for me. “What is Ibsenism?” “Can You Forgive Her?” “What Shall We Do
With Our Girls?” for instance. Of course, they are invariably
unsatisfactory and, sometimes, exasperating. They never really answer
the questions they propound, and they leave one somewhat more muddled
than one was before. Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” is a most bigoted and
tedious performance. In it one of the greatest artists of modern times
elaborately tells one nothing whatever about art, and leaves one with
the impression that his claim on immortality is something of which he
has become very much ashamed. But, crafty old person though I be, I
succumb to them all, and read them because I can’t resist a title in the
form of a question.
At present, I am longing for someone to write a book and call it “What
Is Education?” What, as a matter of fact, is education? Every few days
someone, in endeavoring to describe and sum up someone else, ends with
the clinching statement: “And the strange part of it was that he was a
man, or she was a woman, of education.” This is supposed to settle the
matter--to arouse in one’s mind a definite image. “He was a man of
education,” apparently means something, but what? To me it has come to
mean nothing at all. A short time ago I read in the morning paper of a
dead body that had been found in the river and taken to the county
morgue. “All means of identification had been removed,” wrote the
reporter, in commenting on the incident, “but,” he added, “the body was
evidently that of a man of education.” And, to me, the remarkable part
of this was that the reporter, without doubt, had a hazy idea of what he
was trying to express. In the poor, dead, unidentified thing he had
discovered and recognized something that, to him, implied “education,”
but how he did it, and what it was, I don’t know, because he did not
explain.
There are in this connection all sorts of questions I hope the author of
the book, to which I look forward, will answer. Is, for instance, “a man
of education” the same as “an educated man”? Or is one, perhaps,
somewhat more--well, more educated than the other? At times both these
phrases sound to me as if they meant precisely the same thing, and then
again they suddenly, through no wish of mine, develop subtle but
important differences that cause first the one and then the other to
seem expressive of a higher, a more comprehensive, form of education.
Then, too, is there any particular point at which education leaves off
and “cultivation” begins? And can a person be “cultivated” without being
educated? The words education and cultivation are constantly upon the
American tongue, but what do they mean? Or, do they mean something
entirely different to everyone who employs them? Every American girl who
flirts her way through the high school is “educated,” and it would be
indeed a brave man who dared to suggest that she wasn’t. But is she?
(Heaven forbid that _I_ should suggest anything; I merely crave
information.) And here let me hasten to add that a friend of mine has
always maintained, quite seriously, that he likes me in spite of the
fact that I am, as he expresses it, “one of the most illiterate persons”
of his acquaintance. His acquaintance, it is some slight comfort to
remember, is not large, and he is a doctor of philosophy who lectures at
one of the great English universities. Not only has he read and studied
much, his memory is appalling; he has never forgotten anything. From his
point of view I am not “an educated person.” But then, in the opinion of
Macaulay, Addison was sadly lacking in cultivation! “He does not appear
to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political
and moral writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means
equal to his Latin verse,” Macaulay complains in the _Edinburgh Review_
in 1843. And while Macaulay admits that “Great praise is due to the
notes which Addison appended to his version of the second and third
books of the Metamorphoses,” and confess them to be “rich in apposite
references to Virgil, Stetius and Claudian,” he cannot understand
anyone’s failing to allude to Euripides and Theocritus, waxes indignant
over the fact that Addison quoted more from Ausonius and Manilius than
from Cicero, and feels positively hurt at his having cited “the languid
hexameters of Silius Italicus,” rather than the “authentic narrative of
Polybius.” In Rome and Florence--Macaulay continues, more in sorrow than
in anger--Addison saw all the best ancient works of art, “without
recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or of the Attic
dramatists.”
Of course all this is very sad and leaves us quite cross with Addison
for having deluded us into believing him to be a person of considerable
erudition. How _could_ anybody in the presence of a statue be so
absent-minded as not to recall a single verse of Pindar or Callimachus?
And how hopelessly superficial must be the mind that actually prefers
the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus to the authentic narrative of
Polybius! Yet, on the other hand, if we casually referred to Polybius
while conversing with most of our educated and even so-called cultivated
acquaintances, how many of them, I wonder, would know whether we were
talking about a Greek historian or a patent medicine. Macaulay would
have considered them hopeless; we (and they) are in the habit (perhaps
it is a very bad habit--I don’t know) of regarding them as educated.
Another question that my suppositious author must devote a chapter to,
is the difference between just an education and a “liberal” education.
We used to hear much more about a “liberal” education than we do now,
although Prexy Eliot has of late endeavored to restore the phrase as
well as the thing itself. When does an education leave off being
penurious, so to speak, and become liberal? According to Mr. Eliot,
Milton’s “Areopagitica” helps a lot. I once read Milton’s
“Areopagitica” (“but not for love”) with great care, and when I had
finished it I had to procure at much trouble and expense another book
(written some hundreds of years later) that told me what it was all
about. The next day I passed an examination in the subject--and to-day I
couldn’t, if my life were at stake, recall the nature or the purpose of
the work in question or even explain the meaning of the title. It is
possible, of course, that this is more my fault than Milton’s, but
whoever is to blame, I can truthfully say that never before or since
have I read anything so completely uninteresting or that contributed so
little to the liberality of my education. In Mr. Eliot’s opinion,
however, and no one more firmly believes in the soundness of Mr. Eliot’s
opinions than I do, this ghastly, unintelligible, jaw-breaking relic of
the seventeenth century is, if not absolutely essential to a liberal
education, at least highly conducive to one. What on earth does it all
signify?
Some persons pin their entire faith to a correct use of the pronouns _I_
and _me_. They cheerfully commit every other form of linguistic
violence, but as long as they can preserve sufficient presence of mind
boldly to say once in so often something like, “He left James and me
behind,” instead of resorting to the cowardly “James and myself,” or the
elegantly ungrammatical “James and I,” they feel that their educational
integrity has been preserved. Others believe that education and true
refinement begin and end with always saying, “You would better,” instead
of “You had better,” while Mr. Eliot, in musing on the career of Mr.
Roosevelt, no doubt remarks to himself, “An estimable, even an
interesting man, but is he, after all, conversant with the
‘Areopagitica’?” (I hate to admit it, but I think it highly probable
that he is.) And Macaulay, in the book review from which I have quoted,
disposes once and for all of a certain scholar named Blackmore--rips
open his intellectual back, in fact, by stating with dignified disgust:
“Of Blackmore’s attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient
to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an
apothegm.” Isn’t it all wonderful? And doesn’t it make you wish that
someone would write a work called, “What Is Education?” so you could
find out whether you were educated or not?
Of late I have begun to have an ineradical conviction that I am not--and
this, not because I have a perverse fondness for the “languid”
vocabulary of Silius Italicus (of whom, of course, I never had heard)
but because I apparently know so little about the idiom that, by
inheritance and environment, I am privileged to call my own. Not long
ago, in reading a passage of excellent English prose, I came across a
word that suddenly, as words have a devilish way of doing, stood out
from the page and challenged me. The word was “nadir.” “At this period
he was at the nadir of his fortunes,” was, I think, the sentence in
which it occurred, and from the context I was able to divine not the
exact meaning of the term, but the general idea it expressed. It meant,
I could see, that the person in question had experienced a run of bad
luck, that his affairs, for the time being, were in anything but a
prosperous condition. But this was very far from knowing the specific
meaning of the word “nadir.” It was obviously a noun, and a
simple-looking little creature at that, yet I neither knew how to
pronounce it nor what it meant. So I made a note of it, intending,
later, to inform myself. Further on, I came to the word “apogee,” a
familiar combination of letters that suddenly appeared to be perfectly
absurd. The gentleman referred to was now no longer at the nadir of his
fortunes--he was at the “apogee” of them, and, of course, I was able to
guess that something agreeable had happened to him of late. But what,
after all, was an apogee? I had often read the word before, and I feel
sure that it may be found here and there among my “complete works,”
employed with an air of authority. But, upon my soul, I didn’t know what
it meant, and, therefore, virtuously made another little note.
Once started upon this mad career of disillusionment, there seemed to be
absolutely no end to it, and I read on and on, no longer for the
pleasure of reading, but more because the book had become like one of
those electric machines with metal handles, where, after turning on the
current with a cent, you hang on in interesting agony because you can’t
let go. “Not one jot nor tittle!” I groaned as I wrote it down. “Jot,”
as a verb, conveyed something to me, but what was it when it became a
noun? And what sort of a thing, for heaven’s sake, was a “tittle”? It
sounded more like a kitchen utensil than anything else. (Polly, put the
tittle on--No, that wouldn’t do.) And why, also, were jots and tittles
such inseparable companions? In all my life I had never met a solitary
tittle--a tittle walking about alone, so to speak, unaccompanied by a
devoted jot. Why was it that when I did meet them, hand in hand, as
usual, I didn’t know what they were?
By this time I was beginning to be verbally groggy. What, I wondered,
was--or, rather, wasn’t--“a scintilla of evidence”? (For, oddly enough,
one is never informed that there is a scintilla of evidence, but merely
that there isn’t.) And just how did it happen, in the first place, that
a lack of evidence should have been called a “scintilla,” whereas a
certain kind of expensive gray fur was called a “chinchilla.” Scintilla
chinchilla, scintilla chinchilla--the jury was unable to find a
chinchilla of evidence, although Mrs. Vasterbolt was present at the
trial in a handsome coat of the costliest scintilla. Why not? But as
madness seemed to be lurking in that direction, I hastened feverishly on
to “adamant.” Oh, yes, I know it’s something very hard and unyielding
and, in the kind of novels that no one reads any more, someone is, at a
critical moment, always “as” it--never “like” it. But what is it? It
might be some sort of a mythological cliff against which people were
supposed ineffectually to have hurled themselves; it might be a kind of
metal, or a particularly durable precious stone, or a satisfactory
species of paving material. It might be any old thing; I don’t know.
What in the dickens does it mean to “dree your own weird”? For, as I
almost tore off a page in my anxiety to turn it, my eyes caught sight
of: “‘Everyone must dree his own weird,’ she answered, sententiously.”
Early in life it had dawned on me that to be told you must “dree your
own weird” was merely a more obscure and delicate fashion of telling you
that you must “skin your own skunk”; and yet I very much doubt if the
verb “to dree” means to skin, or if “weird,” used as a noun, has much
connection with the fragrant little denizen of our forests whom we all,
I trust, are accustomed to refer to as the _mephitis Americana_.
On and on I toiled for another hour, at the end of which time I had a
formidable list of ordinary words belonging to my own language, as to
whose real meaning I was completely in the dark. To-day I intended to
look them all up and write a charming little paper on them, primarily
designed, of course, to make dear reader gasp at the scope and
thoroughness of my education. But the day is indescribably hot, and, as
I have been away, my dictionary, unfortunately, is gritty with dust. To
get up and slap at the corpulent thing with a damp towel would be most
repulsive. I shan’t do it. Instead I shall recall that the most
intellectual nation in the world has a saying to the effect that, “_On
peut être fort instruit sons avoir d’éducation._”
JUST A LETTER
The other day I received a letter from an old friend of mine with whom I
have talked for many years now, only in long letters at long intervals.
He is a man of about thirty-seven, but he still writes long letters.
This one, like all the others, is pleasant in spots, and I have
therefore submitted it to a sort of epistolary, dry-cleaning process and
extracted some of the spots. Here they are:--
As you see, I am at Newport. I have been visiting various persons here
for almost a month now, and as the glory will have soon departed, or
rather, as _I_ shall have soon departed, I thought I should give you a
vicarious whiff of high life while I can.
It is a rather hot day for Newport, but in this vast and lovely room, at
a long window opening on a cliff covered with mauve heather, and with
the sea beyond, I don’t in the least mind. I don’t think I should mind
anything very much. I don’t even mind that just outside a man is pushing
a lawn mower back and forth on the faultless turf, although the sound of
his performance makes me feel as if all my teeth were loose. They
probably are. Indeed, after a dinner, a late dance, and the remaining
few hours of last night spent in playing bridge, my fearless little
mirror tells me this morning that I look quite all of twenty-six. One
hears much about the follies of the rich, but I am beginning to feel
that they are as nothing compared to the follies of the poor. For the
paltry sum I last night lost to a man worth eighteen or twenty millions
is almost the exact sum I meant to distribute among the servants of my
hostess when I gracefully make room for somebody else on the day after
tomorrow. Before I began to write to you, I made no end of hectic little
calculations on the back of an envelope, but as yet they don’t seem to
be leading me anywhere except into the hands of a receiver. However--
I’ve had an exceedingly good time here. Theoretically, a person who
leads the kind of life I do ought to have spent his vacation otherwise.
I know that if I had consulted the oracles who answer “Troubled
Subscriber,” they, one and all, would have answered, “Get out into the
open, or the cool, quiet depths of the forest. Get into touch with
Mother Nature and commune with her. Her bosom is large (and covered with
ants). She loves her tired children.” But I did nothing of the sort.
Instead of getting into the forest, I got into the cool, quiet depths of
a sea-going automobile, with a handful of orchids swaying in a
glass-and-silver vase in front of me, and came to Newport. What I needed
just then was not taking long tramps and cooking my own indigestible
meals in a frying pan, reposing on a lumpy heap of pine needles and
getting drowned every other night at half-past eleven, anointing
mosquito bites and falling over logs. Not a bit of it. I yearned instead
for an exquisite bedroom and salon overhanging a sapphire and diamond
sea, a young man--whose very presence created a deeper silence--to wake
me in the morning, to draw a bath, to lay out my clothes, to bring me my
breakfast on china that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. I
wanted to arise late and mingle with perfectly dressed, good-looking,
agreeable people, who seemed to be enjoying themselves and who, if they
ever did have annoying, serious or sad moments, never let one know about
it. I wanted to go to large, gay luncheons at half-past two, and larger,
gayer dinners at half-past eight or nine, with golf and rides and
drives, and other people and tea in between. I wanted to see lots of
young girls who looked like hot-house flowers and who would decide to be
charming to me because they knew that _I_ knew it would be out of the
question to try to marry them, and I wanted to talk to incredibly
youthful looking old women with marvelously arranged, dyed hair, high
diamond collars to conceal the wattles, and ropes of pearls, with which
to run through nervous, jeweled fingers.
Well, all this I have done and seen for a month now, and, as I said, I
have greatly enjoyed myself. I suppose you know, of course, that
Newport, Rhode Island, does not, in the least, resemble the Newport that
the American people read about in newspapers--that the Newport of the
newspapers does not, in fact, exist. To multitudes of our fellow
countrymen this would be not only unwelcome, but incredible news. Yet it
is a curious truth. The great American people (dear, old, great,
American people!) like to think of this extraordinarily healthful and
beautiful spot as being, at the worst, a kind of dazzling den of vice,
and, at the best, a resort where semi-idiotic families possessing great
wealth may, with impunity, concoct grotesque and vulgar--and ever more
vulgar--diversions for all the rest of our completely moral,
intellectual, high-minded and desirable population to sneer at. Around
the mythical Newport of editors and reporters has grown a tradition and
a stock of phrases that the country at large eagerly swallows whole. I
don’t suppose there is a paragrapher in any state of the Union who
could possibly grind out four lines about Newport without employing the
words “monkey dinner,” although there has never been such a thing as a
monkey dinner at Newport (whatever a monkey dinner may be), and nobody
who lives and entertains here in summer has the slightest idea of what
the thing means. Originally, no doubt, the fiction of a reportorial
mind, it has become, through repetition and the course of time, as much
of an established fact to the nation as the Washington monument or the
Civil War.
The country in general believes, I am sure, that a dinner party here is
merely a euphonious term for a debauch--but, of course, you know as well
as I do that a Newport dinner resembles precisely a similar festivity
everywhere else in the world where there is great wealth and the strange
state of mind known as “fashion.” Here there is sometimes--often,
perhaps,--rather too much pomp and circumstance, more servants and
American beauties and jewels than the particular occasion justifies. In
Europe I have dined at great embassies in the company of famous and
important personages, with far less fuss, feathers and war paint than I
have been accustomed to during the past month, when I would dine, for
instance, with a man whose father had amassed millions from ready-made
clothing, and whose party consisted of a few of his equally unimportant
acquaintances. The whole thing (given the kind of thing) is, without
question, very perfectly and beautifully done; but equally without
question it is, most of the time, very much overdone. It has so often
occurred to me as I made myself agreeable to the skinny, be-powdered
nakedness of the lady next to me (maybe you don’t know it, but I have a
reputation for an ability to amuse any woman who has passed the age of
sixty-five, and I, therefore, always take in someone who looks like the
galvanized remains of Rameses II), that there was no real, no
justifiable reason for so much formality and splendor. There really
isn’t, you know. It is not at all as it is in England, for example,
where political ambitions must be furthered and the prestige of great
and ancient names maintained. Here there are widely known names (that of
my last night’s hostess may be seen over the entrance of a large and bad
hotel), but they are neither great nor what one is accustomed to
consider ancient; and as for politics, when politics become necessary to
these people, they merely, and with a light heart, hire a United States
senator to do whatever dirty work the situation demands. Splendor here
is indulged in purely for its own sake. There is absolutely nothing
behind it except unlimited means.
But, even so, neither the “entertainments” nor the persons who give
them, are at all like the nation’s fixed idea of them. The former, if
you like, are unnecessary and super-elaborate, but they are always
beautiful in their way, and decorous; the latter, more often than not,
are extremely interesting and often charming. Why shouldn’t they be? For
daily, since I have been here, it has come over me with a sense of
having discovered the fact that “human nature is pretty much the same
everywhere.” There are intelligent, clever, sympathetic, altogether
delightful men and women here, and also men and women who are, by
nature, dull, narrow, tiresome or common, just as there are in every
habitable region of the globe. But stupidity for stupidity, commonness
for commonness, bore for bore, I confess that the stupid, common bore of
these regions is much less wearisome than he is in regions less
splendid. He (or she) has in his favor all sorts of things that, while
they do not make him interesting or worth one’s time, at least furnish
him with a variety of avenues of approach--if you know what I mean.
Essentially limited though he be, as far as his intellect and sympathies
are concerned, mere sordid wealth had usually forced upon him certain
contacts and habits and experiences that you can understand and can talk
about. There is about him, somewhere, a neutral ground on which for the
time being you can get together in a way you simply can’t with the same
sort of nonentity who has not been subjected to the same sort of
influences. Stupidity for stupidity, commonness for commonness, bore
for bore, I, after all, prefer that of Newport to that of Saugdunk,
Maine, or Pekin, Kansas. In the long run, of course, they are both
exactly the same, and both very awful. The difference between them is
the difference between taking a dose of castor oil enveloped in an
expensive capsule and taking it straight.
I like many of the people I have met here more than I can tell you, but
late at night, sometimes, alone in my always monotonously perfect
bedroom, when all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even
a--valet, I often giggle at the abysmal difference between us. And in
spite of all their hospitality and millions, the laugh, I must
colloquially confess, is on them. For although I am perfectly capable of
meeting them on _their_ ground, they could not possibly meet me on mine.
From earliest childhood our influences and training have been as far
apart as the poles, but I consider mine by far the more important and
valuable; for, when I feel like it, I can go into society, while they
have no idea at all of the relief and delight of getting out of it.
They know their own side of life, but I am perfectly conversant with
theirs and several others as well. When I am with them I can do all of
their stunts just as well as they do them themselves, but I know,
somewhere in the back of my head, that they couldn’t do any of mine. I
don’t despise them or look down on them for this, but I do, every now
and then, feel awfully sorry for them--regret for them the things they
have missed and are missing. “Just what does he mean by that?” I think I
can see you wonder.