LEARNING
AND
OTHER ESSAYS
BY
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
_Electrotyped by
The Maple Press
York, Pa._
CONTENTS
PAGES
LEARNING 1
PROFESSORIAL ETHICS 39
THE DRAMA 53
NORWAY 83
DOCTOR HOWE 89
JESTERS 149
THE COMIC 155
THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 175
THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE 193
CLIMATE 207
THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOOLS 213
THE ÆSTHETIC 235
LEARNING.
An expert on Greek Art chanced to describe in my hearing one of the
engraved gems in the Metropolitan Museum. He spoke of it as ‘certainly
one of the great gems of the world,’ and there was something in his
tone that was even more thrilling than his words. He might have been
describing the Parthenon or Beethoven’s Mass,--such was the passion of
reverence that flowed out of him as he spoke. I went to see the gem
afterwards. It was badly placed, and for all artistic purposes was
invisible. I suppose that even if I had had a good look at it, I should
not have been able to appreciate its full merit. Who could?--save the
handful of adepts in the world, the little group of gem-readers, by
whom the mighty music of this tiny score could be read at sight.
Nevertheless it was a satisfaction to me to have seen the stone. I knew
that through its surface there poured the power of the Greek world;
that not without Phidias and Aristotle, and not without the Parthenon,
could it have come into existence. It carried in its bosom a digest
of the visual laws of spiritual force, and was as wonderful and as
sacred as any stone could well be. Its value to mankind was not to be
measured by my comprehension of it, but was inestimable. As Petrarch
felt toward the Greek manuscript of Homer which he owned but could not
read, so did I feel toward the gem.
What is Education? What are Art and Religion and all those higher
interests in civilization which are always vaguely held up to us as
being the most important things in life? These things elude definition.
They cannot be put into words except through the interposition of
what the Germans call ‘a metaphysic.’ Before you can introduce them
into discourse, you must step aside for a moment and create a theory
of the universe; and by the time you have done this, you have perhaps
befogged yourself and exhausted your readers. Let us be content with
a more modest ambition. It is possible to take a general view of
the externals of these subjects without losing reverence for their
realities. It is possible to consider the forms under which art and
religion appear,--the algebra and notation by which they have expressed
themselves in the past,--and to draw some general conclusion as to the
nature of the subject, without becoming entangled in the subject itself.
We may deal with the influence of the gem without striving exactly to
translate its meaning into speech. We all concede its importance. We
know, for instance, that the admiration of my friend the expert was no
accident. He found in the design and workmanship of the intaglio the
same ideas which he had been at work on all his life. Greek culture
long ago had become a part of this man’s brain, and its hieroglyphs
expressed what to him was religion. So of all monuments, languages,
and arts which descend to us out of the past. The peoples are dead,
but the documents remain; and these documents themselves are part of
a living and intimate tradition which also descends to us out of the
past,--a tradition so familiar and native to the brain that we forget
its origin. We almost believe that our feeling for art is original with
us. We are tempted to think there is some personal and logical reason
at the back of all grammar, whether it be the grammar of speech or the
grammar of architecture,--so strong is the appeal to our taste made
by traditional usage. Yet the great reason of the power of art is the
historic reason. ‘In this manner have these things been expressed: in
similar manner must they continue to be said.’ So speaks our artistic
instinct.
Good usage has its sanction, like religion or government. We transmit
the usage without pausing to think why we do so. We instinctively
correct a child, without pausing to reflect that the fathers of the
race are speaking through us. When the child says, ‘Give me a apple,’
we correct him--“You must say, ‘An apple.’” What the child really
means, in fact, is an apple.
All teaching is merely a way of acquainting the learner with the body
of existing tradition. If the child is ever to have anything to say
of his own, he has need of every bit of this expressive medium to
help him do it. The reason is, that, so far as expressiveness goes,
only one language exists. Every experiment and usage of the past is a
part of this language. A phrase or an idea rises in the Hebrew, and
filters through the Greek or Latin and French down to our own time.
The practitioners who scribble and dream in words from their childhood
up,--into whose habit of thought language is kneaded through a thousand
reveries,--these are the men who receive, reshape, and transmit it.
Language is their portion, they are the priests of language.
The same thing holds true of the other vehicles of idea, of painting,
architecture, religion, etc., but since we have been speaking of
language, let us continue to speak of language. Expressiveness follows
literacy. The poets have been tremendous readers always. Petrarch,
Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Byron, Keats--those of
them who possessed not much of the foreign languages had a passion
for translations. It is amazing how little of a foreign language you
need if you have a passion for the thing written in it. We think of
Shakespeare as of a lightly-lettered person; but he was ransacking
books all day to find plots and language for his plays. He reeks with
mythology, he swims in classical metaphor: and, if he knew the Latin
poets only in translation, he knew them with that famished intensity
of interest which can draw the meaning through the walls of a bad
text. Deprive Shakespeare of his sources, and he could not have been
Shakespeare.
Good poetry is the echoing of shadowy tongues, the recovery of
forgotten talent, the garment put up with perfumes. There is a passage
in the Tempest which illustrates the freemasonry of artistic craft,
and how the weak sometimes hand the torch to the mighty. Prospero’s
apostrophe to the spirits is, surely, as Shakespearian as anything in
Shakespeare and as beautiful as anything in imaginative poetry.
“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves;
And ye, that in the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him,
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
By moonshine do the sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt: the strong-bas’d promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers; oped and let them forth
By my so potent art.”
Shakespeare borrowed this speech from Medea’s speech in Ovid, which
he knew in the translation of Arthur Golding; and really Shakespeare
seems almost to have held the book in his hand while penning Prospero’s
speech. The following is from Golding’s translation, published in 1567:
“Ye Ayres and windes; ye Elves of Hilles
and Brooks, of Woods alone,
Of standing Lakes and of the Night approach
ye every chone.
Through helpe of whom (the crooked banks much
wondering at the thing)
I have compelled streams to run clean backward
to their spring.
By charmes I make the calm seas rough, and make
the rough Seas plaine.
And cover all the Skie with Clouds and chase them
thence again.
By charmes I raise and lay the windes, and burst the
Viper’s jaw.
And from the bowels of the Earth both stones and trees
doe draw.
Whole woods and Forestes I remove: I make the
Mountains shake,
And even the Earth it selfe to grone and fearfully
to quake.
I call up dead men from their graves: and thee O
lightsome Moone
I darken oft, though beaten brasse abate thy
perill soone.
Our Sorcerie dims the Morning faire, and darkes
the Sun at Noone.
The flaming breath of fierie Bulles ye quenched
for my sake.
And caused their unwieldie neck the bended yokes
to take.
Among the Earthbred brothers you a mortell war
did set
And brought a sleepe the Dragon fell whose eyes
were never shut.”
There is, and is to be, no end of this reappearance of old metaphor,
old trade secret, old usage of art. No sooner has a masterpiece
appeared, that summarizes all knowledge, than men get up eagerly
the next morning with chisel and brush, and try again. Nothing done
satisfies. It is all in the making that the inspiration lies; and this
endeavor renews itself with the ages, and grows by devouring its own
offspring.
The technique of any art is the whole body of experimental knowledge
through which the art speaks. The glazes of pottery become forgotten
and have to be hit upon over again. The knack of Venetian glass, the
principle of effect in tiles, in lettering, in the sonnet, in the
fugue, in the tower,--all the prestidigitation of art that is too
subtle to be named or thought of, must yet be acquired and kept up by
practice, held to by constant experiment.
Good artistic expression is thus not only a thing done: it is a way
of life, a habit of breathing, a mode of unconsciousness, a world of
being which records itself as it unrolls. We call this world Art for
want of a better name; but the thing that we value is the life within,
not the shell of the creature. This shell is what is left behind in the
passage of time, to puzzle our after-study and make us wonder how it
was made, how such complex delicacy and power ever came to co-exist. I
have often wondered over the _Merchant of Venice_ as one wonders
over a full-blown transparent poppy that sheds light and blushes like a
cloud. Neither the poppy nor the play were exactly hewn out: they grew,
they expanded and bloomed by a sort of inward power,--unconscious,
transcendent. The fine arts blossom from the old stock,--from the
poppy-seed of the world.
I am here thinking of the whole body of the arts, the vehicles through
which the spirit of man has been expressed. I am thinking also of
the sciences,--whose refractory, belligerent worshipers are even less
satisfied with any past expression than the artists are, for their
mission is to destroy and to rearrange. They would leave nothing
alive but themselves. Nevertheless, science has always been obliged
to make use of written language in recording her ideas. The sciences
are as much a part of recorded language as are the arts. No matter how
revolutionary scientific thought may be, it must resort to metaphysics
when it begins to formulate its ultimate meanings. Now when you
approach metaphysics, the Greek and the Hebrew have been there before
you: you are very near to matters which perhaps you never intended to
approach. You are back at the beginning of all things. In fact, human
thought does not advance, it only recurs. Every tone and semi-tone in
the scale is a keynote; and every point in the Universe is the centre
of the Universe; and every man is the centre and focus of the cosmos,
and through him passes the whole of all force, as it exists and has
existed from eternity; hence the significance which may at any moment
radiate out of anything.
The different arts and devices that time hands to us are like our
organs. They are the veins and arteries of humanity. You cannot
rearrange them or begin anew. Your verse-forms and your architecture
are chosen for you, like your complexion and your temperament. The
thing you desire to express is in them already. Your labors do no more
than enable you to find your own soul in them. If you will begin any
piece of artistic work in an empirical spirit and slave over it until
it suits you, you will find yourself obliged to solve all the problems
which the artists have been engaged on since the dawn of history. Be as
independent as you like, you will find that you have been anticipated
at every point: you are a slave to precedent, because precedent has
done what you are trying to do, and, ah, how much better! In the
first place, the limitations, the horrible limitations of artistic
possibility, will begin to present themselves; few things can be done:
they have all been tried: they have all been worked to death: they have
all been developed by immortal genius and thereafter avoided by lesser
minds,--left to await more immortal genius. The field of endeavor
narrows itself in proportion to the greatness of the intellect that is
at work. In ages of great art everyone knows what the problem is and
how much is at stake. Masaccio died at the age of twenty-seven, after
having painted half a dozen pictures which influenced all subsequent
art, because they showed to Raphael the best solution of certain
technical questions. The Greeks of the best period were so very
knowing that everything appeared to them ugly except the few attitudes,
the few arrangements, which were capable of being carried to perfection.
Anyone who has something to say is thus found to be in one sense a
slave, but a rich slave who has inherited the whole earth. If you can
only obey the laws of your slavery, you become an emperor: you are only
a slave in so far as you do not understand how to use your wealth.
If you have but the gift of submission, you conquer. Many tongues,
many hands, many minds, a traditional state of feeling, traditional
symbols,--the whole passed through the eyes and soul of a single
man,--such is art, such is human expression in all its million-sided
variety.
II.
I have thrown together these remarks in an elliptical and haphazard
way, hoping to show what sort of thing education is, and as a prologue
to a few reflections upon the educational conditions in the United
States.
It is easy to think of reasons why the standards of general education
should be low in America. Almost every influence which is hostile
to the development of deep thought and clear feeling has been at
the maximum of destructive power in the United States. We are a new
society, made of a Babel of conflicting European elements, engaged in
exploiting the wealth of a new continent, under conditions of climate
which involve a nervous reorganization to Europeans who come to live
with us. Our history has been a history of quiet colonial beginnings,
followed by a national life which, from its inception, has been one of
social unrest. And all this has happened during the great epoch of the
expansion of commerce, the thought-destroying epoch of the world.
Let us take a rapid glance at our own past. In the beginning we were
settlers. Now the settlement of any new continent plays havoc with
the arts and crafts. Let us imagine that among the Mayflower pilgrims
there had been a few expert wood-carvers, a violin player or two, and a
master architect. These men, upon landing in the colony, must have been
at a loss for employment. They would have to turn into backwoodsmen.
Their accomplishments would in time have been forgotten. Within a
generation after the landing of the pilgrims there must have followed
a decline in the fine arts, in scholarship, and in certain kinds of
social refinement. This decline was, to some extent, counteracted in
our colonial era by the existence of wealth in the Colonies and by the
constant intercourse with Europe, from which the newest models were
imported by every vessel. Nevertheless, it is hard for a colony to
make up for its initial loss; and we have recently seen the United
States government making efforts on a large scale to give to the
American farmer those practices of intensive cultivation of the soil
which he lost by becoming a backwoodsman and has never since had time
to recover for himself.
The American Revolution was our second serious set-back in education.
So hostile to culture is war that the artisans of France have never
been able to attain to the standards of workmanship which prevailed
under the old monarchy. Our national culture started with the handicap
of a seven years’ war, and was always a little behindhand. During the
nineteenth century the American citizen has been buffeting the waves
of new development. His daily life has been an experiment. His moral,
social, political interests and duties have been indeterminate; nothing
has been settled for him by society. Is a man to have an opinion?
Then he must make it himself. This demands a more serious labor than
if he were obliged to manufacture his own shoes and candlesticks. No
such draught upon individual intellect is made in an old country. You
cannot get a European to understand this distressing overtaxing of the
intelligence in America. Nothing like it has occurred before, because
in old countries opinion is part of caste and condition: opinion is
the shadow of interest and of social status.
But in America the individual is not protected against society at
large by the bulwark of his class. He stands by himself. It is a noble
idea that a man should stand by himself, and the conditions which
force a man to do so have occasionally created magnificent types of
heroic manhood in America. Lincoln, Garrison, Emerson, and many lesser
athletes are the fruits of these very conditions which isolate the
individual in America and force him to think for himself. Yet their
effect upon general cultivation has been injurious. It seems as if
character were always within the reach of every human soul; but men
must have become homogeneous before they can produce art.
We have thus reviewed a few of the causes of our American loss
of culture. Behind all these causes, however, was the true and
overmastering cause, namely, that sudden creation of wealth for which
the nineteenth century is noted, the rise all over the world of new
and uneducated classes. We came into being as a part of that world
movement which has perceptibly retarded culture, even in Europe. How,
then, could we in America hope to resist it? Whether this movement is
the result of democratic ideas, or of mechanical inventions, or of
scientific discovery, no one can say. The elements that go to make
up the movement cannot be unraveled. We only know that the world has
changed: the old order has vanished with all its charm, with all its
experience, with all its refinement. In its place we have a crude
world, indifferent to everything except physical well-being. In the
place of the fine arts and the crafts we have business and science.
Business is, of course, devoted to the increase of physical well-being;
but what is Science? Now, in one sense, science is anything that
true scientific men of the moment happen to be studying. In one
decade, science means the discussion of spontaneous generation, or
spontaneous variation, in the next of plasm, in the next of germs,
or of electrodes. Whatever the scientific world takes up as a study
becomes “science.” It is impossible to deny the truth of this rather
self-destructive definition. In a more serious sense, however, science
is the whole body of organized knowledge; and a distinction is
sometimes made between “pure” science and “applied” science; the first
being concerned solely with the ascertainment of truth, the second,
with practical matters.
In these higher regions, in which science is synonymous with the search
for truth, science partakes of the nature of religion. It purifies
its votaries; it speaks to them in cryptic language, revealing certain
exalted realities not unrelated to the realities of music, or of
poetry and religion. The men through whom this enthusiasm for pure
science passes are surely, each in his degree, transmitters of heroic
influence; and, in their own way, they form a kind of priesthood. It
must be confessed, too, that this priesthood is peculiarly the product
of the nineteenth century.
The Brotherhood of Science is a new order, a new Dispensation. It
would seem to me impossible to divide one’s feeling toward science
according to the divisions “pure” and “applied”; because many men in
whom the tide of true enthusiasm runs the strongest deal in applied
science, as, for instance, surgeons, bacteriologists, etc. Nor ought we
to forget those great men of science who have an attitude of sympathy
toward all human excellence, and a reverence for things which cannot
be approached through science. Such men resemble those saints who have
also, incidentally, been kings and popes. Their personal magnitude
obliterates our interest in their position in the hierarchy. We think
of them as men, not as popes, kings or scientists. In the end we must
admit that there are as many kinds of science as there are of men
engaged in scientific pursuits. The word science legitimately means
an immense variety of things, loosely connected together, some of
them deserving of strong reprobation. I shall use the term with such
accuracy as I am able to command, and leave it to the candid reader to
make allowance for whatever injustice this course may entail.
To begin with, we must find fault with the Brotherhood of Science on
much the same ground that we fought the old religions, upon grounds
of tyranny and narrowness, of dogmatism and presumption. In the next
place, it is evident that, in so far as science is not hallowed by
the spirit of religion, it is a mere extension of business. It is the
essence of world-business, race-business, cosmic-business. It saves
time, saves lives, and dominates the air and the sea; but all these
things may be accomplished, for ought we know, in the course of the
extinction of the better nature of mankind. Science is not directly
interested in the expression of spiritual truth; her notation cannot
include anything so fluctuating, so indeterminate, as the language of
feeling. Science neither sings nor jokes; neither prays nor rejoices;
neither loves nor hates. This is not her fault; but her limitation. Her
fault is that, as a rule, she respects only her own language and puts
trust only in what is in her own shop window.
I deprecate the contempt which science expresses for anything that
does not happen to be called science. Imperial and haughty science
proclaims its occupancy of the whole province of human thought; yet,
as a matter of fact, science deals in a language of its own, in a set
of formulae and conceptions which cannot cover the most important
interests of humanity. It does not understand the value of the fine
arts and is always at loggerheads with philosophy. Is it not clear that
science, in order to make good her claim to universality, must adopt a
conception of her own function that shall leave to the fine arts and
to religion their languages? She cannot hope to compete with these
languages, nor to translate or expound them. She must accept them. At
present she tramples upon them.
There are, then, in the modern world these two influences which are
hostile to education,--the influence of business and the influence of
uninspired science. In Europe these influences are qualified by the
vigor of the old learning. In America they dominate remorselessly, and
make the path of education doubly hard. Consider how they meet us in
ordinary social life. We have all heard men bemoan the time they have
spent over Latin and Greek on the ground that these studies did not
fit them for business,--as if a thing must be worthless if it can be
neither eaten nor drunk. It is hard to explain the value of education
to men who have forgotten the meaning of education: its symbols convey
nothing to them.
The situation is very similar in dealing with scientific men,--at least
with that large class of them who have little learning and no religion,
and who are thus obliged to use the formulae of modern science as their
only vehicle of thought. These men regard humanity as something which
started up in Darwin’s time. They do not listen when the humanities
are mentioned; and if they did they would not understand. When Darwin
confessed that poetry had no meaning for him, and that nothing
significant was left to him in the whole artistic life of the past,
he did not know how many of his brethren his words were destined to
describe.
We can forgive the business man for the loss of his birthright: he
knows no better. But we have it against a scientist if he undervalues
education. Surely, the Latin classics are as valuable a deposit as the
crustacean fossils, or the implements of the Stone Age. When science
shall have assumed her true relation to the field of human culture we
shall all be happier. To-day science knows that the silkworm must be
fed on the leaves of the mulberry tree, but does not know that the
soul of man must be fed on the Bible and the Greek classics. Science
knows that a queen bee can be produced by care and feeding, but does
not as yet know that every man who has had a little Greek and Latin
in his youth belongs to a different species from the ignorant man. No
matter how little it may have been, it reclassifies him. There is more
kinship between that man and a great scholar than there is between the
same man and some one who has had no classics at all: he breathes from
a different part of his anatomy. Drop the classics from education? Ask
rather, Why not drop education? For the classics are education. We
cannot draw a line and say, ‘Here we start.’ The facts are the other
way. We started long ago, and our very life depends upon keeping alive
all that we have thought and felt during our history. If the continuity
is taken from us, we shall relapse.
When we discover that these two tremendous interests--business and
commercial science have arisen in the modern world and are muffling
the voice of man, we tremble for the future. If these giants shall
continue their subjugation of the gods, the whole race, we fear, may
relapse into dumbness. By good fortune, however, there are other
powers at work. The race is emotionally too rich and too much attached
to the past to allow its faculties to be lost through disuse. New
and spontaneous crops will soon be growing upon the mould of our own
stubbly, thistle-bearing epoch.
In the meantime we in America must do the best we can. It is no secret
that our standards of education are below those of Europe. Our art,
our historical knowledge, our music and general conversation, show a
stiffness and lack of exuberance--a lack of vitality and of unconscious
force--the faults of beginners in all walks of life. During the last
twenty-five years much improvement has been made in those branches
of cultivation which depend directly upon wealth. Since the Civil
War there seems to have been a decline in the higher literature,
accompanied by an advance in the plastic arts. And more recently
still there has been a literary reawakening, perhaps not of the most
important kind, yet signifying a new era. If I may employ an obvious
simile, I would liken America to a just-grown man of good impulses
who has lacked early advantages. He feels that cultivation belongs
to him; and yet he cannot catch it nor hold it. He feels the impulse
of expression, and yet he can neither read nor write. He feels that
he is fitted for general society, and yet he has no current ideas or
conversation. And, of course--I say it with regret, but it is a part of
the situation--of course he is heady and proud of himself.
What do we all desire for this ingenuous youth on whom the postponed
expectation of the world, as Emerson called it, has waited so long?
We desire only to furnish him with true advantages. Let us take a
simultaneous survey of the two extremities of the youth’s education,
namely, of nursery training and of the higher education. The two
are more intimately dependent upon each other than is generally
suspected. With regard to the nursery, early advantages are the key
to education. The focus of all cultivation is the fireside. Learning
is a stove plant that lives in the cottage and thrives during the
long winter in domestic warmth. Unless it be borne into children in
their earliest years, there is little hope for it. The whole future
of civilization depends upon what is read to children before they can
read to themselves. The world is powerless to reconvey itself through
any mind that it has not lived in from the beginning,--so hard is the
language of symbols, whether in music, or in poetry, or in painting.
The art must expand with the heart, as a hot rod of glass is touched by
the gold-leaf, and is afterwards blown into dusty stars and rainbows of
mantling irradiation. If the glass expand before it has been touched by
the metal, there is no means of ever getting the metal into it.
The age of machinery has peopled this continent with promoters and
millionaires, and the work of a thousand years has been done in a
century. The thing has, however, been accomplished at some cost. An
ignorant man makes a fortune and demands the higher education for his
children. But it is too late: he should have given it to them when he
was in his shirt sleeves. All that they are able to receive now is
something very different from education. In receiving it they drag down
the old standards. School and college are filled with illiterates. The
whole land must patiently wait till Learning has warmed back to life
her chilled and starved descendants. Perhaps the child or grandchild of
the fortune-builder will teach the children on his knee what he himself
learned too late in life to stead him much.
Hunger and thirst for learning is a passion that comes, as it were,
out of the ground; now in an age of wealth, now in an age of poverty.
Young men are born whom nothing will satisfy except the arts and the
sciences. They seek out some scholar at a university and aim at him
from boyhood. They persuade their parents to send them to college.
They are bored and fatigued by everything that life offers except this
thing. Now, society does not create this hunger. All that society can
do is to provide nourishment of the right kind, good instruction, true
learning, the best scholarship which history has left behind. I believe
that to-day there is a spirit of learning abroad in America--here and
there, in the young--the old insatiable passion. I feel as if men
were arising--most of them still handicapped by the lack of early
training--to whom life has no meaning except as a search for truth.
This exalted famine of the young scholar is the hope of the world.
It is religion and art and science in the chrysalis. The thing which
society must beware of doing is of interposing between the young
learner and his natural food some mechanical product or patent food
of its own. Good culture means the whole of culture in its original
sources; bad culture is any substitute for this.
Let us now examine the higher departments of education, the university,
the graduate school, the museum,--the learned world in America.
There is one function of learned men which is the same in every age,
namely, the production of text-books. Learned men shed text-books as
the oak sheds acorns, and by their fruits ye shall know them. Open
almost any primary text-book or school book in America, and you will,
on almost every page of it, find inelegancies of usage, roughnesses,
inaccuracies, and occasional errors of grammar. The book has been
written by an incompetent hand. Now, what has the writer lacked? Is
it grammar? Is it acquaintance with English literature, with good
models, with the Bible, with history? It is all these things, and more
than all. No school-room teaching can make a man write good English.
No school teaching ever made an educated man, or a man who could
write a good primary text-book. It requires a home of early culture,
supplemented by the whole curriculum of scholarship and of university
training. Nothing else but this great engine will produce that
little book.
The same conditions prevail in music. If you employ the nearest
excellent young lady music teacher to teach your boys to play the
piano, she will bring into the house certain child’s music written
by American composers, in which the rules of harmony are violated
and of which the sentiment is vulgar. The books have been written by
incompetent people. There is a demand for such books and they are
produced. They are the best the times afford: let us be glad that they
exist at all and that they are no worse. But note this: it will require
the whole musical impulse of the age, from the oratorio society and the
musical college down to the street organ, to correct the grammar of
that child’s music book. Ten or twenty years from now a like book will
perhaps be brought into your home, filled with better harmony and with
truer musical feeling; and the change will have been wrought through
the influence of Sebastian Bach, of Beethoven,--of the masters of music.
It is the same with all things. The higher culture must hang over the
cradle, over the professional school, over the community. If you read
the lives of the painters of Italy or of the musicians of Germany, you
will find that, no matter where a child of genius was born, there was
always an educated man to be found in the nearest village--a priest or
a schoolmaster--who gave the child the rudiments himself, and became
the means of sending him to the university. Without this indigent
scholar, where would have been the great master?
It is familiarity with greatness that we need--an early and first-hand
acquaintance with the thinkers of the world, whether their mode of
thought was music or marble or canvas or language. Their meaning is not
easy to come at, but in so far as it reaches us it will transform us. A
strange thing has occurred in America. I am not sure that it has ever
occurred before. The teachers wish to make learning easy. They desire
to prepare and peptonize and sweeten the food. Their little books
are soft biscuit for weak teeth, easy reading on great subjects; but
these books are filled with a pervading error: they contain a subtle
perversion of education.
Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to
Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous. This truth is often
forgotten among us; and yet there are fields of work in which it is
not forgotten, and in such fields art springs up. Let us remember
the accomplishments of our country. The art in which we now most
excel is architecture. America has in it many beautiful buildings and
some learned architects. And how has this come about? Through severe
and conscientious study of the monuments of art, through humble,
old-fashioned training. The architects have had firstrate text-books,
generally written by Europeans, the non-peptonized, gritty, serious
language of masters in the craft. Our painters have done something of
the same sort. They have gone to Europe, and are conversant with what
is being done in Europe. If they are developing their art here, they do
it not ignorantly, but with experience, with consciousness of the past.
I do not recommend subserviency to Europe, but subserviency to
intellect. Recourse to Europe we must have: our scholars must absorb
Europe without themselves becoming absorbed. It is a curious thing
that the American who comes in contact with the old world exhibits two
opposite faults: he is often too much impressed and loses stamina, or
he is too little impressed and remains a barbarian. Contact with the
past and hard work are the cure for both tendencies. Europe is merely
an incidental factor in the problem of our education, and this is very
well shown in our conduct of our law schools. The Socratic method of
instruction in law schools was first introduced at Harvard, and since
then it has spread to many parts of the world. This is undoubtedly
one of our best achievements in scholarship; and Europe had, so far
as I know, no hand in it. The method consists in the _viva voce_
discussion of leading cases, text-books being used merely as an
auxiliary: the student thus attacks the sources themselves. Here we
have American scholarship at its best, and it is precisely the same
thing as the European article: it is simply scholarship.
If we can exhibit this spirit in one branch of learning, why not in
all? The Promethean fire is one single element. A spark of this fire
is all that is needed to kindle this flame. The glance of a child
of genius at an Etruscan vase leaves the child a new being. That is
why museums exist: not only for the million who get something from
them, but for the one young person of intelligence to whom they mean
everything.
Our American universities exhibit very vividly all the signs of
retardation in culture, which are traceable in other parts of our
social life. A university is always a stronghold of the past, and is
therefore one of the last places to be captured by new influence.
Commerce has been our ruler for many years; and yet it is only quite
recently that the philosophy of commerce can be seen in our colleges.
The business man is not a monster; but he is a person who desires to
advance his own interests. This is his occupation and, as it were,
his religion. The advancement of material interests constitutes
civilization to him. He unconsciously infuses the ideas and methods
of business into anything that he touches. It has thus come about in
America that our universities are beginning to be run as business
colleges. They advertise, they compete with each other, they pretend
to give good value to their customers. They desire to increase their
trade, they offer social advantages and business openings to their
patrons. In some cases they boldly conduct intelligence offices, and
guarantee that no hard work done by the student shall be done in
vain: a record of work is kept during the student’s college life, and
the college undertakes to furnish him at any time thereafter with
references and a character which shall help him in the struggle for
life.
This miscarriage of education has been developed and is being conducted
by some of our greatest educators, through a perfectly unconscious
adaptation of their own souls to the spirit of the age. The underlying
philosophy of these men might be stated as follows: “There is nothing
in life nobler than for a man to improve his condition and the
condition of his children. Learning is a means to this end.” Such is
the current American conception of education. How far we have departed
from the idea of education as a search for truth, or as the vehicle
of spiritual expression, may be seen herein. The change of creeds has
come about innocently, and the consequences involved in it are, as yet,
perceived by hardly anyone. The scepticism inherent in the new creed is
concealed by its benevolence. You wish to help the American youth. This
unfortunate, benighted, ignorant boy, who has from his cradle heard
of nothing but business success as the one goal of all human effort,
turns to you for instruction. He comes to you in a trusting spirit,
with reverence in his heart, and you answer his hope in this wise:
‘Business and social success are the best things that life affords.
Come to us, my dear fellow, and we will help you toward them.’ Your
son asks you for bread and you give him a stone, for fish and you give
him a serpent. It would have been better for that boy if he had never
come to your college, for in that case he might have retained a belief
that somewhere in the world there existed ideas, art, enthusiasm,
unselfishness, inspiring activity.
In so far as our universities have been turning into business agencies,
they have naturally lost their imaginative importance. Our professors
seem to be of little more consequence in the community than the
department managers of other large shops. If learning is a useful
commodity which is to be distributed for the personal advantage of the
recipients, it is a thing to be paid for rather than to be worshiped.
To be sure, the whole of past history cannot be swept away in a day,
and we have not wholly discarded a certain conventional and rhetorical
reverence for learning. A dash and varnish of education are thought to
be desirable,--the wash that is growing every year more thin.
Now, the truth is that the higher education does not advance a man’s
personal interests except under special circumstances. What it gives
a man is the power of expression; but the ability to express himself
has kept many a man poor. Let no one imagine that society is likely to
reward him for self-expression in any walk of life. He is much more
likely to be punished for it. The question of a man’s success in life
depends upon society at large. The more highly an age is educated,
the more highly it rewards education in the individual. In an age of
indifference to learning, the educated man is at a disadvantage. Thus
the thesis that education advances self-interest--that thesis upon
which many of our colleges are now being conducted--is substantially
false. The little scraps and snatches of true education which a man
now gets at college often embarrass his career. Our people are finding
this out year by year, and as they do so, they naturally throw the true
conception of the higher education overboard. If education is to break
down as a commercial asset, what excuse have they for retaining it at
all? They will force the colleges to live up to the advertisements and
to furnish the kind of education that pays its way. It is clear that if
the colleges persist in the utilitarian view, the higher learning will
disappear. It has been disappearing very rapidly, and can be restored
only through the birth of a new spirit and of a new philosophic
attitude in our university life.
There are ages when the scholar receives recognition during his
lifetime and when the paths which lead to his lecture-room are filled
with men drawn there by his fame. This situation arises in any epoch
when human intellect surges up and asserts itself against tyranny and
ignorance. In the past the tyrannies have been political tyrannies, and
these have become well understood through the struggles of intellect
in the past; but the present commercial tyranny is a new thing and
as yet little understood. It lies like a heavy fog of intellectual
depression over the whole kingdom of Mammon, and is fed by the smoke
from a million factories. The artist works in it, the thinker thinks
in it. Even the saint is born in it. The rain of ashes from the
nineteenth-century Vesuvius of business seems to be burying all our
landscape.
And yet this is not true. We shall emerge: even we who are in America
and suffer most. The important points to be watched are our university
class-rooms. If our colleges will but allow something unselfish,
something that is true for its own sake, something that is part of the
history of the human heart and intellect, to live in their class-rooms,
the boys will find their way to it. The museum holds the precious
urn, to preserve it. The university, in like manner, stands to house
the alphabets of civilization--the historic instruments and agencies
of intellect. They are all akin to each other as the very name and
function of the place imply. The presidents and professors who sit
beside the fountains of knowledge bear different labels and teach
subjects that are called by various names. But the thing which carries
the label is no more than the shell. The life you cannot label; and
it is to foster this life that universities exist. Enthusiasm comes
out of the world and goes into the university. Toward this point flow
the currents of new talent that bubble up in society: here is the
meeting-place of mind. All that a university does is to give the
poppy-seed to the soil, the oil to the lamp, the gold to the rod of
glass before it cools. A university brings the spirit in touch with its
own language, that language through which it has spoken in former days
and through which alone it shall speak again.
PROFESSORIAL ETHICS.
When I was at a university as an undergraduate--I will not say how many
years ago--I received one morning a visit from a friend who was an
upper classman; for, as I remember it, I was a freshman at the time.
My friend brought a petition, and wished to interest me in the case
of a tutor or assistant professor, a great favorite with the college
boys, who was about to be summarily dismissed. There were, to be sure,
vague charges against him of incompetence and insubordination; but of
the basis of these charges his partisans knew little. They only felt
that one of the bright spots in undergraduate life surrounded this
same tutor; they liked him and they valued his teaching. I remember no
more about this episode, nor do I even remember whether I signed the
petition or not. The only thing I very clearly recall is the outcome:
the tutor was dismissed.
Twice or thrice again during my undergraduate life, did the same
thing happen--a flurry among the students, a remonstrance much too
late, against a deed of apparent injustice, a cry in the night, and
then silence. Now, had I known more about the world, I should have
understood that these nocturnal disturbances were signs of the times,
that what we had heard in all these cases was the operation of the
guillotine which exists in every American institution of learning, and
runs fast or slow according to the progress of the times. The thing
that a little astonished the undergraduate at the time was that in
almost every case of summary decapitation the victim was an educated
gentleman. And this was not because no other kind of man could be found
in the faculty. It seemed as if some whimsical fatality hung over the
professorial career of any ingenuous gentleman who was by nature a
scholar of the charming, old-fashioned kind.
Youth grieves not long over mysterious injustice, and it never occurred
to me till many years afterward that there was any logical connection
between one and another of all these judicial murders which used to
claim a passing tear from the undergraduate at Harvard. It is only
since giving some thought to recent educational conditions in America,
that I have understood what was then happening, and why it was that a
scholar could hardly live in an American University.
In America, society has been reorganized since 1870; the old
universities have been totally changed and many new ones founded. The
money to do this has come from the business world. The men chosen to
do the work have been chosen by the business world. Of a truth, it
must needs be that offenses come; but woe be unto him through whom the
offense cometh. As the Boss has been the tool of the business man in
politics, so the College president has been his agent in education.
The colleges during this epoch have each had a “policy” and a
directorate. They have been manned and commissioned for a certain kind
of service, as you might man a fishing-smack to catch herring. There
has been so much necessary business--the business of expanding and
planning, of adapting and remodeling--that there has been no time for
education. Some big deal has always been pending in each college--some
consolidation of departments, some annexation of a new world--something
so momentous as to make private opinion a nuisance. In this regard
the colleges have resembled everything else in America. The colleges
have simply not been different from the rest of American life. Let a
man express an opinion at a party caucus, or at a railroad directors’
meeting, or at a college faculty meeting, and he will find that he is
speaking against a predetermined force. What shall we do with such a
fellow? Well, if he is old and distinguished, you may suffer him to
have his say, and then override him. But if he is young, energetic, and
likely to give more trouble, you must eject him with as little fuss as
the circumstances will permit.