literary classics in a scientific age. But it is a temptation to add
further words of explanation, especially when one has at one’s elbow
persuasive quotations from Arnold on other aspects of the discussion.
Who has ever better stated the social office of literature than Arnold
in _Culture and Anarchy_ when he says: “The great men of culture are
those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for
carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge,
the best ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge
of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional,
exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of
the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the _best_ knowledge
and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and
light.”
Literary culture then relates one power of our being to another, and it
humanizes knowledge by putting it into the clear, supple and beautiful
idiom of the world. By doing the second, it makes our knowledge ready
for a third operation: it makes it ready for trial by the commonsense
of mankind. What errors are revealed when an imposing jargon is at
last made over into transparent writing, and what truths recommend
themselves with overwhelming authority when at last they are spoken in
the world’s tongue! To be passed by the commonsense of mankind is the
highest seal of truth we can know. The friends of literary culture are
right in their main contentions for literature’s great value. But let
me here repeat there is naught in American Humanism _as a doctrine and
an attitude_ that denies the restricted utility of modern science to
the modern man in his struggle for firm ground on which to plant his
feet in this rocking age. At another place we shall have to examine
the conclusions of individual American Humanists concerning scientific
doctrines. But now, in the endeavor to visualize Humanism in practice,
let us look more closely at the figure of Matthew Arnold, who was so
eminent an exponent of the literary life.
The first point I wish to make about Arnold is an unfashionable one
just now, and therefore not easy for many people to appreciate.
Arnold’s life, externally considered, was typically middle-class
and ordinary. The son of the famous Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, he
went up to Oxford, where he distinguished himself by his verse, and
afterwards faced the common problem of making a living. This problem
was complicated, as is the common case, by his desire to marry, and
he solved it in the ordinary way by taking a position that was not
altogether congenial, was in fact irksome, but did enable him to wed
Miss Lucy Wightman. Thereafter, he raised a family, and became a
member, though a critical one, of the great political and religious
institutions of his country. He traveled, he lectured, and he meditated
and wrote on matters of wide public interest. There were no exciting
physical adventures in his life, no grand crimes of passion, no
flaunting colors, no great upheavals of circumstance: in short, his was
a representative life and, to an unsympathetic eye, a commonplace one.
It was at the other pole from _la vie bohême_.
There are certain advantages not often reckoned in leading a life of
conformity, such as Arnold’s outwardly appears to be. But to forestall
misunderstanding of my point, I must say that I personally see no
virtue in conformity itself, nor in non-conformity by itself. The
first is worthless when set up as an ideal, and since the second is
only a turning inside out of something worthless (the old illustration
of the resemblance between the hollow and the bump comes to mind), it
too is of no value: non-conformity for the sake of non-conformity is
stupid. No; virtue resides all in the aim and spirit with which one
conforms or rebels: the important question is _how_ one lives within
the conventions or outside the pale. It is purpose, not pattern, that
is radical.
But it so happens--and this is among the certain advantages referred
to--that a man who leads a life typical of the millions of middle
class mankind is automatically insured of a greater breadth of normal
experience than is the bohemian flouter of institutions. The former
experiences the common lot of man: a sense of family responsibility,
touch with the main life of his community, actions within institutions
greater than himself, and so on. The latter often becomes a kind
of specialist in eccentric experience. He may be, and often is, of
extraordinary gifts, but subtraction must be made for limitation of his
experience, for specialization in certain directions, for eccentric
psychology. Dazzled by what is unique in him, we often fail to count
the price he has paid, his missing the broadening and steadying effects
of ordinary experience.
Breadth and steadiness--these are essential for the attainment of
poise, and these requisites to a certain extent are mechanically
conferred on one who lives in accord with the large customs of his
society. In looking at Arnold then, let us forget that he was a
Victorian, since that label is a flag to arouse our prejudices and stop
our thinking, but let us concentrate on these qualities of breadth and
steadiness and see how his life in its very regularity and typicality
fed his purpose and attitude, for in them we shall find his genius. It
is not conventionality or unconventionality, I repeat, that is worth
a tuppence, but that counts which one can extract from living. Arnold
wished for proportionateness in character and in following the middle
class pattern of life, he was intelligently using it for his purpose. I
do not advance this as a general proposition but in his case it was so.
_How_ did Arnold conduct his life? We may view him successively as a
thinker, a man of sentiment, and a man of practice, and in each aspect
we shall see him hold himself with an admirable poise. First, his
mind. Every one grants that it was an exceptionally balanced mind, and
the reasons for its fine state of balance are chiefly two: the scope
of Arnold’s reading and the purposiveness of his studies. For what
makes for an unsteady mind? Insufficient knowledge which permits one
to go off half-cocked, as people say; insufficient knowledge, or as
Arnold liked to put it, provincialism. Arnold was constantly on guard
against provincialism both of time and place. In a famous passage he
opposed them both: “Let us conceive of the whole group of civilized
nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great
confederation, bound to a joint action and working towards a common
result; a confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of
the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another.” But he
not only immersed himself in the Occidental mind: he also, as is not
common with Western thinkers, absorbed a great deal of the learning of
the Orient. In other words, by a diligence that is extraordinary when
it is remembered that Arnold by occupation was not a man of letters
but an inspector of schools, he carried in his head a knowledge
of world literature written over a period of twenty-five hundred
years that served him as a marvellous balancing pole in dealing with
the transitional problems of his day as they presented themselves
in politics, religion, education, social morphology and the art of
literature. Breadth of reading was the first aid for him in winning
intellectual balance: the second was purposiveness. For there have
been many omnivorous readers who have merely, after all, passed the
time because of their aimlessness. James Russell Lowell is a pathetic
instance. But Arnold’s duties shortened his hours for reading, and he
felt he had to read, when he was free to do so, to some purpose. There
is a Latin maxim--“_Semper aliquid certi proponendum est_” (always some
certain end must be kept in view)--which we know he impressed upon
himself. His essays are evidence that he was successful in working the
maxim into his blood.
Still the mind is only the third part of a man, and mental poise
can exist alongside of emotional debility and incompetence in daily
affairs. Not so with Arnold, however, who impresses one almost as
much by his emotional poise and his practical level-headedness as by
the stability of his mind. He was a poet and is secure of a place
in the history of English poetry, and this is proof positive of his
strength of feeling, for time permits no man weak in feeling to stay
long in the halls of Poesy. More than that, his sentiments, beginning
with the personal and lyric, tended to pass into reflective emotion:
that is, they broadened, became generalized, impersonal, universal,
linked with reflections on the common destiny of mankind. This
represents a maturing of his emotional life. Now just as provincialism
and aimlessness destroy one’s mental balance, so immaturity and the
inability to feel beyond one’s intimate concerns upset one’s emotional
balance. But Arnold ripened, leaving the petty and childish behind
him. He learned emotionally to stand on his own, to practice a sturdy
independence. His sentiments were adult. Mark too his efforts to
round out his emotional life. By disposition addicted to melancholy
meditativeness, he sought--many times with success--to cultivate
gaiety, to support a deeply serious view with as much charm and
lightness as were fitting.
Now regard him in his practical aspect. We have seen that Arnold
did not evade what the middle class man regards as his duties and
responsibilities. He was a man among men, asking for no petting from
society, meeting honestly by his own efforts the obligations of his
lot. He never underestimated as do many modern artists the importance
of conduct. Conduct, he said, was three-quarters of life, and as such
man’s most serious concern. “As for living, our servants can do that
for us,” said Villiers de l’Isle Adam, but Arnold never echoed such
a sentiment. On the contrary, he not only faced daily affairs with
dignity and courage, observing all varieties of men, bearing his own
part, but he stressed the practical side of his writing. He wished
for the best ideas to _prevail_ and he took infinite pains to make
them persuasive and lucid and graceful so that they would irresistibly
invade men’s minds and prevail. In this he is in extreme contrast with
the “ivory tower” attitude which isolates art and thought from events.
The practical man wishes to make a mark in the world’s business, and
this decidedly Arnold aimed to do. The aim saved him from æsthetic
trifling and metaphysical toying. It filled out the third side of his
being.
Now perhaps we may see what is involved in the ideal of
proportionateness: a threefold activity to clear the mind, to ripen and
extend the feelings, to develop a practical attitude. The man of poise
cannot neglect any one of these on peril of remaining lop-sided. Bias
is his enemy, and against it he needs the full operation of a strong
centralizing spirit in himself. Such a spirit, pervading his conduct,
pervading his poetry, pervading his mind, Arnold possessed, and it is
conveyed in his remark that “we are not here to have facilities found
us for doing the work we like, but to make them.” It is the spirit of
a man who faces the natural difficulties of life with a strong will to
overcome them.
* * * * *
We are trying to arrive at a life-like picture of the man of poise as
American Humanism conceives him. I have chosen Arnold as a working
model of the quality, and an imitable one as well. Naturally American
Humanists vary in their estimates of Arnold, and one or two--notably
G. R. Elliott--are rather harsh in their strictures, but the majority
appear to find in him the prime humanistic virtues, and so it seems
fair to make the use I have of his example. It is obvious, I hope, that
I do not imagine I am passing all of Arnold in review, and furthermore
I confess that were I not looking for a man of poise in the recent
Humanist tradition, I should never have summed Arnold up under that
phrase. Poise to my mind is not the capital thing about him. Beyond
the degree of most men, Arnold was a truth-seeker; and poise was to
him auxiliary to the pursuit of truth. Auxiliary but necessary. For
without moderating one’s powerful prejudices, without attaining a fine
balance and tact, without tempering one virtue by its opposite virtue,
Arnold was positive that one could not see things as they are. Things,
reality, are many-sided, and without the cultivation of many-sidedness
in ourselves, how can we hope to approach them fairly? These words
from the preface to _Essays in Criticism: First Series_ set forth the
right employment of poise in the great endeavor to see life steadily
and whole. “To try and approach truth on one side after another, not
to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side,
with violence and self-will,--it is only thus, it seems to me, that
mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we
shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline. He
who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own, one,
favorite, particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into
the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”
A singular fact ought to be patent from all that has been said: the
man of poise is not a type, but an ideal toward which all types of men
may strive. Nature makes types, but she does not make human beings of
poise. She makes will-less Hamlets who, faced by a necessity to act,
simply speculate and speculate, until events force them at last to
act; she makes Byrons who, on the other hand, try to force events:
they act impetuously, but they reflect like children, as Goethe said
of Byron. But Nature does not make the balanced, well-proportioned
individual. Arnold worked on himself: he worked to perfect himself
beyond the maternal care of Nature.
Thus we see that the man of poise, the Humanist ideal, is in reality
a spiritual athlete. His balance and proportionateness are not gifts,
such as a vein of poetic emotion or a capacity for intellectual
analysis may be, but they are deliberately sought and maintained. It
requires constant effort, constant activity, for him to be what he
is. Modernity accepts no such ideal as the New Humanist upholds. It
wants greater Hamlets, greater Byrons, greater Calibans: it wants the
accentuation of types and the growth of specialism: in short, it wishes
to go with the grain of Nature. But the New Humanist proclaims that
the truly man-like part is to work against the grain of Nature. “It is
this backward motion toward the source,” says Robert Frost, the poet,
“against the stream, that most we see ourselves in.”
IV
THE NEW BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
_“Our ‘intellectual atmosphere,’ however, is now rapidly changing,
is becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons,
oppressed with the stale skepticism of the post-war period, are
beginning to grow skeptical of that skepticism, and are looking
for a new set of controlling ideas capable of restoring value to
human existence. Certain forces are making for order and for new
objectives.... One of these forces is known as ‘humanism,’ which
is rapidly becoming a word to conjure with.”_--Norman Foerster in
_Humanism and America_.
Before I can treat the grounds of the New Humanist doctrine, I must
turn historian and present, briefly at least, correct information about
the origin and course of the movement which acknowledges Irving Babbitt
and Paul Elmer More as masters. I am forced to this by the amount of
misinformation and crude misrepresentation already widely disseminated
concerning More and Babbitt and their colleagues. How this spreading
of erroneous information, which now stands in our view, has come about
is easily explained. American Humanism has had a quiet development for
thirty-five years, making its way chiefly in academic channels and in
scholarly books. Not until very recently, and then principally because
of the spirited campaign waged in behalf of Babbitt and More by the
_Bookman_, has this body of thought made any strong infiltration into
popular literary journalism.
Now the roving eye of the literary journalist-at-large seldom glances
at anything growing up in the universities, and it missed altogether
the New Humanist movement until it emerged in force in the winter
of 1929-1930. Then, to his surprise, the literary journalist found
himself expected by his public to say something about Humanism. He was
totally unprepared to do so, but experience has given him a cynical
attitude toward his public. He is the lazy tutor who does not study
one lesson in advance of his pupil, but he has learned how to divert
the mind of his charge, should he be asked an inconvenient question.
He then makes a great play on non-essentials, he bluffs it out until
the hour is over, knowing well that his pupil will soon forget both the
question and the mystifying answer. To send the public off on false
scents was the shift, not always adopted dishonestly, of the unprepared
literary journalist when Humanism became no longer an avoidable
topic. For literary journalists, it seems, are never pen-tied because
of ignorance: no difficulty was experienced in promptly delivering
opinions having no bearing on the facts, lacking logic, missing the
real issues,--wrong opinions, in short. Myths about the New Humanism
were quickly generated, giving delight to connoisseurs in the absurd,
but decidedly misleading to gentleman-readers wishing simply for plain
light on the new trend. However, to dispel these myths, which obstruct
thought, nothing more is needed than some bald information.
It is dramatic contrast, in view of the international attention his
teachings have won, to begin with a picture of Irving Babbitt[1] in his
classroom, working obscurely, as befits an underminer of an age’s basic
assumptions, at his task of moulding the mind of a generation. Among
the many professional writers and brilliant teachers who have come out
from his courses--one may mention as a catholic selection T. S. Eliot,
Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Lippmann, Norman Foerster, Gilbert Seldes,
Newton Arvin--was the late Stuart P. Sherman, who has left us a roughly
drawn description of his early master’s wealth of mind and strength for
destruction and construction.
“I knew Professor Babbitt as a graduate teacher in the History of
Literary Criticism and in his Rousseau and His Influence. At that time
he had very small classes--meeting around a table. He came in with a
bag bursting full of books, and took out a handful of notes which he
arranged around him. Began to sway in his chair, then leaped out upon
one of them, and poured a barrage of criticism upon some doctrine or
some line of poetry,--‘to cast o’er erring words and deeds a heavenly
show’--Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Dante, Montaigne, Pascal,
Milton, etc.--etc.
“He deluged you with wisdom of the world; his thoughts were unpacked
and poured out so fast you couldn’t keep up with them. You didn’t
know what he was talking about, but you felt that he was extremely in
earnest, that it was tremendously important, that some time it would
count; that he was uttering dogmatically things that cut into your
beliefs, disposed derisively of what you adored, driving you into a
reconstruction of your entire intellectual system. He was at you day
after day like a battering ram, knocking down your illusions. He was
building up a system of ideas.
“You never felt for a moment that he was a pedagogue, teaching pupils.
You felt that he was a Coleridge, a Carlyle, a Buddha, pouring out the
full-stuffed cornucopia of the world upon your head. You were no longer
in the elementary class. You were with a man who was seeking through
literature for illustrations of his philosophy of life. You were
dealing with questions on the answer to which the welfare of nations
and civilization depended. He himself seemed to know the right answer
and was building a thoroughfare of ideas from the Greeks to our own day.
“You went out of the room laden down with general ideas that he had
made seem tremendously important.... He related for you a multitude of
separate and apparently disconnected tendencies to the great central
currents of thought. You carried away also a sense of the need for
immense reading. He had given you theses about literature, about life,
which you would spend a lifetime in verifying.”
A battering ram knocking down illusions ... myself, I like to think
of Irving Babbitt as a dogmatist of the Dr. Johnson type, burly in
his judgments, masculine in his sentiments, downright in manner, an
unyielding hater of sophistry, a stalwart upholder of commonsense.
What is remarkable, in view of the extent of his system, is that he
should have laid out at the age of thirty the ground-plan for his whole
impressive structure of ideas. “The characteristic thought of Irving
Babbitt,” as Norman Foerster observes, “was already adumbrated in 1895
in an address at the University of Wisconsin on ‘The Rational Study of
the Classics,’ published two years later in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and
in 1908 included in his book on _Literature and the American College_.”
Since then he has steadily developed his original thesis: confident
of his foundations, he has put up a heavy, many-fronted, turreted
fortress for the modern mind to retire into and survey across a moat of
commonsense the giddy wheelings of the “modernists,” those, that is,
who make a cult of change and take change to be “progress.”
But what were Babbitt’s sources? His mind is powerfully assimilative
and very muscular in its operations. He has applied it to world
literature, east and west, ancient and modern, and naturally therefore
his sources are varied. He is more Aristotelian than Platonic, however,
and he takes more from Confucius than from Buddha. He feels himself
at home with the rugged conservatism of Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke,
and he stands with Matthew Arnold as an urger of more Hellenism in
Anglo-Saxon culture.
His more immediate stimulators in American literature seem to be
Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton. Emerson as a volatile literary force
arose from many elements, one of them assuredly humanistic, and from
this fortifying element in Emerson Babbitt has drawn much aid to his
own spirit. It was the element which Emerson expressed in the didactic
poem quoted on the flyleaf of Babbitt’s first book, _Literature and the
American College_, and which no American Humanist since has apparently
been able to refrain from quoting some place or other in his writings.
I also succumb to the poem’s epigrammatic appeal and concision.
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
In respect to that man of truly mellow culture, Charles Eliot Norton,
friend of Carlyle, co-editor with Lowell of the _North American
Review_, professor of fine arts at Harvard, and celebrated Dantean
scholar and translator, to him Babbitt acknowledged his indebtedness in
the preface to _Literature and the American College_, written in 1907
shortly before Norton’s death.[2] “Those who,” Babbitt wrote, “during
the past generation have felt the need of a more humane scholarship are
indebted to him, many for direct aid and encouragement, and all for an
example.”