a situation, and the realists themselves do this, there is
no ground for the charge.
Such a philosophy as Dewey’s is nothing if it is not put to work. And
here is his greatest hold on American life. Like most Americans, he has
no sympathy for the lazy, and even the over-reflective may suffer from
the contamination of sloth; the true American wants to see results, and
here is a philosophy in which results are the supreme end. Reform is,
for America, a sort of sport and this philosophy involves nothing but
reform. Metaphysical subtleties and visions leave the busy man cold;
here they are taboo.
Professor Dewey puts his philosophy to work in the fields of ethics
and education. Perhaps his ethics is the least satisfactory, howsoever
promising its beginnings. Moral codes become the expression of
group-approval. But they easily pass into tradition, get out of touch
with fact, are superannuated. The highest virtue is intelligence and
with intelligence one can recognize the uniqueness of every moral
situation and develop from it its own criteria of judgment. Progress
in morals consists in raising the general level of intelligence and
extending the group whose approvals are significant from a social
class to the nation, a notion of highest appeal to Democracy, with
its faith in the individual man. But with Dewey the limit of group
expansion is humanity, and this may verge on dangerous (unfortunately)
radicalism. Dewey’s weapon against conventional ethics is two-edged.
For the intelligent man perhaps there is no better actual moral
standard than that springing from intelligent specific judgments, but
for the uneducated, it is only too easy to identify intelligence with
sentimental opinion and to let practice degenerate into legislative
repression.
After all, judgments of practice do face incomplete situations and the
problem is not only to complete but also to determine the manner in
which the completion shall be brought about. What men transform is not
merely the world, but themselves, and the ethics is incomplete without
some further consideration of such questions as what are human natures,
and what do we want them to become. But perhaps such questions are
too dangerously near metaphysics to have appealed to Dewey’s powers
of analysis. At any rate, the general effectiveness of his ethics is
weakened by his neglect of attention to principles in some sense at
least ultimate.
In education Dewey’s philosophy has its most complete vitality, for
here he is dealing with concrete needs and the means of satisfying
them. The problem of education is to integrate knowledge and life.
He finds no joy in information for information’s sake. Curiosity
may be the gift of the child, but it must be utilized to equip the
man to hold his own in a world of industrialism and democracy. Yet
Dewey’s sympathies are with spontaneity. He is a Rousseau with a new
methodology. Connected with the Laboratory School at Chicago from 1896
to 1903, he has since followed with sympathetic interest all radical
experimentation from the methods of Madame Montessori to those of the
Gary Schools. The vast erudition amassed in this field, and his careful
and unprejudiced study of children, has made him competent above all
men to speak critically of methods and results.
In regard to education, he has given a fuller consideration of the ends
to be attained than in the case of ethics. The end is seen as continued
growth, springing from the existing conditions, freeing activity, and
flexible in its adaptation to circumstances. The educational result
is social efficiency and culture. This efficiency does not, however,
imply accepting existing economic conditions as final, and its cultural
aspect, good citizenship, includes with the more specific positive
virtues, those characteristics that make a man a good companion.
Culture is a complete ripening of the personality. “What is termed
spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about
it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might
have internally--and therefore exclusively.” The antithesis between
sacrificing oneself for others, or others for oneself, is an unreal
figment of the imagination, a tragic product of certain spiritual and
religious thinking.
Professor Dewey well understands the dangers that lurk behind such
terms as _social efficiency_ and _good citizenship_. To him sympathy
is much more than a mere feeling: it is, as he says it should be, “a
cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion
at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” But his very gift of clear
vision, his penetration of the shams of dogma, economic and social,
leads him to treat these things with scant respect. In consequence his
fellow-philosophers, the educators over whom his influence is profound,
and the public suspect him of radicalism. Only too often, to avoid
suspicion of themselves, they turn his doctrine to the very uses that
he condemns: industrial efficiency for them becomes identical with
business expedience; the school, a trade school; culture, a detached
æstheticism to be condemned; and democracy, the privilege of thinking
and acting like everybody else.
The greatest weakness of Dewey’s philosophy, and it is serious, for
Dewey as no other American philosopher grasps principles through
which American civilization might be transformed for the better--lies
in its lack of a metaphysics. Not, of course, a transcendentalism
or a religious mysticism, but above all an interpretation of human
nature. Emotionality represents a phase of the behaviour process
too real to deny, yet it has no place in Dewey’s philosophy of man.
Human longings and aspirations are facts as real as the materials
of industry. Most men remain religious. Must they rest with quack
mystics or unintelligent dogmatists? What is religion giving them that
they crave? Is it a form of art, an attitude toward the ideal, or
some interpretation of the forces of nature that they seek to grasp?
Professor Dewey is himself a lover of art, but what place has art in
his philosophy? If it is an instrument of education, what end does it
serve, and how is it to be utilized? The pragmatic ethics gives no
guarantee that the moral criteria developed by specific situations will
always be the same even for two men equally intelligent. Perhaps, in
spite of the paradox, there may be several best solutions. If so, this
fact has some significance rooted in man’s nature and his relations to
the world that philosophy should disclose. Such supplementation need
not change the character of the results, but it might forefend them
from misinterpretation and abuse.
With all its incompleteness, Dewey’s philosophy is undeniably
that of the America of to-day. What shall we say of the future? No
nation in the world has more abused its philosophies than ours. The
inspirational elements of our idealisms have become the panderings of
sentimentalists. The vitalizing forces of our pragmatisms threaten to
congeal into the dogmata of cash-success. The war has intensified our
national self-satisfaction. We tend to condemn all vision as radical,
hence unsound, hence evil, hence to be put down. Philosophy thrives in
the atmosphere of the Bacchæ:
“What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavour
Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?”
But what have we now of this atmosphere?
At Christmas-time, the American Philosophical Association devoted three
sessions to the discussion of the Rôle of the Philosopher in Modern
Life. From report, opinion was divided between those who would have
him a social reformer, to the exclusion of contemplative background,
and those with a greater sense of playing safe, who would have him
turn to history, of any sort, or contemplation quite detached from
social consequences. Let us hope these opinions are not to be taken
seriously. Our social reformers are not all like Dewey, whose neglect
of basic reflection is probably not as great as the omission of
such reflections from his published works would indicate. Nor is an
academic chair generally suited to the specific contacts with life from
which successful reforms must be shaped. On the other hand, abstract
contemplation with the pedagogic reinforcements advocated, will confirm
the popular American sentiment against reflection, if it is true,
as Dewey asserts, that education must be an outgrowth of existing
conditions. Fortunately genius, if such there be amongst us, will not
submit to the opinions of the American Philosophic Association. If
philosophy can find freedom, perhaps America can yet find philosophy.
HAROLD CHAPMAN BROWN
THE LITERARY LIFE
Among all the figures which, in Mrs. Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,”
make up the pallid little social foreground, the still more pallid
middle distance, of the New York of forty years ago, there is none
more pallid than the figure of Ned Winsett, the “man of letters
untimely born in a world that had no need of letters.” Winsett, we
are told, “had published one volume of brief and exquisite literary
appreciations,” of which one hundred and twenty copies had been sold,
and had then abandoned his calling and taken an obscure post on a
women’s weekly. “On the subject of _Hearth-fires_ (as the paper was
called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining,” says Mrs. Wharton; “but
beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man
who has tried and given up.” Sterile bitterness, a bright futility, a
beginning without a future: that is the story of Ned Winsett.
One feels, as one turns Mrs. Wharton’s pages, how symbolic this is
of the literary life in America. I shall say nothing of the other
arts, though the vital conditions of all the arts have surely much in
common; I shall say nothing of America before the Civil War, for the
America that New England dominated was a different nation from ours.
But what immediately strikes one, as one surveys the history of our
literature during the last half century, is the singular impotence of
its creative spirit. That we have and have always had an abundance of
talent is, I think, no less evident: what I mean is that so little
of this talent succeeds in effectuating itself. Of how many of our
modern writers can it be said that their work reveals a continuous
growth, or indeed any growth, that they hold their ground tenaciously
and preserve their sap from one decade to another? Where, to speak
relatively, the characteristic evolution of the European writer is one
of an ever-increasing differentiation, a progress toward the creation,
the possession of a world absolutely his own (the world of Shaw, the
world of Hardy, the world of Hamsun, of Gorky, of Anatole France),
the American writer, having struck out with his new note, becomes--how
often!--progressively less and less himself. The blighted career,
the arrested career, the diverted career are, with us, the rule. The
chronic state of our literature is that of a youthful promise which is
never redeemed.
The great writer, the _grand écrivain_, has at the best of times
appeared but once or twice in America: that is another matter. I am
speaking, as I say, of the last half century, and I am speaking of the
rank and file. There are those who will deny this characterization of
our literature, pointing to what they consider the robust and wholesome
corpus of our “normal” fiction. But this fiction, in its way, precisely
corroborates my point. What is the quality of the spirit behind it? How
much does it contain of that creative element the character of which
consists in dominating life instead of being dominated by it? Have
these novelists of ours any world of their own as distinguished from
the world they observe and reflect, the world they share with their
neighbours? Is it a personal vision that informs them, or a mob-vision?
The Danish writer, Johannes V. Jensen, has described their work as
“journalism under exceptionally fortunate conditions.” Journalism, on
the whole, it assuredly is, and the chief of these fortunate conditions
(fortunate for journalism!) has been the general failure of the writers
in question to establish and develop themselves as individuals; as
they have rendered unto Cæsar what was intended for God, is it any
wonder that Cæsar has waxed so fat? “The unfortunate thing,” writes Mr.
Montrose J. Moses, “is that the American drama”--but the observation is
equally true of this fiction of ours--“has had many brilliant promises
which have finally thinned out and never materialized.” And again:
“The American dramatist has always taken his logic second-hand; he
has always allowed his theatrical sense to be a slave to managerial
circumstance.” The two statements are complementary, and they apply,
as I say, to the whole of this “normal” literature of ours. Managerial
circumstance? Let us call it local patriotism, the spirit of the times,
the hunger of the public for this, that, or the other: to some one of
these demands, these promptings from without, the “normal” American
writer always allows himself to become a slave. It is the fact, indeed,
of his being a slave to some demand from without that makes him
“normal”--and something else than an artist.
The flourishing exterior of the main body of our contemporary
literature, in short, represents anything but the integrity of an
inner well-being. But even aside from this, one can count on one’s two
hands the American writers who are able to carry on the development
and unfolding of their individualities, year in, year out, as every
competent man of affairs carries on his business. What fate overtakes
the rest? Shall I begin to run over some of those names, familiar to
us all, names that have signified so much promise and are lost in
what Gautier calls “the limbo where moan (in the company of babes)
still-born vocations, abortive attempts, larvæ of ideas that have won
neither wings nor shapes”? Shall I mention the writers--but they are
countless!--who have lapsed into silence, or have involved themselves
in barren eccentricities, or have been turned into machines? The poets
who, at the very outset of their careers, find themselves extinguished
like so many candles? The novelists who have been unable to grow up,
and remain withered boys of seventeen? The critics who find themselves
overtaken in mid-career by a hardening of the spiritual arteries? Our
writers all but universally lack the power of growth, the endurance
that enables one to continue to produce personal work after the
freshness of youth has gone. Weeds and wild flowers! Weeds without
beauty or fragrance, and wild flowers that cannot survive the heat of
the day.
Such is the aspect of our contemporary literature; beside that of
almost any European country, it is indeed one long list of spiritual
casualties. For it is not that the talent is wanting, but that somehow
this talent fails to fulfil itself.
This being so, how much one would like to assume, with certain of our
critics, that the American writer is a sort of Samson bound with the
brass fetters of the Philistines and requiring only to have those
fetters cast off in order to be able to conquer the world! That, as I
understand it, is the position of Mr. Dreiser, who recently remarked
of certain of our novelists: “They succeeded in writing but one
book before the iron hand of convention took hold of them.” There
is this to be said for the argument, that if the American writer as
a type shows less resistance than the European writer it is plainly
because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated, nourished by
the society into which he has been born. In this sense the American
environment is answerable for the literature it has produced. But what
is significant is that the American writer _does_ show less resistance;
as literature is nothing but the expression of power, of the creative
will, of “free will,” in short, is it not more accurate to say, not
that the “iron hand of convention” takes hold of our writers, but
that our writers yield to the “iron hand of convention”? Samson had
lost his virility before the Philistines bound him; it was because he
had lost his virility that the Philistines were able to bind him. The
American writer who “goes wrong” is in a similar case. “I have read,”
says Mr. Dreiser, of Jack London, “several short stories which proved
what he could do. But he did not feel that he cared for want and public
indifference. Hence his many excellent romances.” _He did not feel
that he cared for want and public indifference._ Even Mr. Dreiser, as
we observe, determinist that he is, admits a margin of free will, for
he represents Jack London as having made a choice. What concerns us
now, however, is not a theoretical but a practical question, the fact,
namely, that the American writer as a rule is actuated not by faith
but by fear, that he cannot meet the obstacles of “want and public
indifference” as the European writer meets them, that he is, indeed,
and as if by nature, a journeyman and a hireling.
As we see, then, the creative will in this country is a very weak and
sickly plant. Of the innumerable talents that are always emerging about
us there are few that come to any sort of fruition: the rest wither
early; they are transformed into those neuroses that flourish on our
soil as orchids flourish in the green jungle. The sense of this failure
is written all over our literature. Do we not know what depths of
disappointment underlay the cynicism of Mark Twain and Henry Adams and
Ambrose Bierce? Have we failed to recognize, in the surly contempt with
which the author of “The Story of a Country Town” habitually speaks of
writers and writing, the unconscious cry of sour grapes of a man whose
creative life was arrested in youth? Are we unaware of the bitterness
with which, in certain letters of his later years, Jack London
regretted the miscarriage of his gift? There is no denying that for
half a century the American writer as a type has gone down in defeat.
Now why is this so? Why does the American writer, relatively speaking,
show less resistance than the European writer? Plainly, as I have
just said, because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated,
nourished by the society into which he has been born. If our creative
spirits are unable to grow and mature, it is a sign that there is
something wanting in the soil from which they spring and in the
conditions that surround them. Is it not, for that matter, a sign of
some more general failure in our life?
“At the present moment,” wrote Mr. Chesterton in one of his early
essays (“The Fallacy of the Young Nation”), struck by the curious
anæmia of those few artists of ours who have succeeded in developing
themselves, usually by escaping from the American environment; “at
the present moment the matter which America has very seriously to
consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near
it may be to its end.... The English colonies have produced no great
artists, and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent
possibilities and reserve force. But America has produced great artists
and that fact most certainly means that she is full of a fine futility
and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are,
they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a
brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect
us with the spirit of a school-boy? No, the colonies have not spoken,
and they are safe. Their silence may be the silence of the unborn. But
out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as
the cry of a dying man.” That there is truth behind this, that the
soil of our society is at least arid and impoverished, is indicated
by the testimony of our own poets; one has only to consider what
George Cabot Lodge wrote in 1904, in one of his letters: “We are a
dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and
not accumulators, third-rate”; one has only to consider the writings
of Messrs. Frost, Robinson, and Masters, in whose presentation of our
life, in the West as well as in the East, the individual as a spiritual
unit invariably suffers defeat. Fifty years ago J. A. Froude, on a
visit to this country, wrote to one of his friends: “From what I see of
the Eastern states I do not anticipate any very great things as likely
to come out of the Americans.... They are generous with their money,
have much tenderness and quiet good humour; but the Anglo-Saxon power
is running to seed and I don’t think will revive.” When we consider
the general colourlessness and insipidity of our latter-day life
(faithfully reflected in the novels of Howells and his successors),
the absence from it of profound passions and intense convictions,
of any representative individuals who can be compared in spiritual
force with Emerson, Thoreau, and so many of their contemporaries, its
uniformity and its uniform tepidity, then the familiar saying, “Our
age has been an age of management, not of ideas or of men,” assumes
indeed a very sinister import. I go back to the poet Lodge’s letters.
“Was there ever,” he writes, “such an anomaly as the American man?
In practical affairs his cynicism, energy, and capacity are simply
stupefying, and in every other respect he is a sentimental idiot
possessing neither the interest, the capacity, nor the desire for even
the most elementary processes of independent thought.... His wife
finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear him children and
so drivelling in every way except as a money-getter that she compels
him to expend his energies solely in that direction while she leads a
discontented, sterile, stunted life....” Is this to be denied? And does
it not in part explain that extraordinary lovelessness of the American
scene which has bred the note of a universal resentment in so much of
our contemporary fiction? As well expect figs from thistles as any
considerable number of men from such a soil who are robust enough to
prefer spiritual to material victories and who are capable of achieving
them.
It is unnecessary to go back to Taine in order to realize that here we
have a matrix as unpropitious as possible for literature and art. If
our writers wither early, if they are too generally pliant, passive,
acquiescent, anæmic, how much is this not due to the heritage of
pioneering, with its burden of isolation, nervous strain, excessive
work and all the racial habits that these have engendered?