HUMANISM
AND
AMERICA
ESSAYS
ON THE OUTLOOK
OF MODERN CIVILISATION
_Edited by_
NORMAN FOERSTER
FARRAR AND RINEHART
INCORPORATED
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY FARRAR AND RINEHART
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Preface_
“Life’s a long headache in a noisy street,” sang the poet Masefield
in _The Widow in the Bye Street_ seventeen years ago. Since then, we
have all come to live in Main rather than Bye Street, and our headache
has grown apace despite the best efforts of the physicians of the age.
The noise and whirl increase, the disillusion and depression deepen,
the nightmare of Futility stalks before us in the inevitable intervals
when activity flags. Heroically or mock-heroically we distrust or
reject such stimulants and anodynes as religion, moral conventions, the
dignity of manners, the passion for beauty, and even our recent faith
in democracy, in liberalism, in progress, in science, in efficiency, in
machinery. At length revolt and scepticism themselves have ceased to be
interesting. The modern temper has produced a terrible headache.
In vain does our Chief Executive assure us that “we have reached a
higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the
history of the world.” Like Mr. Punch when it was announced that the
government would soon be broadcasting intelligence by radio, we wonder
“Where will the government get it?” All governments, all nations, are
to-day in this predicament.
The alleged Americanisation of Europe appears to signify, at bottom,
that tendencies native to Europe are being worked out most thoroughly
in the United States and are therefore making the United States the
model of twentieth-century Europe. At the same time Europe knows that
the model is, to speak very gently, inadequate. For a good many years
our own writers have deplored the condition of civilisation in the
United States, with exaggeration but essential truth. But they have
generally made of revolt and scepticism ends rather than beginnings
of wisdom. For materialistic complacency they have substituted a
smart superiority resting on the most dubious foundations. Their
feebleness in constructive power is very patent. They are part of the
disease--symptoms not remedies.
Our “intellectual atmosphere,” however, is now rapidly changing, is
becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons, oppressed
with the stale scepticism of the post-war period, are beginning to
grow sceptical of that scepticism, 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. They are
not strong forces, they can scarcely be called movements, but they are
receiving a hearing and they contain the promise of growth.
One of these forces is known as “humanism,” which is rapidly becoming
a word to conjure with. In its broadest signification, it denotes a
belief that the proper study of mankind is man, and that this study
should enable mankind to perceive and realise its humanity. But the
study of mankind is capable of yielding all manner of results, so that,
for a long time to come, we may expect the word denoting this study
to carry a large variety of meanings. Since man may be conceived as
living on three planes, the natural, the human, and the religious, the
content of the middle term will frequently tend to be invaded by that
of the extremes. Thus, many persons who call themselves humanists, in
this naturistic era from which we have not yet emerged, are unwittingly
naturists yearning stoically for adaptation to the universe or
mystically for a fusion of the human and the natural. Such persons
might call themselves, paradoxically, humanistic naturists. In the
interest of clearness, as it seems to me, the word humanism should be
confined to a working philosophy seeking to make a resolute distinction
between man and nature and between man and the divine.
The most fruitful approximation to such a distinction, in the twentieth
century, has been the work of two American scholar-critics, Irving
Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. The characteristic thought of Irving
Babbitt 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_. This book contains in
essence, one may almost say, everything in the series of volumes in
which he has since applied his humanistic standards to various aspects
of modern life and thought. With a tenacity of purpose unexampled in
an age shifting aimlessly from one enthusiasm and disillusionment to
another, with an effect growing more massive as he has worked out
his ideas in such fields as æsthetics, literary criticism, ethics,
psychology, education, and politics, with a remarkable power of
relating his sense of permanent values to an historical sense (so that
his books are in one view works of history, and in another, doctrinal
inductions from facts), with a vast accumulation of learning that has
been thoroughly assimilated, and with a mode of expression notable for
weighty vigour, earnestness, brilliant ridicule, and an instinct for
ruinous quotation, Professor Babbitt has done more than any one else
to formulate the concept of humanism and gain for it an ever-widening
hearing. A great teacher as well as writer, lecturing to students at
Harvard for some thirty-five years, he has done much to shape the minds
and purposes of a whole generation of young men, and thus to render
possible the continuance of his task in the future.
Paul Elmer More, after a brief experience as teacher of Sanskrit
and Classical literature, entered criticism through the avenue of
journalism, becoming literary editor of the _Independent_ and the New
York _Evening Post_ and editor of the _Nation_. Through his relation
with contributors to the _Nation_, in particular, he exerted a powerful
influence upon the higher critical activity of the country, an
influence extended more widely through his long series of _Shelburne
Essays_, beginning in 1904, in which he united in fine balance a
profound and far-ranging scholarship, unusual psychological insight,
an humanistic point of view, and a gift of firm, luminous, urbane
but penetrating writing. Undervalued because of their hostility to
the popular tendencies of the epoch, these essays will one day be
generally recognised, I believe, as the highest accomplishment in
literary criticism in the whole of American literature. The fundamental
unity in the work of our two leading humanistic thinkers may be seen
by comparing, say, the conclusion of Mr. Babbitt’s _Masters of Modern
French Criticism_ and the “Definitions of Dualism” at the close of the
eighth series of _Shelburne Essays_, or the introduction to _Democracy
and Leadership_ and the first essay in the _New Shelburne Essays_,
Volume I. The main difference, perhaps, lies in emphasis; while Mr.
Babbitt has been first and last concerned with building up a sound
conception of individualism, Mr. More has been progressively absorbed
in the study of the duality of human nature. His strong religious
bent in this study led, in the years following his retirement from
journalism, to the writing of _The Greek Tradition_, in five volumes,
on the relation of Platonic and Hellenistic to Christian thought--a
monumental work, the full significance of which can scarcely be
estimated in its own time.
In a book recently crowned by the French Academy, _Le Mouvement
humaniste aux États-Unis_, Louis J. A. Mercier, professor of French at
Harvard, restricts his account to Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and
W. C. Brownell. In a broad view of the “movement” the late Mr. Brownell
doubtless merits a conspicuous place. Entering criticism, like Mr.
More, by way of journalism, Brownell performed valuable service through
his acute non-provincial book on _French Traits_ as far back as 1888,
and through his perennial insistence on high standards in literature
and the fine arts. Never a humanist in the strict doctrinal sense,
before his death he inclined to respond to the humanitarian optimism
of America. The tendency toward humanitarianism, emotional sympathy
with divine or undivine average humanity, appeared more strikingly in
the post-war writings of Stuart P. Sherman. A student under Professor
Babbitt, a contributor to the _Nation_ under Mr. More, Sherman became
the author of two books written in a vigorous and accomplished style
and permeated with humanistic principles, one on Matthew Arnold
conceived as a Victorian humanist, and one _On Contemporary Literature_
conceived as a chaos of naturalism. Then, carried away by admiration
of Wilsonian idealism and hatred of “Prussian autocracy,” and by an
uncritical devotion to Emerson, he drifted from his humanistic position
into an ever vaguer faith in the common man, and at length, as a
literary journalist in New York, into a rather indulgent impressionism.
In the field of the fine arts, the most humanistic writer has been
Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., of Princeton. Among others who published
significant books in various fields, prior to 1928, are P. H. Frye,
Sherlock Bronson Gass, Robert Shafer, Percy H. Houston, and W. F.
Giese. By 1928 something like a movement could indeed be discerned:
books began to multiply, and periodicals were printing series of
articles--the _Forum_ and the _Bookman_ in America, the _Criterion_
(edited by T. S. Eliot) and the _Nineteenth Century and After_ in
England. Whether the movement will continue to develop, whether it
will succumb to disunion and vagueness, or be submerged by a narrow
conventionalism of one sort or other, it would be idle to predict.
Though we have in America the semblance of a new movement, humanism
itself is not new. It was new, I conceive, when human wisdom was new.
It was comparatively new in ancient Greece, Judea, India, and China. It
was rather old by the time of the Renaissance, when the word humanist
came into currency. In one way or another, its doctrine and discipline
have been clarified by persons as various as Homer, Phideas, Plato,
Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Virgil, Horace, Dante,
Shakspere, Milton, Goethe; more recently, by Matthew Arnold in England
and Emerson and Lowell in America: a strange assortment of names,
no doubt, but also an indication of the inner diversity as well as
the central unity of the humanist ideal. For into the aim of human
perfection enter many elements, no less than that central order which
is the fruit of discipline.
Yet, if humanism is never new, it must constantly confront new
problems in time and place. In the Renaissance, its great foe was
mediæval otherworldliness; to-day its great foe is thisworldliness,
obsession with physical things and the instincts that bind us to the
animal order--in a word, the many forms of naturism that have all but
destroyed humane insight, discipline, and elevation. In a given age,
humanism may have the task of urging the claims of beauty; in another
age the claims of science, or of conduct. It may have one problem in
France, and another across the Channel. So long as America tends to
set the pattern for the twentieth century, so long will the greatest
problem of humanism lie here in the United States.
This relativity of humanistic needs will perhaps go far toward
explaining the special traits of the movement in America and the
corresponding special lines of attack by its naturistic opponents.
Romantics, realists, and sceptics are daily attacking on four fronts:
humanists, it is held, are academic, un-American, reactionary, and
Puritanic.
Humanists are said to be academic. If this means that they are all
university teachers, it is obviously not true. If it means that they
are not interested in the present, it is obviously not true. If it
means that they are interested in theory and not in practical affairs,
it is not true, for what specially concerns them is the relation of
theory and practice. They can scarcely be convicted of displaying what
Stuart P. Sherman, who knew American academic life from the inside,
termed “the professorial vices of pedantry, indolence, timidity, and
intellectual quietism, which is a euphemism for the sluggish tolerance
of men without philosophic conviction or intellectual purpose.” If it
means that our humanists have been more interested than the workaday
journalist critics in concrete knowledge and in general ideas, then
indeed they may be termed academic. They perceive that when a new
movement of thought and life is to be got under way, the first stage
is naturally one of acquiring and organising knowledge--particularly
neglected knowledge. This was clear to Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell
in our little New England renaissance; it was clear to Lessing, Herder,
and the Schlegel brothers in Germany; it was clear to the humanists
of the Renaissance throughout Europe. Let us remember that the first
of all universities was Plato’s “Academy,” the object of which was to
attain a wisdom deeper than that of the market-place. Let us remember
that “mere” theories are often high explosives, destructive of the
prevailing practical life of the market-place, as witness Locke and
Rousseau and the German thinkers from Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche.
Humanists are said to be un-American. According to those who cultivate
the nationalist conception, a valid new criticism, new literature, new
culture must spring from our American experience, not from imported
ideas. They forget the lesson of the past that cultural movements have
two sexes, so to speak, one native and one foreign, and that the native
expresses itself in the main unconsciously under the incitement of the
foreign. The native for the most part takes care of itself, the foreign
must be sedulously cultivated. In the Renaissance a humanism imported
from Italy fructified the native genius of most of Europe. Later,
England, for example, drew upon France and then Germany; Germany upon
France and England; France upon Spain and England; the United States
upon England and Germany. Unlike some of his followers our Walt Whitman
himself finally perceived the need of America’s assimilation of foreign
culture--even from “all former lands” beginning with ancient India and
Greece. It is doubtful whether a _real_ American culture could ever
spring from our own experience; it is certain that it could be _caused_
to spring from our own experience by a happy use of foreign culture.
Humanists are supposed to be reactionary. According to those who pride
themselves on living in the present if not in the future, humanists
want “to return to Buddha and the Bho Tree, to Socrates and the ilex.”
Being, in the main, historically educated men, however, humanists are
well aware that a return to the past is impossible. On the other hand,
they are also aware that, as cultural movements must draw upon foreign
supplies, so they must also draw upon past culture. If a present age
appears to be bad, it can be changed only by the introduction of forces
not vitally existing in that age, and since the future is always a
blank, these forces can be found only through a reinterpretation of the
past. Thus, to a large extent the Renaissance was rendered possible
through the “revival of learning” by the humanists, and the romantic
movement of the late eighteenth century was in part a “return” to the
Middle Ages and the national past. Even the typical modernist, in his
efforts to escape being a Victorian or a Puritan, is plainly bent on
“returning” to the primitive.
This brings us to the last and most frequent charge: that humanists are
Puritans in disguise. It is hard to answer. Nobody knows what a Puritan
is, and when he is disguised such a person is not easy to deal with.
Even Professor Percy Gardner, a leading English authority on Greek
art, ventures to speak of the “puritanism” of the Dorians. While in
America humanists are attacked as Puritan, in France they are attacked
as Catholic, and Mr. T. S. Eliot has been attacked as both. Even though
American historians do not agree as to what the distinguishing virtues
and vices of the seventeenth-century Puritans were, it may be suggested
that one of their plainest virtues was the possession of a certain
faith, now extinct. Their successors, wanting this faith, cannot well
be said to have even the Puritan defects of that virtue. Sometimes
those dire opposites of the humanists, the promoters of Uplift, are
called Puritans. For my part, I think of our Uplifters rather as
misguided humanitarians, followers not of Calvin but rather of that
other Genevan, Rousseau.
What the naturists are really driving at, when they fight this phantom
Puritan, this Feathertop, is regimentation or discipline. Now, humanism
does wish to emphasise discipline, whenever, as to-day, it needs to
be emphasised. It has no desire to measure conduct quantitatively,
according to the familiar formula, as three-fourths of life, but it
does desire to show that the quality of all life is higher or lower
according as our power of vital restraint is exercised. Humanism
conceives that the power of restraint is peculiarly human, and that
those who throw down the reins are simply abandoning their humanity
to the course of animal life or the complacency of vegetables. It
conceives, further, that the attainment of the ideal of completeness
of life, of a human nature rounded and perfect on all its sides,
is fatally frustrated at the start unless the ideal of centrality
or self-control is introduced as the regulating principle. The
substitution of _intensity_ as the regulating principle, which is
proposed by many modernists such as Aldous Huxley, provides for
quantity but not quality of life, and tends to defeat the ideal
of completeness, because certain parts of human nature, if not
disciplined, will always thrive at the expense of other parts. This
fact was glimpsed even by Walter Pater, notwithstanding his doctrine
of the intense moment, when he wrote: “For us of the modern world,
with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so
many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience,
the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far
harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique
life. Yet, no less than ever, the intellect demands completeness,
centrality.”
Many other modernists reject the ideal of completeness itself as making
for a dull uniformity, and propose instead the ideal of diversity. Life
is “full of a number of things,” one of them prattles, remembering
his _Child’s Garden_, but forgetting that humanism itself aims at
diversity--not by urging men to be queerly “different,” each in his own
infantile way, but by urging them to develop with mature reasonableness
the diversities latent within themselves and thus to work toward a
many-sided human type. Humanism believes, with Goethe, that “every one
must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain
that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.” There have
been enough humanists in the world to prove that in fact (and not only
in theory) this image of a dull humanistic uniformity is merely another
scarecrow. It is not the humanists, certainly, who look forward to a
millennium in which all men and women will be superbly alike! If they
speak more of the past than of the future, it is because the wisdom of
the ages is on record and the wisdom of the future a hope devoid of
useful content. But they unreservedly agree with critics who protest
that “beyond anything that has yet been said by the academic humanists,
there is work for the humane imagination to do.”
This does not exhaust the attacks on the humanists. They are reproached
by romanticists for being romantic, but I let that pass. More sensibly,
they are ridiculed by irreligionists for being religious, but I let
that pass also. Something should be said, however, of still another
attack--the objection, by impressionists, that they employ words and
phrases as catchwords and labels in disregard of the elusiveness
of truth. To offer this objection, surely, is to object to the use
of language itself. If words are not more or less arbitrary labels
for things and ideas and the relationship of things and ideas, all
language is pure nonsense. When Mr. Van Wyck Brooks fifteen years
ago, in _America’s Coming-of-Age_, called for “catchwords” as well
as a “programme,” he showed a sounder instinct than he and his
followers have displayed since: they have found no programme, and are
increasingly averse to catchwords. No doubt the truth _an sich_ is
hopelessly elusive, but the attainment of provisional or human truth
is the reward of courage and labour. We cannot afford to shirk the
task of achieving a reasonably clear and consistent terminology, even
though every definition is by nature an affirmation that tends to shut
out some portion of absolute truth. Whenever words become too hard and
exclusive, humanism is concerned with reconsidering their frontiers;
but whenever, as to-day, they become so vague and fluid as to imperil
human communication, humanism aims to achieve a clear relation of
labels to thought.
If the object of this book, on the one hand, is to indicate the
fundamental needs of America as the dominant world power and inadequate
model of civilisation in the twentieth century, on the other hand its
object is to inquire into the fundamental needs of humanism--to work
toward a set of definitions and a terminology neither too rigid nor
too loose, to consider the requirements of humanism in the various
activities of modern thought and life, to determine the special tasks
that confront humanism in this latest moment of time, and to enlist the
interest and efforts of that “rather considerable leaven of intelligent
people” who, as the _Forum_ has said editorially, “cannot view with
indifference the general decay of standards and the resultant chaos
into which our intellectual and moral life has been plunged.” The
publication of a symposium addressed to this public was first proposed,
years ago, by Percy H. Houston, and to him as well as to G. R. Elliott
and Robert Shafer, advisory editors in this undertaking, cordial thanks
are due for many valuable suggestions, although I am alone responsible
for the form which the book has finally assumed. The contributors
are for the most part between thirty and forty-five years of age
(perhaps three or four are over, and three or four under these limits).
One-third of them, as it happens, hold or have held important editorial
positions. The academic group comprises several professors of English
literature, one of French and comparative literature, one of the
fine arts (also director of an art museum), and one of physics (also
dean of a graduate school). The youngest contributor, a student and
athlete, represents that rapidly growing part of the rising generation
which is turning from aimless revolt to the quest of standards. In
consequence of a diversity in occupations, as well as in temperament
and personality, the authors of the book display numerous divergencies
in outlook, in emphasis, and especially in tone. While all of them,
for example, are lovers of the law of measure or “Golden Mean,” some
of them seek the way of quiet firmness or “sweet reasonableness,” even
in this blatant age, while others conceive that modern excesses must be
“Scorch’d by a flaming speech on moderation.”
As the reader will soon perceive, the contributors agree in certain
broad, fundamental opinions. Without exception they have sought to
work their way free of the dogmatic incrustations that threaten to
corrode even what is sound in characteristically modern thought. None
of them, I think, can be suspect of a secret attraction to those
pseudo-scientific and humanitarian short-cuts to truth and morality
that lead in fact to pure scepticism and anarchy. All of them perceive
that a naturistic humanism is finally a paradox. Some of them might be
termed “pure” or “mere” humanists, others are religious humanists. Each
has been free to speak his own mind, and is responsible only for what
he has himself said. If the reader chances to conceive, as I personally
do, that Irving Babbitt is at the centre of the humanistic movement,
some of the other authors will appear to be near the periphery,
although they too may seem near the centre from some other point of
view. The authors of this symposium, in a word, have no desire to form
a closed school, or party, or cult, or religion. They would agree that
the _ism_ in humanism is at present a necessary evil. They are here
temporarily assembled for the sole end of offering suggestions toward
that new integration of values which may yet justify modernity.
Norman Foerster.
_January, 1930._
_Contents_
PAGE
PREFACE: _Norman Foerster_ v
THE PRETENSIONS OF SCIENCE: _Louis Trenchard More_ 3