Breadth of Life.
One of the prime characteristics of the man of culture is freedom from
provincialism, complete deliverance from rigidity of temper,
narrowness of interest, uncertainty of taste, and general unripeness.
The villager, or pagan in the old sense, is always a provincial; his
horizon is narrow, his outlook upon the world restricted, his
knowledge of life limited. He may know a few things thoroughly; he
cannot know them in true relation to one another or to the larger
order of which they are part. He may know a few persons intimately; he
cannot know the representative persons of his time or of his race. The
essence of provincialism is the substitution of a part for the whole;
the acceptance of the local experience, knowledge, and standards as
possessing the authority of the universal experience, knowledge, and
standards. The local experience is entirely true in its own sphere; it
becomes misleading when it is accepted as the experience of all time
and all men. It is this mistake which breeds that narrowness and
uncertainty of taste and opinion from which culture furnishes the only
escape. A small community, isolated from other communities by the
accidents of position, often comes to believe that its way of doing
things is the way of the world; a small body of religious people,
devoutly attentive to their own observances, often reach the
conclusion that these observances are the practice of that catholic
church which includes the pious-minded of all creeds and rituals; a
group of radical reformers, by passionate advocacy of a single reform,
come to believe that there have been no reformers before them, and
that none will be needed after them; a band of fresh and audacious
young practitioners of any of the arts, by dint of insistence upon a
certain manner, rapidly generate the conviction that art has no other
manner.
Society is full of provincialism in art, politics, religion, and
economics; and the essence of this provincialism is always the
same,--the substitution of a part for the whole. Larger knowledge of
the world and of history would make it perfectly clear that there has
always been not only a wide latitude, but great variation, in ritual
and worship; that the political story of all the progressive nations
has been one long agitation for reforms, and that no reform can ever
be final; that reform must succeed reform until the end of
time,--reforms being in their nature neither more nor less than those
readjustments to new conditions which are involved in all social
development. A wider survey of experience would make it clear that art
has many manners, and that no manner is supreme and none final.
A long experience gives a man poise, balance, and steadiness; he has
seen many things come and go, and he is neither paralysed by
depression when society goes wrong, nor irrationally elated when it
goes right. He is perfectly aware that his party is only a means to an
end, and not a piece of indestructible and infallible machinery; that
the creed he accepts has passed through many changes of
interpretation, and will pass through more; that the social order for
which he contends, if secured, will be only another stage in the
unbroken development of the organised life of men in the world. And
culture is, at bottom, only an enlarged and clarified experience,--an
experience so comprehensive that it puts its possessor in touch with
all times and men, and gives him the opportunity of comparing his own
knowledge of things, his faith and his practice, with the knowledge,
faith, and practice of all the generations. This opportunity brings,
to one who knows how to use it, deliverance from the ignorance or
half-knowledge of provincialism, from the crudity of its half-trained
tastes, and from the blind passion of its rash and groundless faith in
its own infallibility.
Provincialism is the soil in which philistinism grows most rapidly and
widely. For as the essence of provincialism is the substitution of a
part for the whole, so the essence of philistinism is the conviction
that what one possesses is the best of its kind, that the kind is the
highest, and that one has all he needs of it. A true philistine is not
only convinced that he holds the only true and consistent position,
but he is also entirely satisfied with himself. He is infallible and
he is sufficient unto himself. In politics he is a blind partisan, in
theology an arrogant dogmatist, in art an ignorant propagandist. What
he accepts, believes, or has, is not only the best of its kind, but
nothing better can ever supersede it.
To this spirit the spirit of culture is antipodal; between the two
there is inextinguishable antagonism. They can never compromise or
agree upon a truce, any more than day and night can consent to dwell
together. To destroy philistinism root and branch, to eradicate the
ignorance which makes it possible for a man to believe that he
possesses all things in their final forms, to empty a man of the
stupidity and vulgarity of self-satisfaction, and to invigorate the
immortal dissatisfaction of the soul with its present attainments, are
the ends which culture is always seeking to accomplish. The keen lance
of Matthew Arnold, flashing now in one part of the field and now in
another, pierced many of the fallacies of provincialism and
philistinism, and mortally wounded more than one Goliath of ignorance
and conceit; but the work must be done anew in every generation and in
every individual. All men are conceived in the sin of ignorance and
born in the iniquity of half-knowledge; and every man needs to be
saved by wider knowledge and clearer vision. It is a matter of
comparative indifference where one is born; it is a matter of supreme
importance how one educates one's self. There is as genuine a
provincialism in Paris as in the remotest frontier town; it is better
dressed and better mannered, but it is not less narrow and vulgar.
There is as much vulgarity in the arrogance of a czar as in that of an
African chief; as much absurdity in the self-satisfaction of the man
who believes that the habit and speech of the boulevard are the
ultimate habit and speech of the race, as in that of the man who
accepts the manners of the mining camp as the finalities of human
intercourse. Culture is not an accident of birth, although
surroundings retard or advance it; it is always a matter of individual
education.
This education finds no richer material than that which is contained
in literature; for the characteristic of literature, as of all the
arts, is its universality of interest, its elevation of taste, its
disclosure of ideas, its constant appeal to the highest in the reader
by its revelation of the highest in the writer. Many of the noblest
works of literature are intensely local in colour, atmosphere,
material, and allusion; but in every case that which is of universal
interest is touched, evoked, and expressed. The artist makes the
figure he paints stand out with the greatest distinctness by the
accuracy of the details introduced and by the skill with which they
are handled; but the very definiteness of the figure gives force and
clearness to the revelation of the universal trait or characteristic
which is made through it. Père Goriot has the ineffaceable stamp of
Paris upon him, but he is for that very reason the more completely
disclosed as a typical individuality. Literature abounds in
illustrations of this true and artistic adjustment of the local to the
universal, this disclosure of the common humanity in which all men
share through the highly elaborated individuality; and this
characteristic indicates one of the deepest sources of its educational
power. So searching is this power that it is safe to say that no one
can know thoroughly the great books of the world and remain a
provincial or a philistine; the very air of these works is fatal to
narrow views, to low standards, and to self-satisfaction.