potentiality is to exclude other potentialities. It is to concentrate
and limit. Dionysus suffers because he must pass into limitations:
his great surges of impulse must eventuate in the actual phenomenal
world. He is the foe of limitation, and his enemy, Apollo, must impose
limits on him. As the Dionysian spirit is strong, it breaks limits and
requires new and wider ones; as the Apollonian spirit is strong, it
accepts the challenge and seeks ever better forms and containers.
The tragic view of Nietzsche and according to him of the Greeks too is
that this struggle must be consciously intensified. The will to surpass
must grapple with the will to maintenance. Liberty battles law; love,
duty; change, custom; intuition, science; and inspiration battles
art. But the antithesis goes deeper than these human aspects reveal,
ultimately reaching energy and matter, Dionysian pure energy and
Apollonian pure form. In the æsthetics of Attic tragedy Nietzsche held
that the chorus was Dionysian and the play an Apollonian projection of
the dithyrambic being-states of the chorus.
But an observer of contemporary civilization in America and Europe who
has had awaked in him a glimmering sense of the ancient Apollonians
and Dionysians would be forced to think that the two types of men are
almost extinct. How many _Moby Dicks_ have there been in the last fifty
years of American literature? Where are the post-Nietzscheans? On
account of the pseudo-Nietzscheans whose grossness and insincerity were
so glaring, no one now dares to call himself a Nietzschean, for we have
learned from the pseudo-Nietzscheans how transparent the pose is, how
fraudulent one is to play Nietzsche without the Dionysian flame in very
truth burning within. So there are no successors to Nietzsche, no line
of initiates of Dionysus. We can appreciate Nietzsche, but we cannot be
Nietzscheans. Our heritage comes from Greece, but not from the Greece
of the Mysteries: we are the heirs of Greek rationalism, of Greek
decadence. Euripides and Socrates have turned out to be the fathers of
the future.
For speaking by and large, our art is devoid of the Æschylean mystical
conception and models itself on Euripides who reasoned with the Gods,
not for them. His principle, says Nietzsche, was this: “To be beautiful
everything must be intelligible.” Accordingly he used the familiar for
his substance, he brought the spectator on the stage, he introduced
realism. “The mirror in which formerly only grand and bold traits
were represented now showed the painful fidelity that conscientiously
reproduces even the abortive outlines of nature.... The spectator
now actually saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and
rejoiced that he could talk so well.” The Euripidean drama, like our
plays and novels today, concerned common matters of which every one
feels he is a competent judge. The audience therefore never comes to
be initiated but to apply without the slightest scruples its criteria
of ordinary experience. This was the betrayal of the Dionysian cause
which Euripides recanted at the end of his life, but the European world
has not recanted, today less than ever when a minuscule Euripides like
Bernard Shaw is loaded with the highest honors.
As for Socrates, although I am utterly unable to decide on the justice
of Nietzsche’s portrait of the historical figure--it is the most
devastating drawing of Socrates ever penned, but is it true?--that
makes no matter here. Nietzsche knew to the core the long line of men
descending from Socrates, and if he imagined a mythical father to fit
the men he knew, we can accept the myth for its truth of portraiture
of a type, if not of the individual it is named after. The Nietzschean
contention is that to Socrates was denied the pleasure of gazing into
the Dionysian abysses. He was therefore no more than Euripides _en
rapport_ with the Apollonian dream-world projected from Dionysian
ecstasy. He was a disintegrating force, withdrawing the Apollonian
tendency into the hard shell of logical schematism as Euripides shrunk
the Dionysian state into naturalistic emotion. He liked art to cling to
the trunk of dialectics, to be overgrown with philosophic thought. He
had the optimism of the dialectician which Nietzsche felt is fatal to
the tragic spirit. And he was most of the time anti-musical. From him
stream the theoretical men, the men of science in the broad sense, the
men who get their enjoyment and satisfaction out of the cast-off veil
rather than out of gazing with rapture at whatever still remains veiled
after the unveiling. They care more for the search after truth than
for truth itself. This Lessing, called by Nietzsche the most honest
of theoretical men, boldly admitted. Finally, they are insensitive
to mystery and attribute to knowledge and perception the power of a
universal panacea, seeing evil itself in error.
_The Birth of Tragedy_ gives us a sense of grand scale by which to
try contemporary literature and culture. It makes it ridiculous to
advance claims for Eugene O’Neill as a Dionysian--to mention an
example of the sort of correction that can immediately be made. It
gives us in Euripides the norm of our literary art, the decadent Greek
justification of the ways of man to God. It replaces Benda’s modest
analysis of the plastic and musical sensibilities, remarked upon in
an earlier chapter, with a majestic view of the highest contrasted
principles in man. Among other things, it throws a piercing light on
the twentieth century Humanists, revealing them to be theoretical or
socratic men as remote from the inspired by Apollo as their romantic
enemies are remote from the inspiration of Dionysus. We modern men do
but whisper inaudibly of the old gods.
In support of my classifying the New Humanists as socratic men, I
will bring forward two or three points. In the Dionysian-Apollonian
opposition, things were reconciled, brought to a dynamic equilibrium,
through struggle. The principle of individuation was in strife with
primordial unity. The most fertile sense of possibilities clashed with
the strictest sense of limitations. But the Humanist does not speak of
struggle as the means of achieving stability: he endorses mediation,
the tempering of liberty by law, the selection of a middle course.
This I hold is the procedure of the logical man with an undeveloped
sense of tragedy. Again, the New Humanist tries to rest on what may
be essentially a transitional phase of man. He concedes that the
highest level of life is religious, but he does not aim to reach it.
The humanistic level attracts him most, but may this attraction not
be translated into a love of the search for truth rather than for
truth itself--the mark of the socratic type? In the last place, it is
significant that several American Humanists confess to a distrust of
the art of music, _the_ Dionysian art. And unlike Socrates no inner
voice reminds them to their consternation, “Humanist, practice music!”
There does not even linger in them as in their monumental predecessor
an uneasy sense that in their philosophizing on the literary tradition
they may through lack of understanding the Dionysian be sinning against
a deity.
* * * * *
But we have to work with the elements of the contemporary situation.
Just as it is idle to sit dreaming of great wealth when one has to work
for bread and butter, so it is idle to sit thinking about becoming
Dionysian or Apollonian when the immediate situation requires buckling
down to the production of humble intellectual and æsthetic fare. I
have totally failed if by shrinking our valuations against a grand
scale of values, I seemed to suggest taking the road to despair of the
modern situation. On the contrary, we want to know where we are at and
how best we may spend our energies on the sound assumption that there
is a zest and a satisfaction in making the most of what we have. Since
I have used Nietzsche to expand our ideas about the state of modern
culture, I shall also give his word of encouragement to us: “A constant
struggle against uniformly unfavorable conditions is what makes a type
stable and hard.” The joy of overcoming is ours to be had for work in
present-day terms on the present-day condition of things: it will be
our rustic fare which notoriously tastes better to those who sweat for
it than to those who live in cushioned ease.
We may use conceptions of Dionysians and Apollonians for measurement,
but the current actualities thus measured are socratic men (Humanists)
and rebellious men (Baconians, Rousseauists--of many sub-varieties, the
Baconians having a touch of socratism, the Rousseauists in their art
converging toward the Euripidean standard). The demigods and satyrs do
not frequent the modern stage, but there is still played across it a
pseudo-Apollonian--pseudo-Dionysian warfare. _Our disaster is that the
participants have lost the sense of being necessary to each other_;
this vitiates all our spiritual economy.
The New Humanists are seeking to vitalize in American life the
principle of concentration and stability: the New Rebels have as their
task the vitalizing of the principle of expansion and flux. The
changed situation brought about by the advent of American Humanism is
that we now have a strong well armed party of conservation to balance
and offset the reigning party of change. A true spiritual economy would
require that each party should intensify its efforts, should surpass
its previous productions, should grow toward greater goals by vigorous
contention with the other. The rôle of the Humanist is to _contain_
the age: the rôle of the rebel is to break out of the containing forms
and to demand new forms for the new enlarged more powerful spirit. But
actually what do we find? The total absence of spiritual economists of
the sort just mentioned. No unconscious sense of a need for passing
from inchoate restlessness into major forms and no need for breaking
out from these forms in turn. Or perhaps I should say scarcely any, for
on a few occasions in the last decade there have been laments that in
American life there was no _resistance_ offered to a school of ideas,
nothing on which a new school could sharpen its mind. Criticism with us
is mostly an affair of acclamation and denunciation, a false state of
excitement in which ideas stagnate.
In the light of the economy sketched above, our recent literary history
reads somewhat as follows. The revolt of the generation now in power,
successfully carried out between 1915 and 1920, was against a _decadent
conservatism_ well named “genteelness.” It savagely broke the forms
of genteel prudish culture, but the forms were weak: it may be said
that genteelness was no enemy at all for strong writers. Well, the now
ruling Middle Generation rested on its easy laurels: there followed
ten years of waxing fat and flabby for the insurgents, to be ended by
the surprising challenge of a virile conservatism that had quietly
grown up in the meantime. _How_ they met the challenge is a matter
of recent history--the jejune thought and rhinestone wit of Carl Van
Doren in the debate with Irving Babbitt at Carnegie Hall, the ignorant
identification of Humanism with the decadent stupid conservatism of
fifteen years ago by Theodore Dreiser, the putting to work again by H.
L. Mencken of his overworked phrases like “vague and witless blather”
left no doubt whatever of the middle-aged rebels’ lack of stuff to meet
the new issues. Most assuredly the containing forms of the New Humanism
can cope with this decadent revolt movement, and have plenty of vacant
space too. It is to the younger generation of literary thinkers that
one must turn in hope of a real resistance, and its performance
likewise was keenly disappointing--the repetition of stale attitudes
for the most part. There was a lack of curiosity, _a pronounced
desire to reject and not the hunger of youth to assimilate and pass
beyond if possible_, that was distinctly discouraging to observe. The
New Humanists may well call out for good enemies: if I judge them
correctly, they have no taste for hollow victories.
To illustrate in the particular field of literature what I have been
contending: the younger generation thought that one of the important
issues involved a defence of contemporary American writing. But the
real issue is how may things work together for the greater glory of
American literature. On that all should unite, and toward it each
should make contribution. The rest is a question of judgment of
contemporary production. There is a Hollywood anecdote that seems to
make clear the differences in judgment involved on this point. A new
motion picture had been given its first showing, and the magnate had
asked his three advisers for opinions. “Stupendous,” said the first.
“Colossal! Unexcelled! Unsurpassable!” the second replied. The third
said in a low tone: “Excuse me, sir, but to me that picture was merely
great.” The New Humanist appears to be that third man judging current
American letters: to him our writing is “merely great.”
The signs of the day should tell the younger literary generation to
beware of forming a new league of mediocrity to succeed the old.
The better path now for the spirit of revolt would seem to be _through_
Humanism. Revolt to be effective must be more than a mere spilling over
weak barriers. You must have worthy forms and trammels to give force to
your new endeavor. You must be contained before you can overflow with
any meaning of importance to the future. To state it another way, the
thorough assimilation of Humanism is the next step.
That there are gaps in Humanism I have pointed out. They are ways of
egress to those who cannot be content within the Humanist doctrine and
discipline. But as they imply in turn the assuming of a more severe
discipline and form, I do not fancy an enthusiastic greeting for them
from an opposition with the naïve faith in man of the present rejecters
of the New Humanism. There is no way out for the addicts of milk
for babes. “The feeble ask for liberty; the strong ask for rule.”
Nietzsche, thou shouldst be living at this hour, when “independence,
free development, and _laisser-aller_ are claimed the most vehemently
precisely by those for whom no restraint _would be too severe_.”
* * * * *
In somewhat mythological language I have been saying that there are
certain possibilities of great development not inherent in the present
state of American culture. To come within reach of other possibilities
we must change to a state that holds them. Matthew Arnold noted that
“in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare,
the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating
and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest
measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive. And this
state of things,” he added, “is the true basis for the creative power’s
exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for
its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as
they are helps to this.” This happy state Arnold had to judge was among
the possibilities excluded by the condition of English culture in the
nineteenth century, and there seems no ground, alas, to believe that it
exists among the possibilities now open to American culture. But Arnold
did consider it possible to initiate an intermediate phase in English
life.
“Even,” he said, “when this (state of things described above) does
not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct
a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and
intelligence in which he may live and work. This is by no means an
equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought
of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakespeare, but besides that it may be
a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute,
if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great
value.” Arnold proceeded then to cite an example of this second and
possible state. “Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the
long and widely-combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe,
when he lived and worked. There was no national glow of life and
thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth.
That was the poet’s weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for
it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of
Germans. That was his strength.”
It is plain that America has yet to reach that state, and that
furthermore a great deal of work by all minds will be necessary to
bring her there. No one would argue otherwise. But the sense of urgency
one would expect is not noticeably present. We do not seem to realize
that we must accelerate our pace of work. There is, so to speak,
plenty of slack on the tether of our culture, and we are not running
it out with any admirable rapidity. Else, so I think, we would be
welcoming the contribution of the Humanists with eagerness and not with
resentment.
As it is, we lag and flounder. We are, to take a common instance from
literature, prone to make late importations of European tendencies
which have already been fully worked out abroad. Consider the vogue
of the Dreiserian novel: it is written in America several decades
after the Zolaesque novel has been thoroughly studied in France. We
import the method of naturalistic fiction--late; we do not import
simultaneously the criticism of the method, but go blundering on as
if nothing had been previously learned from the experiment. The New
Humanists ask us not to be so tardy in a detail like this but to learn
more quickly of the past, that is, to _consciously_ create the field
of our present out of the best available past. In my opinion, the
Humanists can more quickly release us from a multitude of opinions now
holding us back than any other American school of thought current. They
should enable us to get to the end of our tether that much sooner.
It was clear some time before this point that I do not regard American
Humanism as a final resting place. So far as I champion the New
Humanists, it is because they can enormously further reaching the end
of our present phase. Let us put that end very high. Let us say it is a
state of culture as high as that ascribed by Arnold to the Germany of
Goethe, or perhaps better, say it is the equal of eighteenth century
culture in England, the century Arnold underestimated. Observe I do not
say identical with, but equal to, in quality. This achievement for me
represents the end of the rope. Because then we shall have thoroughly
digested all the ideas of the Western mind from the Greeks to Bertrand
Russell: we will be familiar with them all, be able brilliantly to
reshuffle them and deal out clever new hands for ourselves. But the
game will be always the same--always a preliminary game. For the
reason that there is not now current in the Western world _a single new
seminiferous principle for human culture_. There may be one accessible,
but if so, it is certainly not current. We know or shall know all the
existing ideas and there is not a comprehensive regenerating idea in
the ensemble. In our present phase we are limited to old ideas and
our understanding or misunderstanding of old ideas. We cannot expect
a revolutionary change--how can we?--when we have nothing to change
ourselves with.
Furthermore, we are not at all ripe for that inward transformation,
the only right way to an outward social transformation, the business
for us and for our age--according to Arnold. The sense of need for it
has not even been born. We have to reach by intense activity the end
of the situation in which we are cast before a new situation can begin
with its fresh group of possibilities. We have to need something before
we can acquire it. The birth of a new need--that alone will profoundly
alter the present drift and provide an unexpected future tense for
things.
I return to the metaphor of the end of the tether. Most people know
now and then the state that it expresses--a compound of well-being,
distress and the greatest alertness. Well-being, because one has
utilized every resource, put forth every ounce of effort, thought of
every possible scheme, done the very best one could to cope with the
circumstances. Distress, because the best one has is insufficient for
the emergency, because one is at one’s wits’ end, because one needs
more power within or help from without to forestall disaster. The
greatest alertness, because in one’s desperation one overlooks nothing,
one is willing to try anything, one racks oneself for a new plan. In
that state one is most realistic, most clear about means and ends,
most determined, most dissatisfied, straining at the leash of one’s
limitations.
The condition of being at the end of the tether, torn between despair
and the highest hopes, preternaturally awake to any means promising
deliverance, marks for me the highest point a Western culture can
now attain. It is both the one truly fertile state and a pure cry
for deliverance from iron restrictions. It goes without saying that
American culture is distant from it. Who will say we experience now
the need born of such a state for whole orders of ideas that appear
in a time of Renascence, when we have not exhausted our present
orders of thought? We are from all appearances so comfortable and
optimistic--shall I add slothful?--that even American Humanism is too
strong a potion at the present time. We have the illusion of being
free while we are in fact tethered at a comparatively short range. Our
progress must consist in finding out the length of our tether, and for
that Humanism is one of the most available means. The Great Revolt will
be the revolt against the limits of Humanism as new vistas of action,
thought and being become discernible beyond the end of the tether. But
just now our energies appear to be all engaged in the lesser warfare
between Naturalism and Humanism.
It is nevertheless certain that what has here been named the dilemma of
the liberated will emerge more and more strikingly as time goes on,
for the pressures of the situation itself will steadily extrude it.
Their own experience and reflection will compel a larger and larger
vanguard of Americans to see at the one extremity the pitfalls of
romantic heterodoxy and at the other the major defects of classical
orthodoxy. Painting psychological serfdom in alluring colors will
not seduce their judgment, nor will they be convinced that the full
secret for making freemen has been entrusted to the New Humanists.
Of the organized religions they will ask, not solace which might be
given, but a hammer to smite man’s shackles, and the hammer will not be
forthcoming.
But disagreeable as such a dilemma is, it is a great awakener. It is a
challenge to find a means of circumvention. To circumvent it, however,
we shall assuredly have to reach the end of our present resources. It
can not be resolved on any terms less exacting.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I had thought to append a selected bibliography of books bearing
on American Humanism, but there seems little point in duplicating
here--with certain subtractions and a few additions--the bibliography
at the back of _Humanism and America_. That now historic symposium--and
I am greatly indebted to the publishers, Farrar and Rinehart, Inc.,
for their permission to make excerpts from it--will probably aid the
reader hitherto unread in the New Humanism to become acquainted in the
quickest fashion with the leading personalities among the New Humanists
and the extensive ramification of their views. Such a reader should,
however, if he is the man to hoe a long row, press on to the complete
works of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Houghton Mifflin and Co.
have kindly allowed me to quote from several of Babbitt’s books and
from the later volumes of More’s _Shelburne Essays_, as well as from
_Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres_ by Henry Adams. I wish to acknowledge
with thanks other favors of the like kind received from the following: