in a class so extravagantly fearful of even the most palpably absurd
of them. Its philosophy is firmly grounded upon the thesis that the
existing order must stand forever free from attack, and not only
from attack, but also from mere academic criticism, and its ethics
are as firmly grounded upon the thesis that every attempt at any
such criticism is a proof of moral turpitude. Within its own ranks,
protected by what may be regarded as the privilege of the order,
there is nothing to take the place of this criticism. A few feeble
platitudes by Andrew Carnegie and a book of moderate merit by John D.
Rockefeller's press-agent constitute almost the whole of the interior
literature of ideas. In other countries the plutocracy has often
produced men of reflective and analytical habit, eager to rationalize
its instincts and to bring it into some sort of relationship to the
main streams of human thought. The case of David Ricardo at once comes
to mind. There have been many others: John Bright, Richard Cobden,
George Grote, and, in our own time, Walther von Rathenau. But in
the United States no such phenomenon has been visible. There was a
day, not long ago, when certain young men of wealth gave signs of an
unaccustomed interest in ideas on the political side, but the most they
managed to achieve was a banal sort of Socialism, and even this was
abandoned in sudden terror when the war came, and Socialism fell under
suspicion of being genuinely international--in brief, of being honest
under the skin. Nor has the plutocracy of the country ever fostered an
inquiring spirit among its intellectual valets and footmen, which is
to say, among the gentlemen who compose headlines and leading articles
for its newspapers. What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the
United States from the press of all other countries pretending to
culture is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity
and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers
everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to
evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into
a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to
mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed. It is
seldom intelligent, save in the arts of the mob-master. It is never
courageously honest. Held harshly to a rigid correctness of opinion by
the plutocracy that controls it with less and less attempt at disguise,
and menaced on all sides by censorships that it dare not flout, it
sinks rapidly into formalism and feebleness. Its yellow section is
perhaps its most respectable section, for there the only vestige of the
old free journalist survives. In the more conservative papers one finds
only a timid and petulant animosity to all questioning of the existing
order, however urbane and sincere--a pervasive and ill-concealed dread
that the mob now heated up against the orthodox hobgoblins may suddenly
begin to unearth hobgoblins of its own, and so run amok. For it is upon
the emotions of the mob, of course, that the whole comedy is played.
Theoretically the mob is the repository of all political wisdom and
virtue; actually it is the ultimate source of all political power. Even
the plutocracy cannot make war upon it openly, or forget the least
of its weaknesses. The business of keeping it in order must be done
discreetly, warily, with delicate technique. In the main that business
consists of keeping alive its deep-seated fears--of strange faces, of
unfamiliar ideas, of unhackneyed gestures, of untested liberties and
responsibilities. The one permanent emotion of the inferior man, as of
all the simpler mammals, is fear--fear of the unknown, the complex,
the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
His instincts incline him toward a society so organized that it will
protect him at all hazards, and not only against perils to his hide
but also against assaults upon his mind--against the need to grapple
with unaccustomed problems, to weigh ideas, to think things out for
himself, to scrutinize the platitudes upon which his everyday thinking
is based. Content under kaiserism so long as it functions efficiently,
he turns, when kaiserism falls, to some other and perhaps worse form
of paternalism, bringing to its benign tyranny only the docile tribute
of his pathetic allegiance. In America it is the newspaper that is his
boss. From it he gets support for his elemental illusions. In it he
sees a visible embodiment of his own wisdom and consequence. Out of it
he draws fuel for his simple moral passion, his congenital suspicion of
heresy, his dread of the unknown. And behind the newspaper stands the
plutocracy, ignorant, unimaginative and timorous.
Thus at the top and at the bottom. Obviously, there is no aristocracy
here. One finds only one of the necessary elements, and that only in
the plutocracy, to wit, a truculent egoism. But where is intelligence?
Where are ease and surety of manner? Where are enterprise and
curiosity? Where, above all, is courage, and in particular, moral
courage--the capacity for independent thinking, for difficult problems,
for what Nietzsche called the joys of the labyrinth? As well look for
these things in a society of half-wits. Democracy, obliterating the old
aristocracy, has left only a vacuum in its place; in a century and a
half it has failed either to lift up the mob to intellectual autonomy
and dignity or to purge the plutocracy of its inherent stupidity and
swinishness. It is precisely here, the first and favorite scene of the
Great Experiment, that the culture of the individual has been reduced
to the most rigid and absurd regimentation. It is precisely here, of
all civilized countries, that eccentricity in demeanor and opinion
has come to bear the heaviest penalties. The whole drift of our law
is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the
slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law
there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that
custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into
the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a
capital crime against society.
9
_Under the Campus Pump_
But there remain the _intelligentsia,_ the free spirits in the middle
ground, neither as anæsthetic to ideas as the plutocracy on the one
hand nor as much the slaves of emotion as the proletariat on the other.
Have I forgotten them? I have not. But what actually reveals itself
when this small brotherhood of the superior is carefully examined?
What reveals itself, it seems to me, is a gigantic disappointment.
Superficially, there are all the marks of a caste of learned and
sagacious men--a great book-knowledge, a laudable diligence, a certain
fine reserve and sniffishness, a plain consciousness of intellectual
superiority, not a few gestures that suggest the aristocratic. But
under the surface one quickly discovers that the whole thing is little
more than play-acting, and not always very skillful. Learning is there,
but not curiosity. A heavy dignity is there, but not much genuine
self-respect. Pretentiousness is there, but not a trace of courage.
Squeezed between the plutocracy on on side and the mob on the other,
the _intelligentsia_ face the eternal national problem of maintaining
their position, of guarding themselves against challenge and attack,
of keeping down suspicion. They have all the attributes of knowledge
save the sense of power. They have all the qualities of an aristocracy
save the capital qualities that arise out of a feeling of security, of
complete independence, of absolute immunity to onslaught from above
and below. In brief, the old bogusness hangs about them, as about the
fashionable aristocrats of the society columns. They are safe so long
as they are good, which is to say, so long as they neither aggrieve the
plutocracy nor startle the proletariat. Immediately they fall into
either misdemeanor all their apparent dignity vanishes, and with it all
of their influence, and they become simply somewhat ridiculous rebels
against a social order that has no genuine need of them and is disposed
to tolerate them only when they are not obtrusive.
For various reasons this shadowy caste is largely made up of men who
have official stamps upon their learning--that is, of professors,
of doctors of philosophy; outside of academic circles it tends to
shade off very rapidly into a half-world of isolated anarchists. One
of those reasons is plain enough: the old democratic veneration for
mere schooling, inherited from the Puritans of New England, is still
in being, and the mob, always eager for short cuts in thinking, is
disposed to accept a schoolmaster without looking beyond his degree.
Another reason lies in the fact that the higher education is still
rather a novelty in the country, and there have yet to be developed
any devices for utilizing learned men in any trade save teaching. Yet
other reasons will suggest themselves. Whatever the ramification of
causes, the fact is plain that the pedagogues have almost a monopoly
of what passes for the higher thinking in the land. Not only do they
reign unchallenged in their own chaste grove; they also penetrate to
all other fields of ratiocination, to the almost complete exclusion of
unshrived rivals. They dominate the weeklies of opinion; they are to
the fore in every review; they write nine-tenths of the serious books
of the country; they begin to invade the newspapers; they instruct and
exhort the yokelry from the stump; they have even begun to penetrate
into the government. One cannot turn in the United States without
encountering a professor. There is one on every municipal commission.
There is one in every bureau of the federal government. There is one at
the head of every intellectual movement. There is one to explain every
new mystery. Professors appraise all works of art, whether graphic,
tonal or literary. Professors supply the brain power for agriculture,
diplomacy, the control of dependencies and the distribution of
commodities. A professor was until lately sovereign of the country, and
pope of the state church.
So much for their opportunity. What, now, of their achievement?
I answer as one who has had thrown upon him, by the impenetrable
operations of fate, the rather thankless duties of a specialist in the
ways of pedagogues, a sort of professor of professors. The job has got
me enemies. I have been accused of carrying on a defamatory _jehad_
against virtuous and laborious men; I have even been charged with doing
it in the interest of the Wilhelmstrasse, the White Slave Trust and the
ghost of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Nothing could be more absurd.
All my instincts are on the side of the professors. I esteem a man
who devotes himself to a subject with hard diligence; I esteem even
more a man who puts poverty and a shelf of books above profiteering
and evenings of jazz; I am naturally monkish. Moreover, there are more
Ph.D.'s on my family tree than even a Boston bluestocking can boast;
there was a whole century when even the most ignorant of my house was
at least _Juris utriusque Doctor._ But such predispositions should not
be permitted to color sober researches. What I have found, after long
and arduous labors, is a state of things that is surely not altogether
flattering to the _Gelehrten_ under examination. What I have found,
in brief, is that pedagogy turned to general public uses is almost
as timid and flatulent as journalism--that the professor, menaced by
the timid dogmatism of the plutocracy above him and the incurable
suspiciousness of the mob beneath him, is almost invariably inclined
to seek his own security in a mellifluous inanity--that, far from
being a courageous spokesman of ideas and an apostle of their free
dissemination, in politics, in the fine arts, in practical ethics, he
comes close to being the most prudent and skittish of all men concerned
with them--in brief, that he yields to the prevailing correctness of
thought in all departments, north, east, south and west, and is, in
fact, the chief exponent among us of the democratic doctrine that
heresy is not only a mistake, but also a crime.
A philosophy is not put to much of a test in ordinary times, for in
ordinary times philosophies are permitted to lie like sleeping dogs.
When it shows its inward metal is when the band begins to play. The
turmoils of the late lamentable war, it seems to me, provided for
such a trying out of fundamental ideas and attitudes upon a colossal
scale. The whole thinking of the world was thrown into confusion; all
the worst fears and prejudices of ignorant and emotional men came to
the front; it was a time, beyond all others in modern history, when
intellectual integrity was subjected to a cruel strain. How did the
_intelligentsia_ of These States bear up under that strain? What
was the reaction of our learned men to the challenge of organized
hysteria, mob fear, incitement to excess, downright insanity? How did
they conduct themselves in that universal whirlwind? They conducted
themselves, I fear, in a manner that must leave a brilliant question
mark behind their claim to independence and courage, to true knowledge
and dignity, to ordinary self-respect--in brief, to every quality that
belongs to the authentic aristocrat. They constituted themselves,
not a restraining influence upon the mob run wild, but the loudest
spokesmen of its worst imbecilities. They fed it with bogus history,
bogus philosophy, bogus idealism, bogus heroics. They manufactured
blather for its entertainment. They showed themselves to be as naïve
as so many Liberty Loan orators, as emotional, almost, as the spy
hunters, and as disdainful of the ordinary intellectual decencies
as the editorial writers. I accumulated, in those great days, for
the instruction and horror of posterity, a very large collection
of academic arguments, expositions and pronunciamentos; it fills a
trunk, and got me heavily into debt to three clipping-bureaux. Its
contents range from solemn hymns of hate in the learned (and even
the theological) reviews and such official donkeyisms as the formal
ratification of the so-called Sisson documents down to childish
harangues to student-bodies, public demands that the study of the enemy
language and literature be prohibited by law, violent denunciations of
all enemy science as negligible and fraudulent, vitriolic attacks upon
enemy magnificos, and elaborate proofs that the American Revolution
was the result of a foul plot hatched in the Wilhelmstrasse of the
time, to the wanton injury of two loving bands of brothers. I do not
exaggerate in the slightest. The proceedings of Mr. Creel's amazing
corps of "twenty-five hundred American historians" went further than
anything I have described. And in every far-flung college town, in
every one-building "university" on the prairie, even the worst efforts
of those "historians" were vastly exceeded.
But I am forgetting the like phenomena on the other side of the bloody
chasm? I am overlooking the darker crimes of the celebrated German
professors? Not at all. Those crimes against all reason and dignity,
had they been committed in fact, would not be evidence in favor of the
Americans in the dock: the principle of law is too well accepted to
need argument. But I venture to deny them, and out of a very special
and singular knowledge, for I seem to be one of the few Americans who
has ever actually read the proclamations of the German professors:
all the most indignant critics of them appear to have accepted
second-hand accounts of their contents. Having suffered the onerous
labor of reading them, I now offer sworn witness to their relative
mildness. Now and then one encounters in them a disconcerting bray.
Now and then one weeps with sore heart. Now and then one is bogged in
German made wholly unintelligible by emotion. But taking them as they
stand, and putting them fairly beside the corresponding documents of
American vintage, one is at once struck by their comparative suavity
and decorum, their freedom from mere rhetoric and fustian--above all,
by their effort to appeal to reason, such as it is, rather than to
emotion. No German professor, from end to end of the war, put his hand
to anything as transparently silly as the Sisson documents. No German
professor essayed to prove that the Seven Years' War was caused by
Downing Street. No German professor argued that the study of English
would corrupt the soul. No German professor denounced Darwin as an
ignoramus and Lister as a scoundrel. Nor was anything of the sort done,
so far as I know, by any French professor. Nor even by any reputable
English professor. All such honorable efforts on behalf of correct
thought in war-time were monopolized by American professors. And if
the fact is disputed, then I threaten upon some future day, when the
stealthy yearning to forget has arisen, to print my proofs in parallel
columns--the most esteemed extravagances of the German professors
in one column and the corresponding masterpieces of the American
professors in the other.
I do not overlook, of course, the self-respecting men who, in the
midst of all the uproar, kept their counsel and their dignity. A small
minority, hard beset and tested by the fire! Nor do I overlook the
few sentimental fanatics who, in the face of devastating evidence to
the contrary, proceeded upon the assumption that academic freedom was
yet inviolable, and so got themselves cashiered, and began posturing
in radical circles as martyrs, the most absurd of men. But I think I
draw a fair picture of the general. I think I depict with reasonable
accuracy the typical response of the only recognizable _intelligentsia_
of the land to the first great challenge to their aristocratic
aloofness--the first test in the grand manner of their freedom alike
from the bellicose imbecility of the plutocracy and the intolerable
fears and childish moral certainties of the mob. That test exposed them
shamelessly. It revealed their fast allegiance to the one thing that is
the antithesis of all free inquiry, of all honest hospitality to ideas,
of all intellectual independence and integrity. They proved that they
were correct--and in proving it they threw a brilliant light upon many
mysteries of our national culture.
10
_The Intolerable Burden_
Among others, upon the mystery of our literature--its faltering
feebleness, its lack of genuine gusto, its dearth of salient
personalities, its general air of poverty and imitation: What ails
the beautiful letters of the Republic, I repeat, is what ails the
general culture of the Republic--the lack of a body of sophisticated
and civilized public opinion, independent of plutocratic control
and superior to the infantile philosophies of the mob--a body of
opinion showing the eager curiosity, the educated skepticism and the
hospitality to ideas of a true aristocracy. This lack is felt by the
American author, imagining him to have anything new to say, every day
of his life. He can hope for no support, in ordinary cases, from the
mob: it is too suspicious of all ideas. He can hope for no support
from the spokesmen of the plutocracy: they are too diligently devoted
to maintaining the intellectual _status quo._ He turns, then, to
the _intelligentsia_--and what he finds is correctness! In his two
prime functions, to represent the life about him accurately and to
criticize it honestly, he sees that correctness arrayed against him.
His representation is indecorous, unlovely, too harsh to be borne. His
criticism is in contumacy to the ideals upon which the whole structure
rests. So he is either attacked vigorously as an anti-patriot whose
babblings ought to be put down by law, or enshrouded in a silence which
commonly disposes of him even more effectively.
Soon or late, of course, a man of genuine force and originality is
bound to prevail against that sort of stupidity. He will unearth an
adherent here and another there; in the long run they may become
numerous enough to force some recognition of him, even from the
most immovable exponents of correctness. But the business is slow,
uncertain, heart-breaking. It puts a burden upon the artist that
ought not to be put upon him. It strains beyond reason his diligence
and passion. A man who devotes his life to creating works of the
imagination, a man who gives over all his strength and energy to
struggling with problems that are essentially delicate and baffling and
pregnant with doubt--such a man does not ask for recognition as a mere
reward for his industry; he asks for it as a necessary _help_ to his
industry; he needs it as he needs decent subsistence and peace of mind.
It is a grave damage to the artist and a grave loss to the literature
when such a man as Poe has to seek consolation among his inferiors,
and such a man as the Mark Twain of "What Is Man?" is forced to
conceal his most profound beliefs, and such men as Dreiser and Cabell
are exposed to incessant attacks by malignant stupidity. The notion
that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they
are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference
or hostility--this notion is nine-tenths nonsense. If it were true,
then one would never hear of painters going to France or of musicians
going to Germany. What the artist actually needs is comprehension
of his aims and ideals by men he respects--not necessarily approval
of his products, but simply an intelligent sympathy for him in the
great agony of creation. And that sympathy must be more than the mere
fellow-feeling of other craftsmen; it must come, in large part, out of
a connoisseurship that is beyond the bald trade interest; it must have
its roots in the intellectual curiosity of an aristocracy of taste.
Billroth, I believe, was more valuable to Brahms than even Schumann.
His eager interest gave music-making a solid dignity. His championship
offered the musician a visible proof that his labors had got for him a
secure place in a civilized and stable society, and that he would be
judged by his peers, and safeguarded against the obtuse hostility of
his inferiors.
No such security is thrown about an artist in America. It is not that
the country lacks the standards that Dr. Brownell pleads for; it is
that its standards are still those of a primitive and timorous society.
The excesses of Comstockery are profoundly symbolical. What they show
is the moral certainty of the mob in operation against something that
is as incomprehensible to it as the theory of least squares, and what
they show even more vividly is the distressing lack of any automatic
corrective of that outrage--of any firm and secure body of educated
opinion, eager to hear and test all intelligible ideas and sensitively
jealous of the right to discuss them freely. When "The Genius" was
attacked by the Comstocks, it fell to my lot to seek assistance for
Dreiser among the _intelligentsia._ I found them almost unanimously
disinclined to lend a hand. A small number permitted themselves to be
induced, but the majority held back, and not a few, as I have said,
actually offered more or less furtive aid to the Comstocks. I pressed
the matter and began to unearth reasons. It was, it appeared, dangerous
for a member of the _intelligentsia,_ and particularly for a member
of the academic _intelligentsia,_ to array himself against the mob
inflamed--against the moral indignation of the sort of folk who devour
vice reports and are converted by the Rev. Billy Sunday! If he came
forward, he would have to come forward alone. There was no organized
support behind him. No instinctive urge of class, no prompting of
a great tradition, moved him to speak out for artistic freedom ...
England supplied the lack. Over there they have a mob too, and
something akin to Comstockery, and a cult of hollow correctness--but
they also have a caste that stands above all that sort of thing, and
out of that caste came aid for Dreiser.