Diverse and variegated as the texture of our contemporary life and
literature is, a great part of it may be shown to have a fundamental
unity. That unity lies in a certain fear and hopelessness,--occasioned
by a mechanistic philosophy and ultimately owing, I think, to the
misapplied and ill-digested implications of a popular scientific
education. One meets everywhere some attempt to analyse and explain
the life and destiny of man solely on the basis of his physique or
environment, or on some other basis equally uncoloured by human
imagination and idealisation. This attitude is not universal with us,
nor is it even general, but it contains almost all that is original
with us, and if we consider what is original as also characteristic, we
can only postulate that the characteristic feature in our contemporary
literature is the interpretation of life as a phase of merely
animalistic existence.
Now, this admission that man in no way transcends the limits of purely
physical life is an act of cowardice to which no previous generation
has ever so thoroughly committed itself. This admission is directly
contrary to the general spirit of Ancient philosophy, impossible to
the serenity of the Middle Ages, repugnant to the exuberance of the
Renaissance, unnatural to the Romanticism, however defined, of the
early nineteenth century. And even during the faltering generations
just preceding our own, there were still eloquent humanists able to
show that whatever man’s circumstances may be, and whatever his origin
may have been, man was yet able to form for himself an intellectual
and spiritual life and destiny independent of origin and circumstance.
This courage of the past--this self-confidence of the past by which it
was enabled to broaden the scope of its life and pass on to us a social
and imaginative heritage by which every situation and relationship of
our lives is rendered more beautiful--was not the result of accident.
It was the result of long and untiring efforts in self-cultivation, and
the records of these efforts are to be found in the great literatures
which not only recorded, but inspired and motivated them. In those
times the staple of education was the study of literature; and, for my
present purposes, the important features of this study were, that it
was thorough and exact, that it neglected no labour which might aid in
the central purpose, and that, in requiring a certain common background
in all students, it was eminently a social and even international thing.
To attain the same degree of courage and self-confidence, it would
be necessary to us to make the same effort of self-cultivation. The
quality of contemporary literature suggests that we are not exerting
that effort; manners and excesses and failures in contemporary life
equally suggest that we are not. And if we examine the habitual methods
of contemporary teachers of literature, we find so many differences
between these methods and those of the past that it is plain that our
educators have all but lost sight of their central objects.
As early as 1882, in _Literature and Science_, Matthew Arnold set
forth a rather singular prophecy, describing with great exactness much
of our present situation. “As with Greek,” he said, “so with letters
generally: they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more
rationally, but they will not lose their place. What will happen
will rather be that there will be crowded into education other
matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period of
unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but letters will not in
the end lose their leading place.”
It is essential to consider how far this prophecy has been realised,
for it penetrates the very heart of our problem; it suggests the entire
lack of a central emphasis which characterises even the literary
education of our day. American education might very well be said to
be passing through a period of unsettlement and confusion and false
tendency, but by no manner of means might it be said that in American
education letters had obtained or regained their leading place.
Although the colleges swarm with students of literature, the greater
part of these students have a more accurate knowledge of the problems
of the natural sciences or of economics than they have of the problems
and methods of literary study. As a plain matter of fact, a great many
undergraduates choose to specialise in literature, and particularly
in English literature, because they believe it a study easier than
any other. And through a smattering of all the ologies which has been
their education from early childhood, they interpret and condemn great
masterpieces of which they have never learned the true significance,
since they have never confronted soberly the old traditions that
illuminate and sustain those masterpieces. It is largely because our
education deals seriously with almost every subject except literature,
that literature has lost its leading place; and it is because
literature has lost its leading place that education has lost much
of its inspiring power, and our contemporary literary innovators are
characterised to such a degree by fear and hopelessness.
It is not unnatural, however, that popular opinion, which to-day
influences even the teaching of literature, should consider scientific
education so important, for the public sees its leaders in every
field profoundly influenced by science. The leader of our political
organisation, like most of our leaders, happens to be a scientist; most
of our philosophers are scientists, and our magazines deal monthly
with the concessions that our religious leaders are making to the new
implications of science. It is not unnatural that science should be
popularly considered an important study and the study of literature
the recreation of an idle day. And it follows just as naturally that
swarms of undergraduate students should have imposed upon the teaching
of literature much of the dilettantism which this popular view suggests
is inherent in it. The typical student of literature--of English
literature, for example--may be known by four characteristics,--a
fear of Spenser, a dislike of Milton, a hatred of Wordsworth, and
a suppressed desire to write a musical comedy. This is the type of
student that must be taught, and it easily follows that the teaching
of him should come to lack the thoroughness and exactness, the desire
to master ancillary subjects, and the common background, which I have
enumerated above as having once been the ideals of literary study.
The place of these ideals is taken by a dilettantism which displays
itself in two forms,--in individualism and in sciolism. The first,
a shallow type of individualism, is directed by the theory that a
student’s peculiar tastes are the ultimate criteria by which he
should make his judgments, and that he must be seduced into a liking
for literature by the application of whatever literary candy pleases
his palate. The thought that a man should be somewhat adapted to his
reading, and not his reading to him, is altogether alien to this
theory, and the existence of common social ideals, which, if they are
not present in the student, should be developed, is not suspected by
its propounders.
It is to the adoption of this principle by many secondary-school
teachers that we owe the presence in our colleges of the campus
radicals who curse their fates and the restraints prohibiting them
from living their own lives. The ordinary progress of students guided
by such principles is to begin easily with something on the level,
say, of Kipling, and gradually to work up to the high seriousness of
the poetry of Oscar Wilde. The popularity and influence of the sort
of contemporary literature which I have mentioned may be very well
explained, I think, by the existence of this view in the minds of many
of our educators.
The sciolism which is the second form of our literary dilettantism,--a
shallowness which investigates only the superficialities of things,
which delights in accepted definitions and phrases,--is largely
involved in the manner in which our times have forsaken the study of
the classics, as well as of the other literatures and other subjects
without which the study of no one literature can be complete. No
teacher of science would admit to his classes students unversed in
mathematics; he would say that science without some mathematical
knowledge was an impossibility. Now, a knowledge of the literature and
customs of classical antiquity is just as necessary to the student of
a modern literature as a mathematical knowledge is to the student of
science. The teacher of literature, however, who demanded from his
students this indispensable knowledge, would soon lecture to empty
halls. Popular opinion, as reflected by those who are to be taught, is
altogether on the side of those “other matters, far too many,” which
have been crowded into education.
The teacher of literature may well turn out, in the end, to be the sole
means by which society and literature can be raised from their present
depression, and then only provided his influence be stricter and more
humane. For a materialistic epoch such as ours, the only refuge and
the only basis for further progress is in the idealistic humanity of
the past; but the search of the past must not be such a frail and
self-indulgent one as condemns before it understands. Whether we have
outworn the ideals of history or whether they were projected into a
realm of life beyond our present power of realisation, in either case
they reflect the tendency directing all human achievement,--a tendency
to rise to a plane uncircumscribed by the limits of physical existence.
Accordingly, the teacher of any branch of our cultural heritage has
within his hands the reins of destiny; slackly and half-heartedly he
may lose them from his grasp, or by firmly holding them he may guide
the future toward a new triumph of the human spirit. There is no sound
where there are no ears, nor without the development of the inner
mind and segregated human life, of which our literature has been both
the motivation and the record, could there again be true community or
beauty in the world.