American legal system; Raymond Fosdick, “American Police Systems,”
Chapter I, states the operation of criminal law. For legal procedure,
see Reginald Heber Smith, “Justice and the Poor,” published by the
Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching and dealing with
legal aid societies and other methods of securing more adequate legal
relief; Charles W. Eliot and others, “Efficiency in the Administration
of Justice,” published by the National Economic League; Moorfield
Storey, “The Reform of Legal Procedure;” and many other books and
articles; the reports of the American and New York Bar Associations
are of especial value. John H. Wigmore, “Evidence,” vol. V (1915
edition) discusses recent progress; see his “Cases on Torts, Preface,”
on substantive law. A very wide range of topics in American law,
philosophical, historical, procedural, and substantive, is covered
by the writings of Roscoe Pound, of which a list is given in “The
Centennial History of the Harvard Law School.” The same book deals with
many phases of legal education; see also “The Case Method in American
Law Schools,” Josef Redlich, Carnegie Endowment. For the position of
lawyers, the best book is, Charles Warren, “A History of the American
Bar;” a recent discussion of their work is Simeon E. Baldwin, “The
Young Man and the Law.” No one interested in this field should fail to
read the “Collected Legal Papers of Justice Holmes;” see also John H.
Wigmore, “Justice Holmes and the Law of Torts” and Felix Frankfurter,
“The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes,” both in the
_Harvard Law Review_, April, 1916, and Roscoe Pound, “Judge Holmes’s
Contributions to the Science of Law,” _ibid._, March, 1921. A valuable
essay on Colonial legal history is Paul S. Reinsch, “English Common
Law in the Early American Colonies.” A mass of material will be found
in the law reviews, which are indexed through 1907 by Jones, “Index
to Legal Periodicals,” 3 vols., and afterwards in the _Law Library
Journal_, cumulative quarterly.
Z. C., JR.
EDUCATION
The ideas contained in the article are so commonplace and of such
general acceptance among educators that it is impossible to give
specific authority for them. In addition to the articles mentioned,
one of the latest by Dr. D. S. Miller, “The Great College Illusion”
in the _New Republic_ for June 22, 1921, should be referred to. For
the rest the report of the Committee of Ten of the National Education
Association, and the reports of President Eliot and President Lowell
of Harvard, President Meiklejohn of Amherst, and President Wilson of
Princeton, may be cited, with the recognition that any such selection
is invidious.
R. M. L.
SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM
There has been no really fundamental discussion of American scholarship
or American criticism. Those who merely seek a good historical sketch
of our older literary scholarship, along conventional lines, will
find one in the fourth volume of the “Cambridge History of American
Literature” that is at all events vastly superior to the similar
chapters in the “Cambridge History of English Literature.” But more
illuminating than any formal treatise are the comments on our scholarly
ideals and methods in Emerson’s famous address on “The American
Scholar,” in “The Education of Henry Adams,” and in the “Letters” of
William James. The “Cambridge History of American Literature” contains
no separate chapter on American criticism, and the treatment of
individual critics is pathetically inadequate. The flavour of recent
criticism may be savoured in Ludwig Lewisohn’s interesting anthology,
“A Modern Book of Criticism,” where the most buoyant and “modern” of
our younger men are set side by side with all their unacademic masters
and compeers of the contemporary European world. All that can be said
in favour of the faded moralism of the older American criticism is
urged in an article on “The National Genius” in the _Atlantic Monthly_
for January, 1921, the temper of which may be judged from this typical
excerpt: “When Mr. Spingarn declares that beauty is not concerned with
truth or morals or democracy, he makes a philosophical distinction
which I have no doubt that Charles the Second would have understood,
approved, and could, at need, have illustrated. But he says what the
American schoolboy knows to be false to the history of beauty in
this country. Beauty, whether we like it or not, has a heart full of
service.” The case against the conservative and traditional type of
criticism is presented with slapdash pungency in the two volumes of
H. L. Mencken’s “Prejudices.” But any one can make out a case for
himself by reading the work of any American classical scholar side by
side with a book by Gilbert Murray, or any history of literature by an
American side by side with Francesco de Sanctis’s “History of Italian
Literature,” or the work of any American critic side by side with the
books of the great critics of the world.
J. E. S.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE
The “distinguished Englishman” to whom the Martian refers is of course
Viscount Bryce, whose “American Commonwealth” discusses the external
aspects of our uniformity, the similarity of our buildings, cities,
customs, and so on. Our spiritual unanimity has been most thoroughly
examined by George Santayana, both in his earlier essays--as notably in
“The Genteel Tradition”--and in his recent “Character and Opinion in
the United States.”
For all the welter of writing about our educational establishment,
only infrequent and incidental consideration has been bestowed, either
favourably or unfavourably, on its regimental effect. As custodians of
a going concern, the educators have busied themselves with repairs and
replacements to the machinery rather than with the right of way; and
lay critics have pretty much confined themselves to selecting between
machines whose slightly differing routes all lie in the same general
direction. The exception that proves the rule is “Shackled Youth,” by
Edward Yeomans.
But undergraduate life in America has a genre of its own, the form
of fiction known as “college stories.” Nearly every important school
has at some time had written round it a collection of tales that
exploit its peculiar legends, traditions, and customs--for the most
part a chafing-dish literature of pranks, patter, and athletic prowess
whose murky and often distorted reflection of student attitudes is
quite incidental to its business of entertaining. Owen Johnson’s
Lawrenceville stories--“The Prodigious Hickey,” “Tennessee Shad,” “The
Varmint,” “The Humming Bird”--are the classics of preparatory school
life. Harvard has “Pepper,” by H. E. Porter, “Harvard Episodes” and
“The Diary of a Freshman,” by Charles Flandrau, and Owen Wister’s
“Philosophy 4,” the best of all college yarns. Yale has the books
of Ralph D. Paine and of others. The Western universities have such
volumes as “Ann Arbor Tales,” by Karl Harriman, for Michigan, and
“Maroon Tales,” by W. J. Cuppy, for Chicago. George Fitch writes
amusingly about life in the smaller Western colleges in “Petey Simmons
at Siwash” and “At Good Old Siwash.”
The catalogue of serious college fiction is brief, and most of the
novels are so propagandist that they are misrepresentative. For
example, Owen Johnson’s “Stover at Yale,” which was some years out of
date when it was published, misses the essential club spirit in New
Haven by almost as wide a margin as Arthur Train’s “The World and
Thomas Kelly” departs from the normal club life in Cambridge; both
authors set up the straw man of snobbery where snobs are an unimportant
minority. Two recent novels, however, deal more faithfully with
the college scene for the very reason that their authors were more
interested in character than in setting: “This Side of Paradise,” by
Scott Fitzgerald, is true enough to have provoked endless controversy
in Princeton; and “Salt: The Education of Griffith Adams,” by Charles
G. Norris, is a memorable appraisal of student ideals in a typical
co-educational institution. Dorothy Canfield’s “The Bent Twig” is
also laid in a co-educational college. Booth Tarkington’s “Ramsay
Milholland” attends a State University; and the hero of “Gold Shod,” by
Newton Fuessle, is a revelatory failure of the University of Chicago
regimen. To these add an autobiography--“An American in the Making,
The Life Story of an Immigrant,” by M. E. Ravage, whose candid report
on his fellows at the Missouri State University is a masterpiece of
sympathetic criticism.
C. B.
THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE
To attempt to give references to specific books on so general and
inclusive a topic would be an impertinence. But one may legitimately
suggest the trends of investigation one would like to see thoroughly
explored. In my own case they would be: (1) a study of the pioneer from
the point of view of his cultural and religious interests, correlating
those interests with his general economic status; (2) a study of the
revolutionary _feeling_ of America (not formulas) in psychological
terms and of its duration as an emotional driving force; (3) a study of
the effects of the post-Civil War period and the industrial expansion
upon the position of upper-class women in the United States; (4) a
study of sexual maladjustment in American family life, correlated
again with the economic status of the successful pioneer; (5) a very
careful study of the beginnings, rise, and spread of women’s clubs,
and their purposes and accomplishments, correlated chronologically
with the development of club life of men and the extent of vice,
gambling, and drunkenness; (6) a study of American religions in more
or less Freudian terms as compensations for neurotic maladjustment;
(7) a study of instrumentalism in philosophy and its implications for
reform; (8) a serious attempt to understand and appraise the more
or less disorganized _jeunes_, with some attention to comparing the
intensity of their bitterness or optimism with the places of birth and
upbringing. No special study of American educational systems or of the
school or college life would be necessary, it seems to me, beyond, of
course, a general knowledge. The intellectual life of the nation, after
all, has little relation to the academic life.
When such special studies had been finished by sympathetic
investigators, probably one of several writers could synthesize the
results and give us a fairly definitive essay on the intellectual life
of America. Such studies, however, have not yet been done, and without
them I have had to write this essay to a certain extent _en plein air_.
Thus it has been impossible entirely to avoid giving the impression of
stating things dogmatically or intuitively. But as a matter of fact on
all the topics I have suggested for study I have already given much
thought and time, and consequently, whatever its literary form, the
essay is not pure impressionism.
H. E. S.
SCIENCE
There is no connected account of American achievement in science.
Strangely enough, the most pretentious American book on the history
of science, Sedgwick and Tyler’s “Short History of Science” (New
York: Macmillan, 1917), ignores the most notable figures among the
author’s countrymen. A useful biographical directory under the title of
“American Men of Science” (New York Science Press, 1910, 2d edition),
has been compiled by Professor James McKeen Cattell; a third revised
edition has been prepared and issued this year prior to the appearance
of the present volume.
On the tendencies manifest in the United States there are several
important papers. An address by Henry A. Rowland entitled “A Plea
for Pure Science” (_Popular Science Monthly_, vol. LIX, 1901, pp.
170–188), is still eminently worth reading. The external conditions
under which American scientists labour have been repeatedly discussed
in recent years in such journals as _Science_ and _School and
Society_, both edited by Professor Cattell, who has himself appended
very important discussions to the above-cited biographical lexicon.
Against over-organization Professor William Morton Wheeler has recently
published a witty and vigorous protest (“The Organization of Research,”
_Science_, January 21, 1921, N. S. vol. LIII, pp. 53–67).
In order to give an understanding of the essence of scientific activity
the general reader cannot do better than to trace the processes by
which the master-minds of the past have brought order into the chaos
that is at first blush presented by the world of reality. In this
respect the writings of the late Professor Ernst Mach are unsurpassed,
and even the least mathematically trained layman can derive much
insight from portions of his book “Die Mechanik” (Leipzig, 7th edition,
1912), accessible in T. J. McCormack’s translation under the title of
“The Science of Mechanics” (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.). The
section on Galileo may be specially recommended. Mach’s “Erkenntnis
und Irrtum” (Leipzig, 1906) contains most suggestive discussions of
the psychology of investigation, dealing with such questions as the
nature of a scientific problem, of experimentation, of hypothetical
assumptions, etc. Much may also be learned from the general sections
of P. Duhem’s “La theorie physique, son objet et sa structure” (Paris,
1906). E. Duclaux’s “Pasteur: Histoire d’un Esprit” has fortunately
been rendered accessible by Erwin F. Smith and Florence Hedges under
the title “Pasteur, the History of a Mind” (Philadelphia; Saunders,
1920). It reveals in masterly fashion the methods by which a great
thinker overcomes not only external opposition but the more baneful
obstacles of scientific folk-lore.
R. H. L.
PHILOSOPHY
The omission of Mr. Santayana’s philosophy from the above account
indicates no lack of appreciation of its merits. Although written
at Harvard, it is hardly an American philosophy. On one hand, Mr.
Santayana is free from the mystical religious longings that have
given our Idealisms life, and on the other, he is too confident of
the reality of culture and the value of the contemplative life to
sanction that dominance of the practical which is the stronghold of
instrumentalism.
The only histories of American Philosophy are those by Professor
Woodbridge Riley. His “Early Schools” (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1907), is a
full treatment of the period in question, but his “American Thought
from Puritanism to Pragmatism” (H. Holt, 1915) is better reading and
comes down to date. These are best read in connection with some history
of American Literature such as Barrett Wendell’s “Literary History
of America” (Scribner’s Sons, 1914). Royce’s system is given in good
condensed form in the last four chapters of his “Spirit of Modern
Philosophy” (Houghton Mifflin, 1899). Its exhaustive statement is “The
World and the Individual” (2 vols., Macmillan, 1900–1). The “Philosophy
of Loyalty” (Macmillan, 1908) develops the ethics, and the “Problem of
Christianity” (2 vols., Macmillan, 1913), relates his philosophy to
Christianity. Hocking’s religious philosophy is given in his “Meaning
of God in Human Experience” (Yale University Press, 1912). His general
position is developed on one side in “Human Nature and Its Remaking”
(Yale University Press, 1918). Anything of James is good reading. His
chief work is the “Principles of Psychology” (H. Holt, 1890), but the
“Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Some of Life’s Ideals” (H. Holt,
1907) and the “Will to Believe” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), better
illustrate his attitude toward life. “Pragmatism” (Longmans, Green
& Co., 1907) introduces his technical philosophizing. His religious
attitude can be got from the “Varieties of Religious Experience”
(Longmans, Green & Co., 1902). Dewey has nowhere systematized his
philosophy. Its technical points are exhibited in the “Essays in
Experimental Logic” (University of Chicago Press, 1916). The “Influence
of Darwin on Philosophy” (H. Holt, 1910) has two especially readable
essays, one the title-essay, the other on “Intelligence and Morals.”
The full statement of his ethics is the “Ethics” (Dewey and Tufts, H.
Holt, 1908). He is at his best in “Education and Democracy” (Macmillan,
1916). “German Philosophy and Politics” (H. Holt, 1915) is a war-time
reaction giving an interesting point of view as to the significance
of German Philosophy. “The New Realism” (Macmillan, 1912) is a volume
of technical studies by the Six Realists. “Creative Intelligence”
(H. Holt, 1917), by John Dewey and others, is a similar volume of
pragmatic studies. The reviews are also announcing another co-operative
volume, “Essays in Critical Realism” by Santayana, Lovejoy and others.
In a technical fashion Perry has discussed the “Present Tendencies
in Philosophy” (Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), but the best critical
reaction to American philosophy is that of Santayana: “Character and
Opinion in the United States” (Scribner’s Sons, 1920). Santayana’s own
chief philosophic contributions are the “Sense of Beauty” (Scribner’s
Sons, 1896), and the “Life of Reason” (5 vols., Scribner’s Sons,
1905–6). The first two chapters of his “Winds of Doctrine” (Scribner’s
Sons, 1913), on the “Intellectual Temper of the Age” and “Modernism and
Christianity,” are also relevant. Brief but excellent expositions of
Royce, Dewey, James, and Santayana by Morris R. Cohen have appeared in
the _New Republic_, vols. XX-XXIII.
H. C. B.
LITERATURE
Perhaps the most illuminating books for any one interested in the
subject of the essay on literature are the private memorials of
certain modern European writers. For a sense of everything the
American literary life is _not_, one might read, for instance,
the Letters of Ibsen, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Flaubert, Taine and
Leopardi--all of which have appeared, in whole or in part, in English.
V. W. B.
MUSIC
What little there is that is worth reading concerning American music is
scattered through magazine articles and chapters in books upon other
musical subjects. Daniel Gregory Mason has a sensible and illuminating
chapter, “Music in America,” in his “Contemporary Composers.” The
section, “America,” in Chapter XVI of the Stanford-Forsyth “History of
Music” contrives to be tactful and at the same time just. Two books
that should be read by any one interested in native composition are
Cecil Forsyth’s “Music and Nationalism” and Lawrence Gilman’s “Edward
MacDowell.” Rupert Hughes’s “Contemporary American Composers” is twenty
years old, but still interesting; it contains sympathetic--not to say
glowing--accounts of the lives and works of an incredibly large number
of Americans who do and did pursue the art of musical composition. To
know what an artist means when he asks to be understood read pages 240
and 241 of Cabell’s “Jurgen”--if you can get it; also the volume, “La
Foire sur la Place,” of “Jean Christophe.”
D. T.
POETRY
Bodenheim, Maxwell: “Minna and Myself” (Pagan Publishing Co.); “Advice”
(Alfred A. Knopf).
“H. D.”: “Sea-Garden” (Houghton Mifflin).
Eliot, T. S.: “Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf).
Fletcher, John Gould: “Irradiations: Sand and Spray” (Houghton
Mifflin); “Goblins and Pagodas” (Houghton Mifflin); “The Tree of Life”
(Macmillan); “Japanese Prints” (Four Seas Co.); “Breakers and Granite”
(Macmillan).
Frost, Robert: “North of Boston” (Holt); “A Boy’s Will” (Holt);
“Mountain Interval” (Holt).
Kreymborg, Alfred: “Plays for Poem-Mimes” (Others); “Blood of Things”
(Nicholas Brown); “Plays for Merry Andrews” (Sunwise Turn).
Lindsay, Vachel: “The Congo” (Macmillan); “The Chinese Nightingale”
(Macmillan).
Lowell, Amy: “Men, Women and Ghosts” (Houghton Mifflin); “Can Grande’s
Castle” (Houghton Mifflin); “Pictures of the Floating World” (Houghton
Mifflin); “Legends” (Houghton Mifflin).
Masters, Edgar Lee: “Spoon River Anthology” (Macmillan); “The Great
Valley” (Macmillan); “Domesday Book” (Macmillan).
Pound, Ezra: “Umbra” (Elkin Matthews); “Lustra” (Alfred A. Knopf).
Robinson, Edwin Arlington: “Children of the Night” (Scribners);
“The Town Down the River” (Scribners); “The Man Against the Sky”
(Macmillan); “Merlin” (Macmillan); “Captain Craig” (Macmillan); “The
Three Taverns” (Macmillan); “Avon’s Harvest” (Macmillan); “Lancelot”
(Scott and Seltzer).
Sandburg, Carl: “Smoke and Steel” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.).
Stevens, Wallace: See “The New Poetry;” “Others” Anthology.
Teasdale, Sara: “Rivers to the Sea” (Macmillan).
Untermeyer, Louis: “The New Adam” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.); “Including
Horace” (Harcourt, Brace & Co.).
Anthologies: “The New Poetry.” Edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice
Corbin Henderson (Macmillan); “An American Miscellany” (Harcourt, Brace
& Co.); “Others for 1919” edited by Alfred Kreymborg (A. A. Knopf);
“Some Imagist Poets” First, Second and Third Series (Houghton Mifflin).
Criticism: Untermeyer, Louis, “The New Era in American Poetry” (Henry
Holt), a comprehensive, lively, but sometimes misleading survey.
C. A.
ART
The reader may obtain most of the data on the history of American
art from Samuel Isham’s “History of American Painting,” and Charles
H. Caffin’s “Story of American Painting.” Very little writing of an
analytical nature has been devoted to American art, and nearly all of
it is devoid of a sense of perspective and of anything approaching a
realization of the position that American work holds in relation to
that of Europe. Outside of the writing that is only incompetent, there
are the books and articles by men whose purpose is to “boost” the home
product for nationalistic or commercial reasons. In contrast with all
this is Mr. Roger E. Fry’s essay on Ryder, in the _Burlington Magazine_
for April, 1908--a masterful appreciation of the artist.
W. P.
THE THEATRE
The bibliography of this subject is extensive, but in the main
unilluminating. It consists chiefly in a magnanimous waving aside of
what is, and an optimistic dream of what is to be. Into this category
fall most, if not all, of the many volumes written by the college
professors and such of their students as have, upon graduation, carried
with them into the world the college-professor manner of looking at
things. Nevertheless, Professor William Lyon Phelps’ “The Twentieth
Century Theatre,” for all its deviations from fact, and Professor
Thomas H. Dickinson’s “The Case of American Drama,” may be looked
into by the more curious. Mr. Arthur Ruhl’s “Second Nights,” with its
penetrating humour, contains several excellent pictures of certain
phases of the native theatre. Section IV of Mr. Walter Prichard Eaton’s
“Plays and Players,” Mr. George Bronson-Howard’s searching series of
papers entitled, “What’s Wrong with the Theatre,” and perhaps even Mr.
George Jean Nathan’s “The Popular Theatre,” “The Theatre, The Drama,
The Girls,” “Comedians All,” and “Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents” may
throw some light upon the subject. Miss Akins’ “Papa” and all of Mr.
O’Neill’s plays are available in book form. The bulk of inferior native
dramaturgy is similarly available to the curious-minded: there are
hundreds of these lowly specimens on view in the nearest book store.
G. J. N.
ECONOMIC OPINION