cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man
who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the
evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst
an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted
individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium.
Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not
as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of
a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A
healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very
many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force
must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these
many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the
individual men and women who make up the nation. No individual man
could be kept healthy by living in accordance with a plan which took
cognizance only of one set of muscles or set of organs; his health must
depend upon his general bodily vigor, that is, upon the general care
which affects hundreds of different organs according to their hundreds
of needs. Society is, of course, infinitely more complex than the human
body. The influences that tell upon it are countless; they are closely
interwoven, interdependent, and each is acted upon by many others.
It is pathetically absurd, when such are the conditions, to believe
that some one simple panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with
infinite difficulty, with bitter disappointments, with stumblings and
haltings, we are working our way upward and onward. In this progress
something can be done by continually striving to improve the social
system, now here, now there. Something more can be done by the resolute
effort for a many-sided higher life. This life must largely come
to each individual from within, by his own effort, but toward the
attainment of it each of us can help many others. Such a life must
represent the struggle for a higher and broader humanity, to be shown
not merely in the dealings of each of us within the realm of the
state, but even more by the dealings of each of us in the more intimate
realm of the family; for the life of the state rests and must ever rest
upon the life of the family.
In one of Lowell’s biting satires he holds up to special scorn the
smug, conscienceless creature who refuses to consider the morality
of any question of social ethics by remarking that “they didn’t know
everything down in Judee.” It is to be wished that some of those
who preach and practise a gospel of mere materialism and greed, and
who speak as if the heaping up of wealth by the community or by the
individual were in itself the be-all and end-all of life, would learn
from the most widely read and oldest of books that true wisdom which
teaches that it is well to have neither great poverty nor great riches.
Worst of all is it to have great poverty and great riches side by side
in constant contrast. Nevertheless, even this contrast can be accepted
if men are convinced that the riches are accumulated as the result of
great service rendered to the people as a whole, and if their use is
regulated in the interest of the whole community.
The movement for social and industrial reform has for two of its prime
objects the prevention of the accumulation of wealth save by honest
service to the country, and the supervision and regulation of its
business use, and the determination of how it shall be taxed, and
on what terms inherited, even when acquired and used honestly. This
movement is a healthy movement. It aims to replace sullen discontent,
restless pessimism, and evil preparation for revolution, by an
aggressive, healthy determination to get to the bottom of our troubles
and remedy them. To halt in the movement, as those blinded men wish
who care only for the immediate relief from all obstacles which would
thwart their getting what is not theirs, would work wide-reaching
damage. Such a halt would turn away the energies of the energetic and
forceful men who desire to reform matters from a legitimate object into
the channel of bitter and destructive agitation.
PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP[5]
What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation
can do, but what he or it actually does. Scholarship that consists
in mere learning, but finds no expression in production, may be of
interest and value to the individual, just as ability to shoot well
at clay pigeons may be of interest and value to him, but it ranks no
higher unless it finds expression in achievement. From the standpoint
of the nation, and from the broader standpoint of mankind, scholarship
is of worth chiefly when it is productive, when the scholar not merely
receives or acquires, but gives.
[5] “The Mediæval Mind.” By Henry Osborn Taylor.
“The Life and Times of Cavour.” By William Roscoe Thayer.
Of course there is much production by scholarly men which is not,
strictly speaking, scholarship; any more than the men themselves,
despite their scholarly tastes and attributes, would claim to be
scholars in the technical or purely erudite sense. The exceedingly
valuable and extensive work of Edward Cope comes under the head of
science, and represents original investigation and original thought
concerning what that investigation showed; yet if the word scholarship
is used broadly, his work must certainly be called productive
scientific scholarship. General Alexander’s capital “Memoirs of a
Confederate” show that a man who is a first-class citizen as well as
a first-class fighting man may also combine the true scholar’s power
of research and passion for truth with the ability to see clearly and
to state clearly what he has seen. Mr. Hannis Taylor’s history of “The
Origin and Growth of the American Constitution” and General Francis V.
Greene’s history of the American Revolution could have been written
only by scholars. Such altogether delightful volumes of essays as Mr.
Crothers’s “Gentle Reader,” “Pardoner’s Wallet,” and “Among Friends”
may not, in the strictest sense of the word, represent scholarship
any more than the “Essays of Elia” represent scholarship; but they
represent more than scholarship, and they could have been written
only by a man of scholarly attributes. The same thing is true of Mr.
Maurice Egan, now our Minister to Denmark--who so well upholds the
tradition which has always identified American men of letters with
American diplomacy--in his essays in Comparative Literature, named, as
I think not altogether happily, from the first essay, “The Ghost in
Hamlet.” Mr. Egan writes not merely with charm but as no one but a man
of scholarly attributes could write--and, by the way, his dedication
to Archbishop John Lancaster Spalding is a dedication to a man whose
lofty spiritual teachings have been expressed in singularly beautiful
English. In its most perfect expression scholarship must utter itself
with literary charm and distinction; although, I am sorry to say, the
professional scholars sometimes actually distrust scholarship which is
able thus to bring forth wisdom divorced from pedantry and dryness.
As an example, Gilbert Murray’s “Rise of the Greek Epic” not only
shows profound scholarship and the profound scholarly instinct which
can alone profit by the mere erudition of scholarship, but is also so
delightfully written as to be as interesting as the most interesting
novel; and, curiously enough, this very fact, coupled with the fact
that Mr. Murray’s translations of Euripides and Aristophanes are so
attractive, has tended to excite distrust of him in the minds of
worthy scholars whose productions are themselves free from all taint
of interest, from all taint of literary charm. Professor Lounsbury’s
extraordinary scholarship has been fully appreciated only by the best
scholars; and this partly because of the very fact of his many-sided
development in the field of intellectual endeavor.
But I speak now of works of scholarship in the more conventional sense,
of works which show scholarship such as Lea showed in his history of
the Inquisition, such as Child showed in his studies of English ballad
poetry.
Mr. Taylor’s study of “The Mediæval Mind” is a noteworthy
contribution--I am tempted to say the most noteworthy of recent
contributions--to the best kind of productive scholarship. His
erudition is extraordinary in breadth and depth, his grasp of the
subject no less marked than his power of conveying to others what
he has thus grasped. He is not only faithful to the truth in large
things, he is accurate in small matters also; and where he makes use
of any statement he always shows that there is justification for it;
although, by the way, I can only guess at his reason for calling Attila
a “Turanian”--a word which carries a pleasant flavor of pre-Victorian
ethnology, and might just about as appropriately be applied to
Tecumseh. As he expressly states, Mr. Taylor is not concerned with the
brutalities of mediæval life, nor with the lower grades of ignorance
and superstition which abounded in the Middle Ages, but with the more
informed and constructive spirit of the mediæval time. There is, of
course, no hard and sharp line to be drawn between mediæval time and,
on the one hand, what is “ancient” and, on the other hand, what is
“modern”; but for his purposes he treats the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries as showing the culmination of the mediæval spirit in its
most characteristic form; although he also incidentally touches on
things that occurred in the fourteenth century, and of course covers
the slow upward movement through the Dark Ages (as to which he does
rather less than justice to the Carolingian revival of learning), when
men were groping in the black abyss into which civilization so rapidly
slid after the close of the second century. His mastery of the facts
is well-nigh perfect, and he handles them with singular sympathy. In
such chapters as “The Spotted Actuality” he makes it evident that he
has constantly before his own mind the whole picture. The ordinary
reader, however, needs to remember that it is no part of Mr. Taylor’s
purpose to present this whole picture, but merely to make a study
somewhat analogous to what a study of the intellect of the nineteenth
century would be if it dealt exclusively with the thought of the
various universities of Europe and America and of circles like that of
Emerson at Concord and Goethe at Weimar. Indeed, this comparison is
hardly accurate, for the universities of the nineteenth century had a
far closer connection with the living thought of the day than was true
of the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The latter
(like their feeble survivals in the Spanish-speaking countries) much
more closely resembled the ordinary type of Mohammedan university of
the present day, such a university as the big Mohammedan university at
Cairo, than they resembled any modern university worth calling such,
or, indeed, any ancient university of living and creative force.
The schoolmen of the Middle Ages and the universities in which they
flourished are well worth such study as that which Mr. Taylor gives
them, if only because they represented what regarded itself as the
highest spiritual and intellectual teaching of the time, and because
they symbolized the forces which manifested themselves with infinitely
more permanent value in that wonderful cathedral architecture which was
one of the two culminating architectural movements of all time--the
other, of course, being the classical Greek. But the greatest
mediæval effect upon the thought of after time was produced, not by
the schoolmen, but by works which they would hardly have treated as
serious at all--by the Roland Song, the “Nibelungenlied,” the Norse
and Irish sagas, the Arthurian Cycle, including “Parsifal”; and modern
literature, on its historical side, may be said to have begun with
Villehardouin and Joinville. None of the leaders of the schools are
to-day living forces in the sense that is true of the nameless writers
who built up the stories of the immortal death fights in the Pyrenean
pass and in the hall of Etzel, or of the search for the Holy Grail.
There are keen intellects still influenced by Thomas Aquinas; but
all the writings of all the most famous doctors of the schools taken
together had no such influence on the religious thought of mankind
as two books produced long afterward, with no conception of their
far-reaching importance, by the obscure and humble authors of the
“Imitation of Christ” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” In the thirteenth
century the spiritual life in action, as apart from dogma, and as lived
with the earnest desire to follow in the footsteps of the Christ,
reached, in the person of Saint Francis of Assisi, as lofty a pinnacle
of realized idealism as humanity has ever attained. But among those
who, instead of trying simply to live up to their spiritual impulses,
endeavored to deal authoritatively in the schools with spiritual and
intellectual interests, the complementary tyranny and servility in all
such spiritual and intellectual matters were such as we can now hardly
imagine to ourselves. The one really great scientific investigator,
Roger Bacon, who actually did put as an ideal before himself the honest
search for truth, was imprisoned for years in consequence; and this in
spite of the fact that his avowals of abject submission to theological
authority and unquestioning adherence to dogma were such as we of
to-day can with difficulty understand.
At first sight such an attitude in the intellectual world seems
incompatible with the turbulent and lawless insistence on the right of
each individual to do whatever he saw fit in the political and social
world which characterized the seething life of the time. But, as Mr.
Taylor points out, the minute that a man in the Middle Ages began to be
free in any real sense he tended to become an outlaw; and, moreover,
the men who were most intolerant of restraint in matters physical
and material made no demands whatever for intellectual or spiritual
freedom. The ordinary knight or nobleman, the typical “man of action”
of the period, promptly resented any attempt to interfere with his
brutal passions or coarse appetites; but, as he had neither special
interest nor deep conviction in merely intellectual matters, he was
entirely willing to submit to guidance concerning them. The attitude
of the great baron of the highest class is amusingly shown by a
conversation that Joinville records as having occurred between himself
and King Louis the Saint. Among the questions which King Louis one
day propounded to Joinville, in the interests of the higher morality,
was whether Joinville would rather have leprosy or commit a mortal
sin; to which Joinville responded with cordial frankness that he would
rather commit thirty mortal sins than have leprosy. Now, in addition
to being a most delightful chronicler, Joinville was an exceptionally
well-behaved and religious baron, standing far above the average, and
he was very careful to perform every obligation laid upon him by those
whom he regarded as his spiritual advisers. The fact simply was that
he had no idea of the need for spiritual or intellectual independence
in the sense that a modern man has need for such independence,
because he took only a superficial interest in anything concerned
with intellectual inquiry. To harry a heretic or a Jew was not only
a duty but a pleasure, and no effort whatever was needed to refrain
from intellectual inquiry which presented to him not the slightest
attraction; but leprosy was something tangible, something real, and the
instant that the real came into collision with even the most insistent
supposed spiritual obligation the rugged old baron went into immediate
revolt.
The whole way of looking at life was so different from ours that only a
thoroughly sympathetic and understanding writer like Mr. Taylor can set
it forth in a manner that shall be sympathetic and yet not revolt us.
One of his most delightful chapters is that on “The Heart of Heloise.”
The qualities that Heloise displayed are those which eternally appeal
to what is high and fine in human life; as for her lover, Abelard, it
is possible to pardon the abject creature only by scornfully condemning
the age which imposed upon him the rules of conduct in accordance with
which he lived.
Mr. Thayer’s “Life of Cavour” is another first-rate example of
productive scholarship. It is much more than a mere biography.
The three greatest and most influential statesmen, in purpose and
achievement, since the close of the Napoleonic epoch were Lincoln,
Bismarck, and Cavour; and any account of either of them must
necessarily be an account of the most vitally important things that
happened to mankind during the period when each was playing his
greatest part. An adequate biography of either must therefore be a
permanent addition to history; such a biography could be written only
by a scholar and writer of altogether exceptional attainments; and such
a biography has been furnished by Mr. Thayer. Mr. Thayer is already
well known as the author of various volumes dealing with Italy, all
of them representing work worth doing, and all of them leading up to
and making ready the way for the really notable history which he has
now written. There are other books which should be read in connection
with it; the younger Trevelyan’s brilliant studies of Garibaldi and
the Italian revolutionists of 1848 and the dozen years immediately
succeeding, and De La Gorce’s profoundly interesting histories of the
Second Empire and the Second Republic in France, which contain the
most powerful presentment of the period from the anti-revolutionary
standpoint. Cavour not only did more than any other one man for
Italian unity and independence, but he symbolized the movement as
neither Garibaldi the Paladin, nor Mazzini the Republican, nor even
King Victor Emmanuel symbolized it. As Mr. Thayer describes Cavour’s
career it is not only of interest in itself, but it is of interest
as showing that vast and complex aggregate of contradictory forces
through whose warring chaos every great leader who fights for the
well-being of mankind must force his way to triumph. Cavour had to
contend against foes within just as much as against foes without. He
had to hold the balance between the unreasoning reactionary and the
unreasoning revolutionist, just exactly as on a larger or smaller scale
all leaders in the forward movement of mankind must ever do. Mr. Thayer
has set forth in masterly fashion the task to which the great statesman
addressed himself and the manner in which that task was performed; his
book is absorbingly interesting to the general reader, and should be of
profit not merely to the special student but to every active politician
who is in politics for any of the reasons which alone render it really
worth while to be a politician at all. Mr. Thayer is devoted to his
hero, as he ought to be; and he is a stanch partisan; but his obvious
purpose is to be fair, and the principles of liberty to which he pins
his faith are those upon which American governmental policy must always
rest--although it is not necessary to follow him in all his views, as
when he suddenly treats free trade from the fetichistic standpoint
instead of as an economic expedient to be judged on its merits in any
given case. Every man interested not only in the realities but in
the possibilities of political advance should study this book; and,
in addition to its intrinsic worth and interest, it is an example of
the kind of productive scholarship which adds to the sum of American
achievement.
* * * * *
Anything that Professor Lounsbury writes is certain to be interesting.
Any collection by him of the writings of others is also certain to be
interesting. Probably when Mr. Lounsbury is doing what he himself is
willing to accept as work, it is both so profound and so erudite that
we laymen can do little but admire it from a distance. Fortunately,
however, he is also willing to do what he regards as play, such as a
Life of Fenimore Cooper, or a study of English adapted to the needs of
those who are not scholars; and all of his writing of this lighter kind
adds markedly to the sum of enjoyment of laymen who are fond of reading.
The two volumes before me illustrate the good that can be done by
people of cultivation who at our different universities provide the
means needed to foster productive scholarship--for, unfortunately,
productive scholarship in this country is apt to be unremunerative. The
slender volume on the early literary career of Robert Browning[6] is
based on four lectures delivered at the University of Virginia under
the terms of the Barbour-Page Foundation, a foundation due to the
wisdom and generosity of Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. The “Yale Book of
American Verse”[7] is published by the Yale University Press under the
auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, a club founded by
Mr. Alexander Smith Cochran. It is the kind of club the possession of
which every real university in the country must envy Yale.
[6] “The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning.” By Thomas
R. Lounsbury.
[7] “Yale Book of American Verse.” Collected by Thomas R.
Lounsbury.
This study of Browning particularly appeals to any man who, although
devoted to Browning, yet does not care for the pieces that some of the
Browning clubs especially delight in. Browning’s great poems, those
which will last as long as English literature lasts, are given their
full meed of praise by Professor Lounsbury. The other poems, those
which especially excite the interest of the average Browning society,
are treated very amusingly and on the whole very justly. Professor
Lounsbury insists that these “poems” will not permanently last, because
they are essentially formless, and therefore not poetry at all,
and indeed not literature. He holds that the attraction such poems
exercise on certain people is the attraction of the unintelligible. Mr.
Lounsbury’s writings are always full of delicious touches, and he is
sometimes at his best in this little volume, as, for instance, where
he says: “In fact, commentaries on Browning generally bear a close
resemblance to fog-horns. They proclaim the existence of fog, but they
do not disperse it.” One of his main contentions is that fundamentally
the interest in those poems of Browning which are both very long and
very obscure does not differ in kind from that displayed in guessing
the answers to riddles or, to use a more dignified comparison, from
that employed in the solution of difficult mathematical problems.
I think, however, that for the admiration of these rather obscure
philosophical poems of Browning there is a reason upon which Mr.
Lounsbury has not touched. He says truly that the men who admire
Browning are very apt to be men not especially drawn to writers in whom
lofty speculations have found their fitting counterpart in clearness
and beauty of expression; and he instances Wordsworth and Tennyson as
poets to be enjoyed only by men and women who have a certain degree
of fondness for literature as literature. Now, I think it is true of
Browning (as it is true of Walt Whitman) that many of the people who
labor longest and hardest to master his meaning are entirely mistaken
in thinking that they enjoy him as a poet. But I do not think that Mr.
Lounsbury’s explanation that they prize him only as a puzzle fully
accounts for the enjoyment of many of these men or the profit they
derive from their study. The fact is that Browning does represent
very deep thought, very real philosophy--mixed, of course, with much
thought that is not deep at all but only obscure, and much would-be
philosophy that has no meaning whatsoever. In an instance that came to
my own knowledge, a class of college boys in a course of literature,
after carefully studying Browning for a couple of months, and after
then taking up Tennyson, unanimously abandoned Tennyson and insisted
on returning to the study of Browning. These hard-working, intelligent
boys were not all of them merely interested in puzzles. They were not
all of them blind to poetry as such. They did care to a certain extent
for form, but primarily they were interested in the great problems of
life, they were interested in great and noble thoughts. Doubtless many
of them rather enjoyed having to dig out the thought from involved
language. But probably a greater number felt a larger enjoyment in
finding lofty thought expressed in language which was even more lofty
than obscure.