controversy. No other educational system was ever so valiantly and
nobly defended. For no other have so many masterly arguments been
marshalled in vain. There was a pride and a splendour in the long
years’ study of Greek. It indicated in England that the nation had
reached a height which permitted her this costly inutility, this
supreme intellectual indulgence. Greek was an adornment to the minds
of her men, as jewels were an adornment to the bodies of her women.
No practical purpose was involved. Sir Walter Scott put the case
with his usual simplicity and directness in a letter to his second
son, Charles, who had little aptitude for study: “A knowledge of the
classical languages has been fixed upon, not without good reason, as
the mark of a well-educated young man; and though people may scramble
into distinction without it, it is always with difficulty, just like
climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door.”
In the United States we have never been kindly disposed towards
extravagance of this order. During the years of our comparative
poverty, when few citizens aspired to more than a competence, there
was still money enough for Latin, and now and then for Greek. There
was still a race of men with slender incomes and wide acquirements, to
whom scholarship was a dearly bought but indestructible delight. Now
that we have all the money there is, it is universally understood that
Americans cannot afford to spend any of it on the study of “the best
that has been known and thought in the world.”
Against this practical decision no argument avails. Burke’s plea for
the severity of the foundation upon which rest the principles of taste
carries little weight, because our standard of taste is genial rather
than severe. The influence of Latinity upon English literature concerns
us even less, because prose and verse are emancipated from the
splendid shackles they wore with such composure. But the mere reader,
who is not an educational economist, asks himself now and then in what
fashion Milton and Dryden would have written, if vocational training
had supplanted the classics in their day. And to come nearer to our
time, and closer to our modern and moderate appreciations, how would
the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and the lines “On the
Death of a Favourite Cat” have been composed, had Gray not spent all
his life in the serene company of the Latins?
It was easy to define the requirements of an educated man in the year
1738, when Gray, a bad mathematician and an admirable classicist,
left Cambridge. It is uncommonly difficult to define them to-day. Dr.
Goodnow, speaking a few years ago to the graduating class of Johns
Hopkins University, summed up collegiate as well as professional
education as the acquisition of the capacity to do work of a specific
character. “Knowledge can come only as the result of experience. What
is learned in any other way seldom has such reality as to make it an
actual part of our lives.”
A doctor cannot afford to depend too freely on experience, valuable
though it may be, because the high prices it asks are paid by his
patients. But so far as professional training goes, Dr. Goodnow stood
on firm ground. All it undertakes to do is to enable students to work
along chosen lines--to turn them into doctors, lawyers, priests, mining
engineers, analytical chemists, expert accountants. They may or may
not be educated men in the liberal sense of the word. They may or may
not understand allusions which are current in the conversation of
educated people. Such conversation is far from encyclopædic; but it is
interwoven with knowledge, and rich in agreeable disclosures. An adroit
participant can avoid obvious pitfalls; but it is not in dodging issues
and concealing deficits that the pleasures of companionship lie. I once
heard a sparkling and animated lady ask Mr. Henry James (who abhorred
being questioned) if he did not think American women talked better than
English women. “Yes,” said the great novelist gently, “they are more
ready and much more brilliant. They rise to every suggestion. But”--as
if moved by some strain of recollection--“English women so often know
what they are talking about.”
Vocational training and vocational guidance are a little like
intensive farming. They are obvious measures for obvious results;
they economize effort; they keep their goal in view. If they “pander
to cabbages,” they produce as many and as fine cabbages as the soil
they till can yield. Their exponents are most convincing when they are
least imaginative. The Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business
Administration says bluntly that it is hard for a young man to see any
good in a college education, when he finds he has nothing to offer
which business men want.
This is an intelligible point of view. It shows, as I have said, that
the country does not feel itself rich enough for intellectual luxuries.
But when I see it asserted that vocational training is necessary for
the safety of Democracy (the lusty nursling which we persist in feeding
from the bottle), I feel that I am asked to credit an absurdity. When
the reason given for this dependence is the altruism of labour,--“In a
democracy the activity of the people is directed towards the good of
the whole number,”--I know that common sense has been violated by an
assertion which no one is expected to take seriously. A life-career
course may be established in every college in the land, and students
carefully guarded from the inroads of distracting and unremunerative
knowledge; but this praiseworthy thrift will not be practised in the
interests of the public. The mechanical education, against which Mr.
Lowell has protested sharply, is preëminently selfish. Its impelling
motive is not “going over,” but getting on.
“It takes a much better quality of mind for self-education than for
education in the ordinary sense,” says Mrs. Gerould; and no one will
dispute this truth. Franklin had two years of schooling, and they were
over and done with before he was twelve. His “cultural opportunities”
were richer than those enjoyed by Mr. Gompers, and he had a consuming
passion for knowledge. Vocational training was a simple thing in his
day; but he glimpsed its possibilities, and fitted it into place. He
would have made an admirable “vocational counsellor” in the college he
founded, had his counsels not been needed on weightier matters, and
in wider spheres. As for industrial education, those vast efficiency
courses given by leading manufacturers to their employees, which
embrace an astonishing variety of marketable attainments, they would
have seemed to him like the realization of a dream--a dream of diffused
light and general intelligence.
We stand to-day on an educational no man’s land, exposed to double
fires, and uncertain which way to turn for safety. The elimination
of Greek from the college curriculum blurred the high light, the
supreme distinction, of scholarship. The elimination of Latin as an
essential study leaves us without any educational standard save a
correct knowledge of English, a partial knowledge of modern languages,
and some acquaintance, never clearly defined, with precise academic
studies. The scientist discards many of these studies as not being
germane to his subject. The professional student deals with them as
charily as possible. The future financier fears to embarrass his mind
with things he does not need to know.
Yet back of every field of labour lies the story of the labourer, and
back of every chapter in the history of civilization lie the chapters
that elucidate it. “Wisdom,” says Santayana, “is the funded experience
which mankind has gathered by living.” Education gives to a student
that fraction of knowledge which sometimes leads to understanding and a
clean-cut basis of opinions. The process is engrossing, and, to certain
minds, agreeable and consolatory. Man contemplates his fellow man
with varied emotions, but never with unconcern. “The world,” observed
Bagehot tersely, “has a vested interest in itself.”
The American Laughs
It was the opinion of Thomas Love Peacock--who knew whereof he
spoke--that “no man should ask another why he laughs, or at what,
seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a
responsible agent.... Reason is in no way essential to mirth.”
This being so, why should human beings, individually and collectively,
be so contemptuous of one another’s humour? To be puzzled by it is
natural enough. There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible
as the joke we do not see. But to be scornful or angry, to say with
Steele that we can judge a man’s temper by the things he laughs at,
is, in a measure, unreasonable. A man laughs as he loves, moved by
secret springs that do not affect his neighbour. Yet no sooner did
America begin to breed humorists of her own than the first thing these
gentlemen did was to cast doubts upon British humour. Even a cultivated
laugher like Mr. Charles Dudley Warner suffered himself to become
acrimonious on this subject; whereupon an English critic retaliated
by saying that if Mr. Warner considered Knickerbocker’s “New York” to
be the equal of “Gulliver’s Travels,” and that if Mr. Lowell really
thought Mr. N. P. Willis “witty,” then there was no international
standard of satire or of wit. The chances are that Mr. Lowell did not
think Mr. Willis witty at all. He used the word in a friendly and
unreflecting moment, not expecting a derisive echo from the other side
of the sea.
And now Mr. Chesterton has protested in the “Illustrated London News”
against the vogue of the American joke in England. He says it does
not convey its point because the conditions which give it birth are
not understood, and the side-light it throws fails to illuminate a
continent. One must be familiar with the intimacies of American life to
enjoy their humorous aspect.
Precisely the same criticism was offered when Artemus Ward lectured in
London more than a half-century ago. The humour of this once famous
joker has become a disputable point. It is safe to say that anything
less amusing than the passage read by Lincoln to his Cabinet in Mr.
Drinkwater’s play could not be found in the literature of any land.
It cast a needless gloom over the scene, and aroused our sympathy for
the officials who had to listen to it. But the American jest, like
the Greek epic, should be spoken, not read; and it is claimed that
when Artemus Ward drawled out his absurdities, which, like the Greek
epic, were always subject to change, these absurdities were funny.
Mr. Leacock has politely assured us that London was “puzzled and
enraptured with the very mystery of the humour”; but Mr. Leacock,
being at that time three years old, was not there to discern this
for himself. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell _was_ there on the opening night,
November 13, 1866, and found the puzzle and the mystery to be far in
advance of the rapture. The description he was wont to give of this
unique entertainment (a “Panorama,” and a lecture on the Mormons), of
the depressing, unventilated Egyptian Hall in which it was given, of
the wild extravagances of the speaker, which grew wilder and wilder as
the audience grew more and more bewildered, was funny enough, Heaven
knows, but the essence of the fun lay in failure.
Americans, sixty years ago, were brought up on polygamous jests.
The Mormons were our neighbours, and could be always relied upon to
furnish a scandal, a thrill, or a joke. When they mended their ways,
and ceased to be reprehensible or amusing, the comic papers were
compelled to fall back on Solomon, with whose marital experiences they
have regaled us ever since. But to British eyes, Brigham Young was
an unfamiliar figure; and to British minds, Solomon has always been
distinguished for other things than wives. Therefore Artemus Ward’s
casual drolleries presupposed a humorous background which did not
exist. A chance allusion to a young friend in Salt Lake City who had
run away with a boarding school was received in stupefied silence.
Then suddenly a woman’s smothered giggle showed that light had dawned
on one receptive brain. Then a few belated laughs broke out in various
parts of the hall, as the idea travelled slowly along the thought
currents of the audience, and the speaker went languidly on to the next
unrecognizable pleasantry.
The criticism passed upon Americans to-day is that they laugh often and
without discrimination. This is what the English say of us, and this is
what some Americans have said of the English. Henry James complained
bitterly that London play-goers laughed unseasonably at serious plays.
I wonder if they received Ervine’s “John Ferguson” in this fashion, as
did American play-goers. That a tragedy harsh and unrelenting, that
human pain, unbearable because unmerited, should furnish food for mirth
may be comprehensible to the psychologist who claims to have a clue to
every emotion; but to the ordinary mortal it is simply dumbfounding.
People laughed at Molnar’s “Liliom” out of sheer nervousness, because
they could not understand it. And “Liliom” had its comedy side. But
nobody could have helped understanding “John Ferguson,” and there was
no relief from its horror, its pitifulness, its sombre surrender to
the irony of fate. Yet ripples of laughter ran through the house; and
the actress who played Hannah Ferguson confessed that this laughter
had in the beginning completely unnerved her, but that she had steeled
herself to meet and to ignore it.
It was said that British audiences were guilty of laughing at “Hedda
Gabler,” perhaps in sheer desperate impatience at the unreasonableness
of human nature as unfolded in that despairing drama. They should
have been forgiven and congratulated, and so should the American
audiences who were reproached for laughing at “Mary Rose.” The charm,
the delicacy, the tragic sense of an unknown and arbitrary power with
which Barrie invested his play were lost in the hands of incapable
players, while its native dullness gained force and substance from
their presentation. A lengthy dialogue on a pitch-black stage between
an invisible soldier and an inarticulate ghost was neither enlivening
nor terrifying. It would have been as hard to laugh as to shudder in
the face of such tedious loquacity.
We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable of
the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they
dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh,
weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations
of the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck’s “Intruder” was
played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia,
they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for
these varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented,
degenerates swiftly into farce--into very bad farce, too, as Swift said
of the vulgar malignities of fate.
The Dublin players brought to this country a brand of humour and
pathos with which we were unfamiliar. Irish comedy, as we knew it,
was of the Dion Boucicault type, a pure product of stageland, and
unrelated to any practical experiences of life. Here, on the contrary,
was something indigenous to Ireland, and therefore strange to us. My
first experience was at the opening night of Ervine’s “Mixed Marriage,”
in New York. An audience, exclusively Semitic (so far as I could judge
by looking at it), listened in patient bewilderment to the theological
bickerings of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. I sat in a box with
Lady Gregory who was visibly disturbed by the slowness of the house at
the uptake, and unaware that what was so familiar and vital to her was
a matter of the purest unconcern to that particular group of Americans.
The only thing that roused them from their apathy was the sudden rage
with which, in the third act, Tom Rainey shouted at his father:
“Ye’re an ould fool, that’s what ye are; a damned ould fool!” At these
reprehensible words a gust of laughter swept the theatre, destroying
the situation on the stage, but shaking the audience back to life and
animation. It was seemingly--though I should be sorry to think it--the
touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and delicacy, “The
Playboy of the Western World,” was put on the American stage, men
laughed--generally at the wrong time--out of the hopeless confusion
of their minds. The “Playboy” was admittedly an enigma. The night I
saw it, the audience, under the impression that it was anti-Irish, or
anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-something, they were not sure
what, hurled denunciations and one missile--which looked strangely
like a piece of pie--at the actors. It was a disgraceful scene, but
not without its humorous side; for when the riotous interruptions had
subsided, an elderly man arose, and, with the manner of an invited
speaker at a public dinner, began, “From time immemorial”--But the
house had grown tired of disturbances, and howled him down. He waited
for silence, and then in the same composed and leisurely manner began
again, “From time immemorial”--At this point one of the policemen
who had been restoring order led him gently but forcibly out of the
theatre; the play was resumed; and what it was that had happened from
time immemorial we were destined never to know.
A source of superlative merriment in the United States is the two-reel
comic of our motion-picture halls. Countless thousands of Americans
look at it, and presumably laugh at it, every twenty-four hours. It is
not unlike an amplified and diversified Punch and Judy show, depending
on incessant action and plenty of hard knocks. Hazlitt says that bangs
and blows which we know do not hurt provoke legitimate laughter; and,
until we see a funny film, we have no conception of the amount of
business which can be constructed out of anything so simple as men
hitting one another. Producers of these comics have taken the public
into their confidence, and have assured us that their work is the
hardest in the motion-picture industry; that the slugging policeman
is trained for weary weeks to slug divertingly, and that every tumble
has to be practised with sickening monotony before it acquires its
purely accidental character. As for accessories--well, it takes
more time and trouble to make a mouse run up a woman’s skirt at the
right moment, or a greyhound carry off a dozen crullers on its tail,
than it does to turn out a whole sentimental scenario, grey-haired
mother, high-minded, pure-hearted convict son, lumber-camp virtue,
town vice, and innocent childhood complete. Whether or not the time
and trouble are well spent depends on the amount of money which that
mouse and those crullers eventually wring from an appreciative and
laughter-loving public.
The dearth of humorous situations--at no time inexhaustible--has
compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as speed,
violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable mishaps. A man
acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or sit down to dinner
without coming to grief. Even the animals--dogs, donkeys and pigs--are
subject to catastrophes that must wreck their confidence in life.
Fatness, besides being funny, is, under these circumstances, a great
protection. The human body, swathed in rolls of cotton-wadding, is safe
from contusions and broken bones. When an immensely stout lady sinks
into an armchair, only to be precipitated through a trap-door, and shot
down a slide into a pond, we feel she has earned her pay. But after
she has been dropped from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in
air by a balloon anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked
up by an elephant, and carried through the streets at the head of a
circus parade, we begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the
producers of comic “movies” know what “One crowded hour of glorious
life” can be made to hold.
Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as
unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its determining
causes--why should we?--until the contradictory definitions of
philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel us to recognize
its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle that our
pleasure in the ludicrous originates in the sight of another’s
misfortune. Its motive power is malice. Hobbes stoutly affirmed that
laughter is not primarily malicious, but vainglorious. It is the rough,
spontaneous assertion of our own eminence. “We laugh from strength, and
we laugh at weakness.” Hazlitt saw a lurking cruelty in the amusement
of civilized men who have gaged the folly and frivolity of their
kind. Bergson, who evidently does not frequent motion-picture halls,
says that the comic makes its appeal to “the intelligence pure and
simple.” He raises laughter to the dignity of a “social gesture” and
a corrective. We put our affections out of court, and impose silence
upon our pity before we laugh; but this is only because the corrective
would fail to correct if it bore the stamp of sympathy and kindness.
Leacock, who deals in comics, is sure of but one thing, that all humour
is anti-social; and Stevenson ascribes our indestructible spirit of
mirth to “the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination.”
The illustrations given us by these eminent specialists are as
unconvincing as the definitions they vouchsafe, and the rules they lay
down for our guidance. Whenever we are told that a situation or a jest
offers legitimate food for laughter, we cease to have any disposition
to laugh. Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason
than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly
serious when invited too freely to be amused. An entertainment which
promises to be funny is handicapped from the start. It has to plough
deep into men’s risibilities before it can raise its crop of laughter.
I have been told that when Forepaugh first fired a man out of a cannon,
the audience laughed convulsively; not because it found anything
ludicrous in the performance, but because it had been startled out of
its composure, and relieved from a gasping sense of fear.
Sidney Smith insisted that the overturning of a dinner-table which had
been set for dinner was a laughable incident. Yet he was a married
man, and must have known that such a catastrophe (which seems to us
to belong strictly to the motion-picture field) could not have been
regarded by Mrs. Smith, or by any other hostess, as amusing. Boswell
tells us that Dr. Johnson was so infinitely diverted by hearing that
an English gentleman had left his estate to his three sisters that he
laughed until he was exhausted, and had to hold on to a post (he was
walking home through the London streets) to keep himself from falling
to the ground. Yet no reader of Boswell ever saw anything ludicrous
in such a last will and testament. Sophocles makes Electra describe
Clytemnestra as “laughing triumphantly” over the murder of Agamemnon;
but Electra was a prejudiced witness. Killing an undesired husband
is no laughing matter, though triumph over its accomplishment--when
failure means death--is a legitimate emotion. Clytemnestra was a
singularly august and composed sinner. Not from her did Orestes and
Electra inherit their nervous systems; and not on their testimony
should we credit her with an excess of humour alike ill-timed and
unbecoming.