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Title: Humanism and America
Essays on the outlook of modern civilisation
Editor: Norman Foerster
Contributor: Irving Babbitt
George Roy Elliott
Louis Trenchard More
Paul Elmer More
Release date: March 5, 2026 [eBook #78119]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78119
Credits: Sean – @parchmentglow
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUMANISM AND AMERICA ***
HUMANISM
AND
AMERICA
ESSAYS
ON THE OUTLOOK
OF MODERN CIVILISATION
_Edited by_
NORMAN FOERSTER
FARRAR AND RINEHART
INCORPORATED
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY FARRAR AND RINEHART
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Preface_
“Life’s a long headache in a noisy street,” sang the poet Masefield
in _The Widow in the Bye Street_ seventeen years ago. Since then, we
have all come to live in Main rather than Bye Street, and our headache
has grown apace despite the best efforts of the physicians of the age.
The noise and whirl increase, the disillusion and depression deepen,
the nightmare of Futility stalks before us in the inevitable intervals
when activity flags. Heroically or mock-heroically we distrust or
reject such stimulants and anodynes as religion, moral conventions, the
dignity of manners, the passion for beauty, and even our recent faith
in democracy, in liberalism, in progress, in science, in efficiency, in
machinery. At length revolt and scepticism themselves have ceased to be
interesting. The modern temper has produced a terrible headache.
In vain does our Chief Executive assure us that “we have reached a
higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the
history of the world.” Like Mr. Punch when it was announced that the
government would soon be broadcasting intelligence by radio, we wonder
“Where will the government get it?” All governments, all nations, are
to-day in this predicament.
The alleged Americanisation of Europe appears to signify, at bottom,
that tendencies native to Europe are being worked out most thoroughly
in the United States and are therefore making the United States the
model of twentieth-century Europe. At the same time Europe knows that
the model is, to speak very gently, inadequate. For a good many years
our own writers have deplored the condition of civilisation in the
United States, with exaggeration but essential truth. But they have
generally made of revolt and scepticism ends rather than beginnings
of wisdom. For materialistic complacency they have substituted a
smart superiority resting on the most dubious foundations. Their
feebleness in constructive power is very patent. They are part of the
disease--symptoms not remedies.
Our “intellectual atmosphere,” however, is now rapidly changing, is
becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons, oppressed
with the stale scepticism of the post-war period, are beginning to
grow sceptical of that scepticism, and are looking for a new set of
controlling ideas capable of restoring value to human existence.
Certain forces are making for order and for new objectives. They are
not strong forces, they can scarcely be called movements, but they are
receiving a hearing and they contain the promise of growth.
One of these forces is known as “humanism,” which is rapidly becoming
a word to conjure with. In its broadest signification, it denotes a
belief that the proper study of mankind is man, and that this study
should enable mankind to perceive and realise its humanity. But the
study of mankind is capable of yielding all manner of results, so that,
for a long time to come, we may expect the word denoting this study
to carry a large variety of meanings. Since man may be conceived as
living on three planes, the natural, the human, and the religious, the
content of the middle term will frequently tend to be invaded by that
of the extremes. Thus, many persons who call themselves humanists, in
this naturistic era from which we have not yet emerged, are unwittingly
naturists yearning stoically for adaptation to the universe or
mystically for a fusion of the human and the natural. Such persons
might call themselves, paradoxically, humanistic naturists. In the
interest of clearness, as it seems to me, the word humanism should be
confined to a working philosophy seeking to make a resolute distinction
between man and nature and between man and the divine.
The most fruitful approximation to such a distinction, in the twentieth
century, has been the work of two American scholar-critics, Irving
Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. The characteristic thought of Irving
Babbitt was already adumbrated in 1895 in an address at the University
of Wisconsin on “The Rational Study of the Classics,” published two
years later in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and in 1908 included in his
book on _Literature and the American College_. This book contains in
essence, one may almost say, everything in the series of volumes in
which he has since applied his humanistic standards to various aspects
of modern life and thought. With a tenacity of purpose unexampled in
an age shifting aimlessly from one enthusiasm and disillusionment to
another, with an effect growing more massive as he has worked out
his ideas in such fields as æsthetics, literary criticism, ethics,
psychology, education, and politics, with a remarkable power of
relating his sense of permanent values to an historical sense (so that
his books are in one view works of history, and in another, doctrinal
inductions from facts), with a vast accumulation of learning that has
been thoroughly assimilated, and with a mode of expression notable for
weighty vigour, earnestness, brilliant ridicule, and an instinct for
ruinous quotation, Professor Babbitt has done more than any one else
to formulate the concept of humanism and gain for it an ever-widening
hearing. A great teacher as well as writer, lecturing to students at
Harvard for some thirty-five years, he has done much to shape the minds
and purposes of a whole generation of young men, and thus to render
possible the continuance of his task in the future.
Paul Elmer More, after a brief experience as teacher of Sanskrit
and Classical literature, entered criticism through the avenue of
journalism, becoming literary editor of the _Independent_ and the New
York _Evening Post_ and editor of the _Nation_. Through his relation
with contributors to the _Nation_, in particular, he exerted a powerful
influence upon the higher critical activity of the country, an
influence extended more widely through his long series of _Shelburne
Essays_, beginning in 1904, in which he united in fine balance a
profound and far-ranging scholarship, unusual psychological insight,
an humanistic point of view, and a gift of firm, luminous, urbane
but penetrating writing. Undervalued because of their hostility to
the popular tendencies of the epoch, these essays will one day be
generally recognised, I believe, as the highest accomplishment in
literary criticism in the whole of American literature. The fundamental
unity in the work of our two leading humanistic thinkers may be seen
by comparing, say, the conclusion of Mr. Babbitt’s _Masters of Modern
French Criticism_ and the “Definitions of Dualism” at the close of the
eighth series of _Shelburne Essays_, or the introduction to _Democracy
and Leadership_ and the first essay in the _New Shelburne Essays_,
Volume I. The main difference, perhaps, lies in emphasis; while Mr.
Babbitt has been first and last concerned with building up a sound
conception of individualism, Mr. More has been progressively absorbed
in the study of the duality of human nature. His strong religious
bent in this study led, in the years following his retirement from
journalism, to the writing of _The Greek Tradition_, in five volumes,
on the relation of Platonic and Hellenistic to Christian thought--a
monumental work, the full significance of which can scarcely be
estimated in its own time.
In a book recently crowned by the French Academy, _Le Mouvement
humaniste aux États-Unis_, Louis J. A. Mercier, professor of French at
Harvard, restricts his account to Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and
W. C. Brownell. In a broad view of the “movement” the late Mr. Brownell
doubtless merits a conspicuous place. Entering criticism, like Mr.
More, by way of journalism, Brownell performed valuable service through
his acute non-provincial book on _French Traits_ as far back as 1888,
and through his perennial insistence on high standards in literature
and the fine arts. Never a humanist in the strict doctrinal sense,
before his death he inclined to respond to the humanitarian optimism
of America. The tendency toward humanitarianism, emotional sympathy
with divine or undivine average humanity, appeared more strikingly in
the post-war writings of Stuart P. Sherman. A student under Professor
Babbitt, a contributor to the _Nation_ under Mr. More, Sherman became
the author of two books written in a vigorous and accomplished style
and permeated with humanistic principles, one on Matthew Arnold
conceived as a Victorian humanist, and one _On Contemporary Literature_
conceived as a chaos of naturalism. Then, carried away by admiration
of Wilsonian idealism and hatred of “Prussian autocracy,” and by an
uncritical devotion to Emerson, he drifted from his humanistic position
into an ever vaguer faith in the common man, and at length, as a
literary journalist in New York, into a rather indulgent impressionism.
In the field of the fine arts, the most humanistic writer has been
Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., of Princeton. Among others who published
significant books in various fields, prior to 1928, are P. H. Frye,
Sherlock Bronson Gass, Robert Shafer, Percy H. Houston, and W. F.
Giese. By 1928 something like a movement could indeed be discerned:
books began to multiply, and periodicals were printing series of
articles--the _Forum_ and the _Bookman_ in America, the _Criterion_
(edited by T. S. Eliot) and the _Nineteenth Century and After_ in
England. Whether the movement will continue to develop, whether it
will succumb to disunion and vagueness, or be submerged by a narrow
conventionalism of one sort or other, it would be idle to predict.
Though we have in America the semblance of a new movement, humanism
itself is not new. It was new, I conceive, when human wisdom was new.
It was comparatively new in ancient Greece, Judea, India, and China. It
was rather old by the time of the Renaissance, when the word humanist
came into currency. In one way or another, its doctrine and discipline
have been clarified by persons as various as Homer, Phideas, Plato,
Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Virgil, Horace, Dante,
Shakspere, Milton, Goethe; more recently, by Matthew Arnold in England
and Emerson and Lowell in America: a strange assortment of names,
no doubt, but also an indication of the inner diversity as well as
the central unity of the humanist ideal. For into the aim of human
perfection enter many elements, no less than that central order which
is the fruit of discipline.
Yet, if humanism is never new, it must constantly confront new
problems in time and place. In the Renaissance, its great foe was
mediæval otherworldliness; to-day its great foe is thisworldliness,
obsession with physical things and the instincts that bind us to the
animal order--in a word, the many forms of naturism that have all but
destroyed humane insight, discipline, and elevation. In a given age,
humanism may have the task of urging the claims of beauty; in another
age the claims of science, or of conduct. It may have one problem in
France, and another across the Channel. So long as America tends to
set the pattern for the twentieth century, so long will the greatest
problem of humanism lie here in the United States.
This relativity of humanistic needs will perhaps go far toward
explaining the special traits of the movement in America and the
corresponding special lines of attack by its naturistic opponents.
Romantics, realists, and sceptics are daily attacking on four fronts:
humanists, it is held, are academic, un-American, reactionary, and
Puritanic.
Humanists are said to be academic. If this means that they are all
university teachers, it is obviously not true. If it means that they
are not interested in the present, it is obviously not true. If it
means that they are interested in theory and not in practical affairs,
it is not true, for what specially concerns them is the relation of
theory and practice. They can scarcely be convicted of displaying what
Stuart P. Sherman, who knew American academic life from the inside,
termed “the professorial vices of pedantry, indolence, timidity, and
intellectual quietism, which is a euphemism for the sluggish tolerance
of men without philosophic conviction or intellectual purpose.” If it
means that our humanists have been more interested than the workaday
journalist critics in concrete knowledge and in general ideas, then
indeed they may be termed academic. They perceive that when a new
movement of thought and life is to be got under way, the first stage
is naturally one of acquiring and organising knowledge--particularly
neglected knowledge. This was clear to Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell
in our little New England renaissance; it was clear to Lessing, Herder,
and the Schlegel brothers in Germany; it was clear to the humanists
of the Renaissance throughout Europe. Let us remember that the first
of all universities was Plato’s “Academy,” the object of which was to
attain a wisdom deeper than that of the market-place. Let us remember
that “mere” theories are often high explosives, destructive of the
prevailing practical life of the market-place, as witness Locke and
Rousseau and the German thinkers from Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche.
Humanists are said to be un-American. According to those who cultivate
the nationalist conception, a valid new criticism, new literature, new
culture must spring from our American experience, not from imported
ideas. They forget the lesson of the past that cultural movements have
two sexes, so to speak, one native and one foreign, and that the native
expresses itself in the main unconsciously under the incitement of the
foreign. The native for the most part takes care of itself, the foreign
must be sedulously cultivated. In the Renaissance a humanism imported
from Italy fructified the native genius of most of Europe. Later,
England, for example, drew upon France and then Germany; Germany upon
France and England; France upon Spain and England; the United States
upon England and Germany. Unlike some of his followers our Walt Whitman
himself finally perceived the need of America’s assimilation of foreign
culture--even from “all former lands” beginning with ancient India and
Greece. It is doubtful whether a _real_ American culture could ever
spring from our own experience; it is certain that it could be _caused_
to spring from our own experience by a happy use of foreign culture.
Humanists are supposed to be reactionary. According to those who pride
themselves on living in the present if not in the future, humanists
want “to return to Buddha and the Bho Tree, to Socrates and the ilex.”
Being, in the main, historically educated men, however, humanists are
well aware that a return to the past is impossible. On the other hand,
they are also aware that, as cultural movements must draw upon foreign
supplies, so they must also draw upon past culture. If a present age
appears to be bad, it can be changed only by the introduction of forces
not vitally existing in that age, and since the future is always a
blank, these forces can be found only through a reinterpretation of the
past. Thus, to a large extent the Renaissance was rendered possible
through the “revival of learning” by the humanists, and the romantic
movement of the late eighteenth century was in part a “return” to the
Middle Ages and the national past. Even the typical modernist, in his
efforts to escape being a Victorian or a Puritan, is plainly bent on
“returning” to the primitive.
This brings us to the last and most frequent charge: that humanists are
Puritans in disguise. It is hard to answer. Nobody knows what a Puritan
is, and when he is disguised such a person is not easy to deal with.
Even Professor Percy Gardner, a leading English authority on Greek
art, ventures to speak of the “puritanism” of the Dorians. While in
America humanists are attacked as Puritan, in France they are attacked
as Catholic, and Mr. T. S. Eliot has been attacked as both. Even though
American historians do not agree as to what the distinguishing virtues
and vices of the seventeenth-century Puritans were, it may be suggested
that one of their plainest virtues was the possession of a certain
faith, now extinct. Their successors, wanting this faith, cannot well
be said to have even the Puritan defects of that virtue. Sometimes
those dire opposites of the humanists, the promoters of Uplift, are
called Puritans. For my part, I think of our Uplifters rather as
misguided humanitarians, followers not of Calvin but rather of that
other Genevan, Rousseau.
What the naturists are really driving at, when they fight this phantom
Puritan, this Feathertop, is regimentation or discipline. Now, humanism
does wish to emphasise discipline, whenever, as to-day, it needs to
be emphasised. It has no desire to measure conduct quantitatively,
according to the familiar formula, as three-fourths of life, but it
does desire to show that the quality of all life is higher or lower
according as our power of vital restraint is exercised. Humanism
conceives that the power of restraint is peculiarly human, and that
those who throw down the reins are simply abandoning their humanity
to the course of animal life or the complacency of vegetables. It
conceives, further, that the attainment of the ideal of completeness
of life, of a human nature rounded and perfect on all its sides,
is fatally frustrated at the start unless the ideal of centrality
or self-control is introduced as the regulating principle. The
substitution of _intensity_ as the regulating principle, which is
proposed by many modernists such as Aldous Huxley, provides for
quantity but not quality of life, and tends to defeat the ideal
of completeness, because certain parts of human nature, if not
disciplined, will always thrive at the expense of other parts. This
fact was glimpsed even by Walter Pater, notwithstanding his doctrine
of the intense moment, when he wrote: “For us of the modern world,
with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so
many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience,
the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far
harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique
life. Yet, no less than ever, the intellect demands completeness,
centrality.”
Many other modernists reject the ideal of completeness itself as making
for a dull uniformity, and propose instead the ideal of diversity. Life
is “full of a number of things,” one of them prattles, remembering
his _Child’s Garden_, but forgetting that humanism itself aims at
diversity--not by urging men to be queerly “different,” each in his own
infantile way, but by urging them to develop with mature reasonableness
the diversities latent within themselves and thus to work toward a
many-sided human type. Humanism believes, with Goethe, that “every one
must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain
that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.” There have
been enough humanists in the world to prove that in fact (and not only
in theory) this image of a dull humanistic uniformity is merely another
scarecrow. It is not the humanists, certainly, who look forward to a
millennium in which all men and women will be superbly alike! If they
speak more of the past than of the future, it is because the wisdom of
the ages is on record and the wisdom of the future a hope devoid of
useful content. But they unreservedly agree with critics who protest
that “beyond anything that has yet been said by the academic humanists,
there is work for the humane imagination to do.”
This does not exhaust the attacks on the humanists. They are reproached
by romanticists for being romantic, but I let that pass. More sensibly,
they are ridiculed by irreligionists for being religious, but I let
that pass also. Something should be said, however, of still another
attack--the objection, by impressionists, that they employ words and
phrases as catchwords and labels in disregard of the elusiveness
of truth. To offer this objection, surely, is to object to the use
of language itself. If words are not more or less arbitrary labels
for things and ideas and the relationship of things and ideas, all
language is pure nonsense. When Mr. Van Wyck Brooks fifteen years
ago, in _America’s Coming-of-Age_, called for “catchwords” as well
as a “programme,” he showed a sounder instinct than he and his
followers have displayed since: they have found no programme, and are
increasingly averse to catchwords. No doubt the truth _an sich_ is
hopelessly elusive, but the attainment of provisional or human truth
is the reward of courage and labour. We cannot afford to shirk the
task of achieving a reasonably clear and consistent terminology, even
though every definition is by nature an affirmation that tends to shut
out some portion of absolute truth. Whenever words become too hard and
exclusive, humanism is concerned with reconsidering their frontiers;
but whenever, as to-day, they become so vague and fluid as to imperil
human communication, humanism aims to achieve a clear relation of
labels to thought.
If the object of this book, on the one hand, is to indicate the
fundamental needs of America as the dominant world power and inadequate
model of civilisation in the twentieth century, on the other hand its
object is to inquire into the fundamental needs of humanism--to work
toward a set of definitions and a terminology neither too rigid nor
too loose, to consider the requirements of humanism in the various
activities of modern thought and life, to determine the special tasks
that confront humanism in this latest moment of time, and to enlist the
interest and efforts of that “rather considerable leaven of intelligent
people” who, as the _Forum_ has said editorially, “cannot view with
indifference the general decay of standards and the resultant chaos
into which our intellectual and moral life has been plunged.” The
publication of a symposium addressed to this public was first proposed,
years ago, by Percy H. Houston, and to him as well as to G. R. Elliott
and Robert Shafer, advisory editors in this undertaking, cordial thanks
are due for many valuable suggestions, although I am alone responsible
for the form which the book has finally assumed. The contributors
are for the most part between thirty and forty-five years of age
(perhaps three or four are over, and three or four under these limits).
One-third of them, as it happens, hold or have held important editorial
positions. The academic group comprises several professors of English
literature, one of French and comparative literature, one of the
fine arts (also director of an art museum), and one of physics (also
dean of a graduate school). The youngest contributor, a student and
athlete, represents that rapidly growing part of the rising generation
which is turning from aimless revolt to the quest of standards. In
consequence of a diversity in occupations, as well as in temperament
and personality, the authors of the book display numerous divergencies
in outlook, in emphasis, and especially in tone. While all of them,
for example, are lovers of the law of measure or “Golden Mean,” some
of them seek the way of quiet firmness or “sweet reasonableness,” even
in this blatant age, while others conceive that modern excesses must be
“Scorch’d by a flaming speech on moderation.”
As the reader will soon perceive, the contributors agree in certain
broad, fundamental opinions. Without exception they have sought to
work their way free of the dogmatic incrustations that threaten to
corrode even what is sound in characteristically modern thought. None
of them, I think, can be suspect of a secret attraction to those
pseudo-scientific and humanitarian short-cuts to truth and morality
that lead in fact to pure scepticism and anarchy. All of them perceive
that a naturistic humanism is finally a paradox. Some of them might be
termed “pure” or “mere” humanists, others are religious humanists. Each
has been free to speak his own mind, and is responsible only for what
he has himself said. If the reader chances to conceive, as I personally
do, that Irving Babbitt is at the centre of the humanistic movement,
some of the other authors will appear to be near the periphery,
although they too may seem near the centre from some other point of
view. The authors of this symposium, in a word, have no desire to form
a closed school, or party, or cult, or religion. They would agree that
the _ism_ in humanism is at present a necessary evil. They are here
temporarily assembled for the sole end of offering suggestions toward
that new integration of values which may yet justify modernity.
Norman Foerster.
_January, 1930._
_Contents_
PAGE
PREFACE: _Norman Foerster_ v
THE PRETENSIONS OF SCIENCE: _Louis Trenchard More_ 3
HUMANISM: AN ESSAY AT DEFINITION: _Irving Babbitt_ 25
THE HUMILITY OF COMMON SENSE: _Paul Elmer More_ 52
THE PRIDE OF MODERNITY: _G. R. Elliott_ 75
RELIGION WITHOUT HUMANISM: _T. S. Eliot_ 105
THE PLIGHT OF OUR ARTS: _Frank Jewett Mather, Jr._ 113
THE DILEMMA OF MODERN TRAGEDY: _Alan Reynolds Thompson_ 127
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY: _Robert Shafer_ 149
PANDORA’S BOX IN AMERICAN FICTION: _Harry Hayden Clark_ 170
DIONYSUS IN DISMAY: _Stanley P. Chase_ 205
OUR CRITICAL SPOKESMEN: _Gorham B. Munson_ 231
BEHAVIOUR AND CONTINUITY: _Bernard Bandler II_ 258
THE WELL OF DISCIPLINE: _Sherlock Bronson Gass_ 268
COURAGE AND EDUCATION: _Richard Lindley Brown_ 285
A LIST OF BOOKS 291
_The essence of Elizabethan as of other humanisms is the
understanding of man and the definition of the sphere of properly
human activity. The philosophical mind of Shakespeare’s age began
the work of reflection by cleaving the universe along three levels.
On the lowest level is the natural world, which is the plane
of instinct, appetite, animality, lust, the animal passions or
affections; on this level the regulation is by necessary or natural
law. On the middle level is the human world, which is regulated
and, in a sense, created by the will and knowledge of man; working
upon the natural world; but governed by reason, the special human
faculty; and illuminated more or less from the level above. On
the third level is the supernatural world, which is the plane of
spiritual beings, and the home of eternal ideas._
--STUART P. SHERMAN: “ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.”
HUMANISM
AND
AMERICA
_The Pretensions of Science_
LOUIS TRENCHARD MORE
I
Since the time when the Whigs of England fastened the specific title of
_Pretender_ on the son and grandson of James II, the word has retained
in our speech a sinister significance. For us a pretender is one who
makes a false claim to a title. But in speaking of the pretensions of
science, humanists do not mean precisely this. No humanist would deny
that science has a legitimate field of its own when investigating the
phenomena of the objective world and attempting to find law and order
in the flux of events. Nor would he deny that it has added much to our
security and power and has increased our opportunities for a richer
life and character.
Science has its legitimate pretensions to power; but false claims are
now being advanced on all sides under the shelter of its name, and
it is these false claims which the humanist is concerned to expose.
While our modern pretenders are unfortunately far greater in number
than the two descendants of James, they do fall into two classes. The
first includes those men of science who are not content to work in
their limited field, but are really metaphysicians who have created
a fictitious world of the imagination made out of æthers, electrons,
and mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and
others’ minds with the sensible world of brute fact. This class does
comparatively little direct harm, as it merely creates some confusion
in the orderly domain of science; but, indirectly, it has given a
stimulus and specious authority to the pseudo-scientists. The second
class comprises those who are claiming that the phenomena of the
subjective world also lie in the field of science and have imposed on
the age the pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology. They would
have us believe that all truth is scientific and that the conclusions
of self-examination are but guess-work. By mere verbal analogies they
have linked the study of man’s intellectual and spiritual nature to the
physical world of mechanical matter and motion. It is the false claims
of these pseudo-sciences which must be exposed and renounced in order
that humanism may come again into its own as the arbiter of character.
As in the Middle Ages canting simulation of goodness, as well as honest
virtue, was covered by the word religion, so to-day vague speculation,
as well as accurate experimentation, is proclaimed as science. By a
curious throw-back we are apparently using the word “science” in the
primitive sense of “all knowledge,” as the Greeks used it. And they,
in spite of their acumen, had not been able to differentiate between
the two equally valid methods of learning by objective experimentation
and by personal experience. We have seemingly forgotten that one
of the greatest achievements of the Renaissance was to discover
this difference of method and to limit “science” strictly to the
investigation of objective phenomena. Even Descartes, who attempted to
create a purely mechanical world, excluded the processes of thought as
something foreign to the scientific method.
It was the biologists of the nineteenth century, intoxicated with the
delusion that the magic word evolution was a key to unlock all the
mysteries of the universe, who foisted on the world the idea that man
is but a complicated physical and chemical machine, and who sought to
discredit the dualistic philosophy of the Renaissance physicists. And
of all the biologists, Huxley, the militant propagandist, was the
one who did the most to degrade humanism into the pseudo-sciences of
psychology and sociology. He first correctly emphasised the fact that
there is but one scientific method which is best exemplified by the
subject of mechanics. But--and in this lies the source of his mischief
to clear thinking--_he then defined science as merely organised common
sense_. One has only to analyse this definition to discover its
speciousness and its confusion of thought. His definition has been
almost universally accepted, although it undoes all the lessons taught
us by the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages and the scientific
experimentalists of the Renaissance; and its effect has been to drive
theoretical science back into the hypothetical metaphysics of the
Greeks.
It is merely a truism to say that our contact with the objective
and subjective worlds is based, directly or indirectly, on our
sense-perceptions; and, to be intelligibly transmitted from one person
to another, such data must be common to many individuals. Also, it
is an inevitable tendency of the mind to organise all facts or to
link them together. Thus Huxley really classes all sound knowledge
as science. But, since this sound knowledge, according to him, can
be attained only by following the method of mechanics, which is the
interpretation by the mind of the spatial and temporal relations
between sensible bodies, his inference is clear that the phenomena of
consciousness, the individual mind, and our social relations, are to be
interpreted as problems of matter and motion.
Yet what, actually, is the process of exact science? The answer to this
question should show us whether or not the term does have any precise
and limited significance, and whether or not fundamental confusion must
result from the attempt to make it synonymous with all knowledge.
Exact science, then, is first of all based on the naïve belief in an
objective and real world whose events are connected in an orderly and
prescribed manner, and occur independently of our thought or will. The
phenomena of this objective world appeal to us through our sense-organs
by some form of action, which we call energy, and are interpreted by
our minds. We speak of this interpretation as observation; but to be
scientific we must also select the phenomena to be observed, in order
that we may classify their similarities and their dissimilarities.
In the course of time, we have found such precision in many of our
classifications and such regularity in the past actions of phenomena,
that we are able to predict future events. Those predictions, which
from past experience we find to have been accurately verified, we
formulate as laws. For example, we have observed the actions of so
many falling bodies that we have formulated the law of gravitation. It
would be an error to say that a body fell, yesterday, because of this
law; that event was simply one of the observed facts from which the
law was deduced; but it is quite proper to predict that such a body
will fall, to-morrow, in accordance with the law of gravitation. To
sum up, the scientific method is limited to experimental observation
and the formulation of laws; its value lies in the fact that, by its
cultivation, we have done much to allay our apprehensions for the
future and thus have abated the edge of superstition; and we also
have vastly increased our power over our environment, or, in the much
misunderstood aphorism of Francis Bacon, we have found science to be
valuable for its fruits.
In a general way, we may say that the scientist should follow in his
investigations the phenomena of the objective world only until their
special forms of energy are absorbed by our nervous system. It is in
the province of the humanist to study the phenomena of the subjective
world after these stimuli have been translated into emotion and thought.
If a scientific prediction, or law, is to be something more than a
vague statement of what will probably occur, we feel the necessity
of measuring the quantity of the event; that is, our minds are not
satisfied until we are able to express it mathematically. Since the
only measurable attributes, concerning which our opinion of more or
less is definite, are geometrical lengths, the aim of all science is,
and must be, to express its laws in the language of mechanics; for that
subject alone deals exclusively with simple, sensible masses and their
geometrical relations in space. We have then the paradox that while
mathematics is the goal of science, in that it is the ideal method,
or language of expression, it is not itself a science since it is
concerned with subjective ideas and is not limited by the restrictions
of sensible bodies. Modern men of science may rebel against this fact;
but even the newer, and more dubious, of the pseudo-sciences are
forced to substantiate their claims with the support of factitious
mathematical formulæ and tables and to simulate the mechanistic method.
The inevitable tendency of science is to investigate all phenomena
quantitatively, and to view the whole universe as a vast and measurable
machine.
If the phenomena of life are to be classed as an exact science, it is
necessary to postulate that the living organism, also, is a machine,--a
thing of various material parts, acting on each other by mechanical
forces. Such a postulate is pure _fiat_, for we have found no common
factors between what we call vital actions and mechanical and physical
forces. Biology is, at best, confined to the discovery of qualitative
classifications, and the mutual chemical and physical reactions of
the organism; and life is so complex and so variable that very few of
its phenomena can be predicted with any accuracy. For example, the
so-called law of heredity is often cited, but we have made scarcely
any progress towards predicting variations in even an immediately
succeeding generation. Even if a general law of progressive evolution
were granted to have been established, no one could foretell by it the
future variations of any species.
If the scientific method is badly strained when applied to even the
simplest forms of life, it completely fails when used to elucidate the
phenomena of the mind. The fundamental definition of science excludes
the processes of consciousness from its field, for it assumes that
objective phenomena are to be interpreted by the mind. If we attempt to
study the mind objectively, then we come face to face with the absurd
paradox of a thing investigating itself by means of I itself. And the
gibe cast at the scientific psychologists, that they propose to study
the mind by first denying its existence, is only too well founded.
The possibility of a scientific method is based on a rational
interpretation of objective phenomena. Psychology, as a science, would
be a solemn version of _Alice Through the Looking Glass_ in which
real persons are viewed and analysed by their images, or rather by
some other intelligence, such as a dog or an inhabitant of Mars. The
futility of such a process should be apparent if we recollect that an
animal’s mental processes can themselves be estimated and expressed
only as a vaguer and more rudimentary sort of human mind.
II
Our modern idea that science embraces all kinds of knowledge is, as
I have mentioned before, a curious reversion to the Greeks. In spite
of the fact that they formulated the great deductive laws of physics,
such as cause and effect, conservation of matter, etc., and developed
an extraordinarily fruitful science of geometry, they remained
indifferent to the experimental method. They developed almost no
apparatus for experimentation, established no standards of measurement,
and their arithmetical symbols were so awkward that only the simplest
calculations could be made. They never succeeded in disentangling
subjective and objective ideas. Plato could anticipate the modern
conception of natural law in his aphorism that God geometrises, but
at the same time he vaguely identified the human soul with the stars
and endued the universe with life. Democritus pictured the world as an
aggregation of atoms, differing only in size, shape, and motion; yet
he also tacitly ascribed to them a will or desire to move which was
only less pronounced than in those finer particles which constituted
the souls of men. Also the four classic elements,--earth, water, air,
and fire,--which combined in different proportions to form all material
bodies, were actuated by the animistic principle that each element
sought its own place. One could multiply these examples of classical
thought which confused mechanical forces with the vital attributes of
will and desire.
The failure of the Greeks to develop an objective and experimental
method was intensified by the domination of the Christian religion
during the Middle Ages. The emphasis of thought was placed on the
problems of human character. At a time when men were taught that our
environment was a trap set by the powers of evil to allure our souls to
eternal damnation, there could be little stimulus to study the laws of
nature or to apply them to increase our interest in a temporal life. It
is customary for historians to condemn the Church for having crushed
science, but no concerted opposition was necessary in a society which
saw no advantage in gathering its fruits. It was an axiom that truth
was the direct consequence of intuition and revelation, that God had
revealed in the Bible, and through His living Church, all the knowledge
necessary for man’s guidance in a transitory state. To neglect such a
certainty for the perceptions of our fallible and sinful senses, and to
construct a world from them according to our reason, would be to fall
into the sin of the pride of the intellect. Furthermore, in a society
small in numbers and in area, where the greater number were believed to
have been created to minister to the comfort of the few, little need
was felt for mechanical power and industry. The only science which
seemed to be worth cultivating was one which was believed to foretell
human events and to affect our spiritual life.
It had been generally accepted from ancient times that the stars
influenced our lives and foretold the future. Such knowledge was
eagerly sought by a society which was principally concerned with
religion and was, at the same time, a prey to superstitious fear.
It is not surprising that astrology was seriously cultivated. If we
grant the postulate that the stars do affect us, then we must admit
that astrology was a true science. The positions and the motions of
the planets and stars were observed and recorded as accurately as
possible, and deductions were made according to rules and laws believed
to have been verified by experience. Nor does it seem to me much more
credulous to believe that our character is determined by the relative
positions of the planets, than to assume, as do Mr. Watson and the
modern behaviourists, that our thoughts are caused by the relative
positions and motions of the material atoms which happen to compose
the substance of our brains. The astrologists had, at least, the great
advantage of dealing with real bodies which we can observe, while these
psychologists have for their use only the hypothetical and machine-made
atoms of the chemist which they can never hope to observe. There is
little to choose between the superstition that the planets foretell our
characters and the superstition that atoms constitute thought; both
lead to equally foolish and irrational practices. And there is the
less excuse for the psychologist, since he has had the benefit of a
longer past experience than had the astrologer to convince him of the
futility of identifying mind and matter.
The only other science which aroused popular interest was alchemy. The
basis of this subject was the postulate that all matter was composed
of the four elements combined in various proportions. By the use
of chemical reagents, the combinations of these elements could be
altered and a given substance be thus changed into another. Alchemy
is generally associated with the attempt to transmute metals and, in
particular, to change lead into gold, because the natural cupidity
of their patrons made it advisable for the alchemists to hold that
prospect before them in order to obtain a livelihood. In principle,
alchemy is but little different from modern chemistry. Our most recent
theory still holds that the difference between lead and gold is due
only to the numerical relations of a single element, the electron. The
difference between chemistry and alchemy does not lie in either their
fundamental hypotheses or their methods, but in our vastly superior
technique of experimentation and accumulated knowledge. The nature of
the modern electronic atom is essentially as fictitious as was the
nature of the mediæval elements.
Besides exciting the hope of wealth, alchemy was important as an aid
to health and longevity. Since health required that the four elements
of the body should be preserved in their proper balance, illness, and
even death, were but the temporary or permanent loss of their right
proportions. Alchemists, convinced of this truth, were led to seek for
a sovereign substance, the philosopher’s stone, which would have the
power to restore this disturbed balance and give to its fortunate owner
permanent health and life.
It is a mistake to suppose that the Church oppressed these
sciences--many of its most orthodox fathers and saints eagerly studied
them. The abuses due to the rampant charlatanry of many of their
practitioners were repressed, but their serious doctrines were fused
into the religion of the time much as, in our day, the clergy have
tried to harmonise Christianity and biological evolution. In fact, as
we shall see, the most determined opposition which the new Copernican
theory of the solar system had to overcome was the fusion of Christian
dogma with Aristotelian astrology and alchemy.
It was natural that the first fruits of the new science of the
Renaissance should have been in astronomy and mechanics. The
accumulated observations of the astrologers had vastly increased the
complexity of the Ptolemaic system, and the discrepancies between
the observed and calculated positions of the planets had become
glaringly evident. When the great treatise of Copernicus was finally
published as he lay on his death-bed, it is altogether probable that
no one suspected that it marked the beginning of a new philosophy. He
had merely proved that the calculations of astronomers were greatly
simplified by assuming that the sun, instead of the earth, was the
fixed centre of the solar system, and that the earth and other planets
revolved about it in circular orbits. It must remain a mooted question
whether Copernicus believed that his discovery was only a mathematical
device; his book states explicitly that he, as a Catholic, still
subscribed to the belief that the earth was actually the fixed centre
of the universe as the Church and the Aristotelians both taught to be
a necessary article of faith. At all events, it was not until Galileo
some sixty years later invented the telescope and turned it on the
heavens, that men saw the significance of the discovery. The eye of
the telescope penetrated the depths of the solar system. It proved
that the planets were not pure celestial matter but were mere masses
like the earth. Their brilliance was not a divine fire but ordinary
sunlight reflected from their dull surfaces; they, like the earth,
were inanimate bodies revolving about the sun and the Copernican system
became a fact instead of a mathematic device. It is not extravagant to
assert that, with the acceptance of Copernican astronomy, the whole
mediæval conception of nature gave place to a reliance on experimental
evidence.
The work of Galileo in founding the science of mechanics was fatal to
the mysticism of the contemporary alchemists. Instead of the elements
with their natural places, their likes and dislikes, their hierarchy of
nobility, and their subserviency to planetary influences, he laid down
the universal principle that all natural actions were due to mechanical
forces whose only function was to alter the motions of bodies and whose
amount was measurable in mathematical symbols. His significant work for
us was an uncompromising war waged against the scientific dogmatism
of the Aristotelians on the clear-cut issue that knowledge of the
objective world could be obtained only by experimental evidence, and
not by subjective preconceptions. Understood rightly, he had reinstated
the Platonic dualism of two worlds, one of matter, and the other of the
mind or spirit.
It is significant that during Galileo’s lifetime, so swift was the
movement, Descartes saw the trend of the new science and its inevitable
effect on philosophy and religion. In his _Système du Monde_, he
pictured a universe of matter and motion and nothing else,--a
machine. From matter he tried to strip every sensible attribute
except extension, or its mere geometrical position and extent. All
phenomena became for him merely phases of motion. With the courage
of his conviction, he even tried to imagine plants and animals to be
mechanically acting automata. One thing only he could not include in
this mechanism,--and that was _thought and consciousness_.
The cosmogony of Descartes has long since crumbled to dust, but the
gap he made between the subjective and objective worlds has never been
closed in spite of incessant later attempts. And these early creators
of science, as something distinct from humanism, were quite conscious
that they were engaged in a revolution which could end only with the
overthrow of the dogmatic science of the Middle Ages, sheltered by the
authority of Aristotle and the Bible. Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and
Bacon all declared explicitly that the old order must pass. From their
day to ours, we have more and more regarded the universe as a machine,
a combination of inert matter and moving forces, acting not as we may
desire, but according to invariable laws which we have personified as
Nature. Man was left, by the physicists, as a unique outsider who could
interpret this machine in terms of his sensations and mind, but could
neither alter nor avoid its fateful operation.
Only one step further was needed to identify all science with mechanics
and to compress the scientific method within the limits imposed by
mechanical laws. This fundamental principle was Newton’s discovery
of the universal attraction of matter. According to this law, a
single kind of force, depending only on the amount of matter and the
distance between bodies, operated to hold the stars in their paths
and to cause all the chemical and physical activities of atoms. With
its discovery, the mechanistic theory was complete and dominant,
and science had, in principle, gone as far as it can ever go. But,
what is even more important, Newton grasped in his early years the
fact that the scientific method is limited to the experimental
investigation of objective phenomena, those which can be classified,
measured geometrically, and formulated in laws which predict future
events. He held with absolute consistency and restraint that what is
once accomplished by this method is permanent. The experimental laws
of gravitation, of the pressure of gases, and all others of like
nature, are true within the limits of accuracy of our observation
and measurement. If these improve, such laws do not fail, their
mathematical expression is merely made more precise. They belong to the
permanent acquisitions of the mind.
III
To attempt to explain the nature of matter, or heat, or light, the
mechanism by which they act, or the method by which their energy is
translated into sensation and thought, this, however, is to pass
into the realm of metaphysics, or what Newton excellently called
hypothesis. All such speculations are, at best, transitory, and,
instead of predicting new lines of work, they lag behind the sure and
steady advance of experimentation; they are constantly being revised
to explain new phenomena after they are discovered. A convincing
illustration of this criticism can be found in the history of the
hypotheses of the nature of light. Physicists commonly assert that the
corpuscular hypothesis retarded the advance of the subject of light for
a century; their answer was to replace it by an equally metaphysical
hypothesis of mechanical waves in an æther. After incessantly
patching up this new conception during the next century, they are
again returning to a corpuscular hypothesis, even more metaphysical
and incomprehensible than its prototype. It seems impossible for us
to learn that the trouble does not arise from the weakness of any
particular variety, but lies in the nature of hypothesis, itself.
We have created fictitious æthers, atoms, and electrons which bear
no resemblance to sensible bodies; light is alternately a stream of
corpuscles, or waves, or quanta of energy, or even a mathematical
symbol; space is declared to be impenetrable except along certain
curves; and time is confused with space. What one age proposes as a
great advance is flung aside by the next which makes a new hypothesis
whose only fate is to be rejected. So far have these speculations been
carried that the dogma is seriously maintained that a false scientific
hypothesis is valuable because in some mysterious way it leads to the
discovery of truth.
As we have advanced in sober experimental science, these hypotheses
have become more and more abstruse and more and more dogmatic until
the most recent of these dreamers, Whitehead, Eddington, Einstein,
have pictured a phantasmagoria, instead of a world, as non-sensical as
the hallucinations of the mediæval monk driven mad by the fevers of
asceticism.
Such models of the structure of matter may, indeed, be useful to
give substance to our thought and a language for our ideas. They
have something of the same sort of relation to real objects that
portraits do to living persons. But there is this important point to be
remembered. A skilful painter has seen and studied the person and can
make so faithful a likeness as to create the illusion of reality. But
the man of science is attempting to picture things which can never be
seen, for atoms lie in the realm of the infinitely small, whose very
existence is problematical. Models of atoms, of æthers, or of space
have about the same degree of authenticity as the posthumous portrait
of a person whom no one then alive had ever seen. Men of science are
too prone to confuse the thing and the model in their own minds, and
they have certainly been so careless in their teaching that even very
highly educated laymen accept these hypotheses as facts. Is it not true
that the world pretty generally takes the hypothetical explanation of
gravitation by Einstein, which involves the concept of a fictitious
space of more than three dimensions and the fusion of time with space,
to be equally as scientific, and therefore equally as true, as the
experimental law of the attraction of bodies? Do not many accept as
a demonstrated fact one or another of the many hypotheses advanced by
biologists to explain the cause of the observed variations in species?
And having failed to distinguish between scientific fact and fiction,
we have incorporated this mass of speculation into our philosophy of
life and especially into our religion. We are worse confused than the
Deists of the eighteenth century who believed that the mind of God
could be defined by learning the facts and laws of Nature; we now
propose that the intellectual and spiritual attributes of Man be framed
in the hypotheses of dogmatic Science.
That the scientific method, as evolved from physics and chemistry, is
not applicable to the problems of life has been the settled conviction
of virtually all the investigators in those sciences. In fact, in
order to achieve their results they have had to assume that life is a
perturbation which cannot be included in a mechanical and mathematical
world, and that so far as possible sense-perceptions must be excluded
as criteria of laws. However, it has not been so clear to many of
them that the mechanical method imposes definite, and rather narrow,
limitations even upon the study of physical and chemical problems.
These limitations were clearly defined in the seventeenth century
during the protracted controversy between Newton on the one side, and
Hooke and Huygens on the other, as to the nature of light and the
_modus operandi_, or mechanism, of its transmission. The question
involved was clear-cut; and it will pay to discuss it in some detail
because it settled once for all, I think, the distinction between
science and humanism.
Theoretical physics, from the very beginning, has been a synthesis of
phenomena in terms of mechanics; that is, in terms of substance and
motion. For example, the physical properties of heat, sound, and light
are expressed by the same mathematical formulæ which express the motion
of a wave in water. To distinguish between them, we assign different
names to the substances involved, as a molecule of air, a corpuscle of
light, or an æther. But whatever names we may give to them, or however
we may try to distinguish them, we assign to all of them the common
attribute of mass, or inertia, which is the only essential coefficient
in a mechanical equation. And we use for all these different phenomena
the same formula of motion, the quotient of the distance by the time.
These quantities, mass and motion, when combined give us the law of
mechanical energy, and our synthesis rests on the single fact that
heat, sound, and light may be changed into mechanical motion, and may
be produced by it. This energy is then their common and mutable factor.
But the objective phenomena of heat, light, and sound are cognisable
to us through three separate sense-organs and are perceived as
temperature, sight, and tone. These sensations are fundamentally
different and, in fact, to confuse any of them with another is one of
the surest indications of insanity. Thus the world as depicted by the
physicist does not correspond with our world of sensation; nor does he
attempt to do more than to discuss a restricted set of attributes, and
not even those which really distinguish heat, light, etc., as such.
Newton, in his earliest published work, made evident this essential
difference between the fields of physics and psychology. By means
of a prism he refracted a beam of white sunlight into a continuous
spectrum. He then placed a screen, containing a narrow slit, behind
the prism in such a way as to permit only a very thin ray from the
spectrum to pass on, and through, a second prism fastened parallel to
the first prism. (I call it a homogeneous light ray to distinguish it
from its psychological analogue, colour.) No matter what portion of the
spectrum was used for the second prism, there was no further change of
colour; the ray merely suffered a second angular deviation equal to
that produced by the first refraction. He also recombined the whole
spectrum by a reversed prism and obtained a single ray parallel to the
original ray and pure white in colour. As a result of his experiments,
he announced the following law: a primary ray of light is one which
has a definite and specific angle of refraction by a prism, and each
such primary ray is, to the eye, a primary colour. White is therefore
a mixture of an indefinitely large number of primary rays, each
possessing a different angle of deviation when passed through a prism;
and when so separated each primary ray is seen by the eye as a primary
colour.
The experiments of Newton were accepted as correct by Huygens and
Hooke, probably the two most eminent physicists of the time. But they
objected to his definition of a primary colour and to his conclusions.
They had found previously, by their own experiments, that certain
pairs of complementary colours, such as a certain red and a certain
blue, gave to the eye the same sensation of white as did clear
sunlight. They had defined them as the two primary colours which, by
different proportions of mixture, would produce all other colours,
including white. They therefore objected that it was unnecessary and
cumbersome to assume an infinite number of primary rays when two were
quite sufficient. By no process of reasoning could these two opinions
be either reconciled or controverted. They involved fundamentally
different criteria. White produced by the combination of a continuous
spectrum and the white produced by a combination of red and blue
were one and the same to Hooke and Huygens because their criterion
of identity was the sensation of sight, and it must be the same for
all psychologists who deal with subjective light. To Newton, the two
whites were altogether different. The one examined by a prism gives a
continuous spectrum, and the other gives two separated bands of blue
and red. What, then, to the physicist is a fundamental dissimilarity
is to the psychologist complete identity. How then can psychological
sensations be studied by physical methods?
To show that this is not an isolated case, but that this gulf runs
between the entire fields of physics and psychology, I can give an
artificial example. While I deprecate the pseudo-scientific pictures,
now fashionable, of the state of prehistoric man and of the condition
of the earth before its habitability, I am able to imagine a world
in which the eye had never developed, so that all life was blind. I
am sure the word colour would never have been coined in such a world
and that there could be no psychology of sight, but I also know that
the blind race could develop a physical science of light because very
many of its phenomena can be, and are now exclusively, studied by such
apparatus as thermometers and electric galvanometers which can be read
by touch. Or, to cite an everyday example, is not the mere fact, that
the sensation produced by pepper on the tongue cannot be distinguished
from that of heat, sufficient to make us hesitate before trying to
study the sensations objectively, to synthesise the objective and
subjective worlds, or to try to investigate them by the same method?
The history of physics, since the time of Maxwell, shows a record of
vain efforts to reconstruct a materialistic monism. These attempts
have failed because they involved a supposititious æther and atom
which could no longer satisfy the growing body of experimental facts
about radiant energy. After Maxwell predicted the existence of
electro-magnetic radiation, an æther or atom possessing the ordinary
attributes of matter became an absurdity.
But our childish, or at least youthful, reluctance to admit our
limitations is so great that we proceeded to repeat the hypothetical
method once more by substituting an energiastic monism. Unmindful of
Pascal’s dictum that man cannot investigate the world of either the
infinitely small or the infinitely large, we are replacing a material
atom and æther by Planck’s hypothesis of discrete and disembodied
_quanta_, or atoms, of energy. Already there have arisen four
insuperable difficulties.
The hypothesis affirms action without specifying something to act,
unless the word _energy_ is given all the physical attributes of
matter. In which case a _quantum_ of radiant energy is merely our old
friend, a corpuscle of light, masquerading under a new name. Again, it
substitutes the principle of discontinuity of action for continuity,
and one is puzzled to know from what the _quantum_ originates and
in what it ends. And again, it creates the dilemma that light is
simultaneously corpuscular and vibrational, since without the latter
quality none of the phenomena of interference is explicable. Lastly, it
drifts into a pure philosophy of idealism.
My discussion would not be complete without a reference to the theory
of relativity. It is significant that the earliest serious critique
of Newtonian physics was made by Bishop Berkeley. With the greatest
ingenuity and skill, he pointed out that objects can become known
to us only _by_ the mind and that since light, sound, and motion
are interpreted by the mind as essentially different, they cannot
be synthesised by any experimental and objective process. So far
Berkeley’s critique is thoroughly valid. He proceeded, however, to make
the _non-sequitur_ that objects exist only _in_ the mind. If we accept
this postulate, the logic of idealism is irrefutable; few, however,
will accept it. Idealism fails because it ignores brute fact, and we
accept the answer of Dr. Johnson who made his objection by merely
kicking a large stone in his path.
Einstein also began with a critique of Newtonian dynamics to prove
that the conclusions we can draw from electrodynamics are as limited
and as relative as those from mechanics. From this denial of our
ability to obtain real or absolute knowledge he, like Berkeley,
has proceeded to construct a positive philosophy of the absolute.
Relativity, as it has now been interpreted by such disciples as
Whitehead and Eddington, is merely idealism under a new guise. The
objective world of sensation and experience is illusion, and truth
exists only in a set of subjective mathematical formulæ of cosmic
_events_. The relativists openly rejoice that mathematics has come into
its own kingdom and is no longer to be the handmaiden of physics, no
longer to be restricted by the limitations of the sense-perceptions.
Euclidean geometry, which is limited to the three dimensions of tactual
space, has been replaced by a geometry of hyper-space, the properties
of which no one can be cognisant of. Subjective time is eliminated, and
objective time is conflated with space. They, too, deny the validity of
the senses, as did the mediæval schoolman, and picture a topsy-turvy
world. They are labouring under the delusion that the limitations of
logic can be avoided by the simple substitution of mathematical symbols
for words, forgetting that mathematical symbols are as meaningless as
words when they are detached from facts. They fail to see that the
equation is but a form of the syllogism. One can trace all through
their argument the old and familiar fallacy of the ambiguous middle.
They are quite reckless, as it suits their convenience, in confusing
physical space of three dimensions with mathematical space of an
unlimited number; neither do they distinguish time as a subjective
sequence of events from time as a measurable component of velocity. The
relativists are as rash as those sociologists who see a real connection
between physical energy of motion and mental energy of thought and so
deceive themselves with the notion that they are scientific.
A note of uncertainty is beginning to show itself, however, for
thoughtful physicists are seeing the _impasse_ into which their
unbridled hypotheses have led them. Abstruse mathematical analysis is
again proving to us, what Pascal, Newton, Lagrange, and philosophy
had demonstrated in a simpler way, that the mechanistic method can,
at best, only picture an objective world as it seems to us, and not
as it is. As a recent physicist confesses: “The physicist thus finds
himself in a world from which the bottom has dropped clean out; as he
penetrates deeper and deeper it eludes him and fades away by the highly
unsportsmanlike device of just becoming meaningless. No refinement of
measurement will avail to carry him beyond the portals of this shadowy
domain which he cannot even mention without logical inconsistency. A
_bound_ is thus forever set to the curiosity of the physicist. What
is more, the mere existence of this bound means that he must give up
his most cherished convictions and faith. The world is not a world of
reason, understandable by the intellect of man, but as we penetrate
ever deeper, the very law of cause and effect, which we had thought to
be a formula to which we could force God himself to subscribe, ceases
to have meaning.”[1] The answer to this naïve confession is simple
enough: there never was a _bottom_ to his hypothetical world, as he
could have foreseen if he had acquainted himself with the warning of
the more profound men of science, philosophers, and humanists.
The writer adds that this failure, now proved, “must forever keep the
physicist humble.” But there is no cause for him to think lowly of
himself for what he has accomplished and for what he may achieve. He
should, rather, be modest and restrict himself to what can be done
legitimately by the scientific method. I fear, however, that in spite
of such occasional confessions, the physicists are neither humble nor
modest, but are merely bewildered. The false pretensions of science
must be wholly abandoned, and the problems of our destiny be examined
by a wise judgment drawn from human experience, before we can hope for
a sane and humanistic philosophy.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “The New Vision of Science,” by Professor P. W. Bridgman, _Harper’s
Magazine_, 1929.
_Humanism: An Essay at Definition_
IRVING BABBITT
I
The art of defining is so indispensable that one needs to define the
limits of definition itself. A very eminent humanist, Erasmus, showed
his awareness of these limits when he complained of the attempts of the
theologians of the Reformation to formulate deity that every definition
was a disaster. Though the humanist does not seek to define God and is
in general chary of ultimates, he is wont in more mundane matters to
put the utmost emphasis on definition. This Socratic emphasis would
seem especially needed at a time like the present which has probably
surpassed all previous epochs in its loose and irresponsible use of
general terms. Unless this tendency is corrected, the day may come
when, outside of words that stand for the measurements of science or
the objects of sense, communication between men will be well-nigh
impossible. The exchange of ideas regarding those aspects of life
that fall outside the merely quantitative and material may become
as difficult as economic exchanges would be with coins that have no
definite value.
This growing debasement of the intellectual coinage may be illustrated
from the word humanism itself. The boundaries of a genuine humanism
are broad and flexible. It is plain, however, that the word is being
appropriated for points of view that cannot be brought within these
boundaries, however generously extended. As a preliminary to pointing
out some of the more serious of the resulting confusions it would
seem desirable to build up the historical background. For what a word
actually has meant should surely throw light on what it ought to mean.
As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in the Italy of
the fifteenth century, and later in other European countries, to the
type of scholar who was not only proficient in Greek and Latin, but who
at the same time inclined to prefer the humanity of the great classical
writers to what seemed to him the excess of divinity in the mediævals.
This contrast between humanity and divinity was often conceived very
superficially. However, the best of the humanists were not content with
opposing a somewhat external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian
elegance to the scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught
a glimpse of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best.
They were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their
faculties in this world rather than at an other-worldly felicity.
Each faculty, they held, should be cultivated in due measure without
one-sidedness or over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic or that of
the specialist. “Nothing too much” is indeed the central maxim of all
genuine humanists, ancient and modern.
In a world of ever-shifting circumstance, this maxim is not always of
easy application. Whoever has succeeded in bridging the gap between
the general precept and some particular emergency has to that extent
achieved the fitting and the decorous. Decorum is simply the law of
measure in its more concrete aspects. For every type of humanist
decorum is, in Milton’s phrase, the “grand masterpiece to observe.”
Actually this observation may rest on deep insight, as it did in the
case of Milton himself, or it may degenerate into empty formalism.
The adjustment of which I have spoken between the variable and the
permanent elements in human experience requires spiritual effort and
most men are spiritually indolent. For genuine adjustment they tend
to substitute outer conformity so that decorum itself finally comes
to seem a mere veneer, something that has no deep root in the nature
of things. Moreover the notions of decent behaviour to which men have
conformed at any particular period have always been more or less
local and relative. It is easy to take the next step and assume that
they have been _only_ local and relative, an assumption subversive
not merely of decorum but of humanism itself. Humanism, one of our
modernists has argued, may have done very well for other times and
places, but under existing circumstances, it is at best likely to prove
only a “noble anachronism.” A similar objection to humanism is that
it has its source in a psychology of “escape,” that it is an attempt
to take flight from the present into a past that has for the modern
man become impossible. But humanism is not to be identified with this
or that body of traditional precepts. The law of measure on which it
depends becomes meaningless unless it can be shown to be one of the
“laws unwritten in the heavens” of which Antigone had the immediate
perception, laws that are “not of to-day or yesterday,” that transcend
in short the temporal process. The final appeal of the humanist is not
to any historical convention but to intuition.
It does not follow that the humanist is ready to abandon history to
the relativist. The main conventions that have prevailed in the past
reveal important identities as well as differences. These identities
cannot be explained as due to their common derivation from some
previous convention. The Chinese made an independent discovery of
the law of measure.[2] An important task, indeed, that awaits some
properly qualified scholar, preferably a Chinese, is a comparison of
Confucian humanism with occidental humanism as it appears, for example,
in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle. The announcement was made recently in
the press that a Harvard astronomer had discovered the “centre of the
universe” (more strictly the centre of our galactic system). In the
meanwhile the far more important question is being neglected whether
human nature itself has any centre. One’s faith in the existence of
such a centre increases when one finds the best commentary on Pascal’s
dictum that the great man is he who combines in himself opposite
virtues and occupies all the space between them, in a Confucian book
the very title of which, literally rendered, means the “universal norm”
or “centre.”[3] Here and elsewhere the Confucian books reveal a deep
and direct insight into the law of measure. Legge’s translation of the
Chinese word for decorum (_li_) as “the rules of propriety” has been
rightly censured as unduly prim and formalistic; though it must be
admitted that a formalistic element is very marked at times even in the
older Confucian writings.
Practically the assertion of a “universal centre” means the setting
up of some pattern or model for imitation. The idea of imitation goes
even deeper than that of decorum, but is an idea that humanism shares
with religion. Humanism, however, differs from religion in putting
at the basis of the pattern it sets up, not man’s divinity, but the
something in his nature that sets him apart simply as man from other
animals and that Cicero defines as a “sense of order and decorum and
measure in deeds and words.”[4] It dwells on the danger of any attempt
to pass too abruptly to the religious level; it holds, if I may be
pardoned for quoting myself, that the world would have been a better
place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting
out to be superhuman. The virtue that results from a right cultivation
of one’s humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living,
is poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles
succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The difference
is none the less marked between the man who is moving towards poise and
the man who is moving away from it. Since the break with the somewhat
artificial decorum of the eighteenth century most men have been moving
away from it. It would not be easy to argue with any plausibility that
the typical modernist is greatly concerned with the law of measure;
his interest, as a glance at our newspapers should suffice to show,
is rather in the doing of stunts and the breaking of records, in
“prodigies, feats of strength and crime,”[5] the very topics that,
according to the traditional report, Confucius banished from his
conversation. “Let us confess it,” says Nietzsche, speaking not merely
for the rank and file but for the leaders, “proportionateness is
foreign to us.” It is foreign to us because we no longer refer our
experience to any centre. With the growth of the naturalistic temper,
the normal has come to have less appeal than the novel. The pursuit
of poise has tended to give way to that of uniqueness, spontaneity,
and above all intensity. “The last remnant of God on earth,” says
Nietzsche himself, “are the men of great longing, of great loathing, of
great satiety.” Once grant that there is no constant element in life
and one might agree with Walter Pater that a man’s highest ambition
should be “to burn with a hard gem-like flame,” to get “as many
pulsations as possible into the given time.”[6] Æsthetic perceptiveness
is an excellent thing, but thus to set it up as an end in itself is
almost at the opposite pole from humanism. Yet Pater has been called
a humanist. One might so regard him if one accepted his view that
the distinctive humanistic trait is an all-embracing curiosity.[7]
Humanism appears primarily, not in the enlargement of comprehension
and sympathy, desirable though this enlargement may be, but in the act
of selection, in the final imposition on mere multiplicity of a scale
of values. Matthew Arnold, with his striving for centrality, has far
better claims to be regarded as a humanist than Pater--and that in
spite of his inadequacy on the side of religion. The model that Arnold
sets up for imitation in the name of culture is a constant corrective
of everything that is one-sided and out of proportion. “I hate,” he
says, speaking not only for himself but for all true humanists, “all
over-preponderance of single elements.”
II
We have seen thus far that the word humanist has two main meanings--an
historical meaning in its application to the scholars who turned away
from the Middle Ages to the Greeks and Romans, and a psychological
meaning, as one may say, that derives directly from the historical
one: humanists in this latter sense are those who, in any age, aim at
proportionateness through a cultivation of the law of measure. Keeping
this definition in mind, we should now be prepared to deal with the
confusions in the use of the word of which I spoke at the beginning.
These confusions have arisen from its misapplication to various types
of naturalists and supernaturalists, especially the former.
For example, the eminent orientalist, M. Sylvain Lévi, has in a recent
book used the term humanism in speaking of persons as far apart as
Buddha and Rousseau.[8] Buddha, it is true, had his humanistic side:
he recommended that one follow a _via media_ between asceticism and
self-indulgence. But, unlike Confucius, he is in his primary emphasis
not humanistic, but religious. The association of humanism with
Rousseau is especially unjustifiable. Rousseau was, in the current
sense of the word, a highly vital individual, but he cannot be properly
regarded as either religious or humanistic. He attacked both humanism
and religion in their traditional forms, and instead of working out
some modern equivalent for these forms, helped to usher in the era of
free naturalistic expansion in the midst of which we are still living.
He was above all for free temperamental expansion. He was himself
emotionally expansive to a degree that was incompatible not only with
artificial but with real decorum. He encouraged the humanitarian hope
that brotherhood among men may be based on emotional overflow. In
general the most serious confusion in the use of the word humanist
has arisen from its appropriation by the humanitarians. Walt Whitman
was, for instance, highly Rousseauistic in his notion of brotherhood.
We should therefore know what to think of the assertion of Mr. Lewis
Mumford that Walt Whitman was a true humanist; also of the assumption
of the term by the left-wing Unitarians and other Protestants who have
been moving towards humanitarianism.[9]
The humanitarian has favoured not only temperamental expansion; he
has also, as a rule, favoured the utmost expansion of scientific
knowledge with a view to realising the Baconian ideal. Perhaps indeed
the chief driving power behind the humanitarian movement has been the
confidence inspired in man by the progressive control physical science
has enabled him to acquire over the forces of nature. It goes without
saying that the humanist is not hostile to science as such but only
to a science that has overstepped its due bounds, and in general to
every form of naturalism, whether rationalistic or emotional, that
sets up as a substitute for humanism or religion. In the case of such
encroachments there is not only a quarrel between the naturalist and
the humanist, but a quarrel of first principles. When first principles
are involved the law of measure is no longer applicable. One should
not be moderate in dealing with error. I have pointed out elsewhere
the danger of confounding the humanistic attitude with that of the
Laodicean.[10]
The reason for the radical clash between the humanist and the purely
naturalistic philosopher is that the humanist requires a centre to
which he may refer the manifold of experience; and this the phenomenal
world does not supply. In getting his centre the humanist may appeal
primarily to tradition, or as I have said, to intuition. In the latter
case he will need to submit to a searching Socratic dialectic the word
intuition itself--to distinguish between intuitions of the One and
intuitions of the Many. Otherwise he will run the risk of not being a
modern but only a modernist. The contrast between modern and modernist
is not unlike that between Socrates and the sophists. Both modern and
modernist are under compulsion to accept in some form the ancient
maxim that man is the measure of all things.[11] Only, the measure of
the modern is based on a perception of the something in himself that
is set above the flux and that he possesses in common with other men;
whereas the perception with which the modernist is chiefly concerned,
to the subversion of any true measure whatsoever, is of the divergent
and the changeful both within and without himself. The present menace
to humanism, it has been said, is less from its enemies than from
those who profess to be its friends. Thus Mr. F. C. S. Schiller of
Oxford proclaims himself a humanist, and at the same time seeks to show
that the true humanist was not Socrates but that precursor of recent
“flowing” philosophers, Protagoras.
It should be noted that many of our votaries of change and mobility
are more emotional than Protagoras or any other Greek sophist. They
tend to make, not their own thoughts, but their own feelings the
measure of all things. This indulgence in feeling has been encouraged
by the sentimentalists who have discovered in feeling not only the
quintessentially human element, but, as I said in speaking of Rousseau,
the ultimate ground of fraternal union. In our own time, partly perhaps
as a result of the psycho-analytical probing of the sources of the
emotional life in the subconscious, there is a growing distrust of the
sentimentalist. To be sure, one may, according to the psycho-analyst,
turn the emotions to good account by a process of “sublimation.” Why
not escape still more completely from one’s complexes and infantile
survivals by adjusting oneself to the cosmic order that is revealed
to the scientific investigator in his laboratory? One may thus cease
to be ego-centric and become truly mature and disinterested. This is
the attitude that Mr. Walter Lippmann recommends in _A Preface to
Morals_, and it is this attitude that, by a flagrant misuse of the
word, he terms “humanism.” It is well that a man should adjust himself
to the reality of the natural order and, as a preliminary, should
strive to be objective in the scientific sense; but humanism calls
for an adjustment to a very different order that is also “real” and
“objective” in its own way. It insists in short that there is a “law
for man” as well as a “law for thing,” and is in this sense dualistic.
Mr. Lippmann’s attempt to base ethics on monistic postulates is,
from either a religious or humanistic point of view, a revival of the
stoical error. Yet he would have us believe that any one who has become
disinterested after the scientific fashion has got the equivalent not
only of humanism but of “high religion.” By thus dissimulating the gap
between the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of the laboratory, he is
flattering some of the most dangerous illusions of the present time.
He escapes from the main humanitarian tendency to give to feeling a
primacy that does not belong to it, only to encourage its other main
tendency to accord to physical science a hegemony to which it is not
entitled.
It is self-evident that humanitarianism of the scientific or
utilitarian type, with its glorification of the specialist who is
ready to sacrifice his rounded development, if only he can contribute
his mite to “progress,” is at odds with the humanistic ideal of
poise and proportion. The religious pretensions of humanitarianism
of this type are even more inacceptable, at least if one understands
by religion anything resembling the great traditional faiths. The
Baconian has inclined from the outset to substitute an outer for an
inner working--the effort of the individual upon himself--that religion
has, in some form or other, always required. The result has been to
encourage the acquisitive life and also the pursuit of material instead
of spiritual “comfort.” A typical example of this utilitarian trend is
Professor T. N. Carver’s _Religion Worth Having_, in which he so exalts
the “productive life” that religion is all but identified with thrift.
At this rate it may soon be possible to get one’s religion securely
tucked away in a safe-deposit drawer! One should, however, be grateful
to Professor Carver for not having called himself a humanist.
It does not seem possible to supply from the sentimental or
Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement the elements that are,
religiously speaking, absent from its utilitarian side. The nature to
which the Rousseauist invites one to return, is, as I have sought to
show elsewhere, only a projection of the idyllic imagination. In the
state of nature or some similar state thus projected, in other words
in Arcadia, man is “good.” Practically this has meant that there is
in the natural man an altruistic impulse that may prevail over his
egoism. The upshot of this myth of man’s natural goodness has been to
discredit the traditional controls, both humanistic and religious.
Humility, conversion, decorum, all go by the board in favour of
unrestricted temperamental overflow. The crucial question is whether
the immense machinery of power that has resulted from the efforts of
the utilitarians can be made, on this basis of unlimited expansion, to
serve disinterested ends. Everything converges indeed on both sides
of the humanitarian movement upon the idea of service. If it can
be shown that there has been no vital omission in the passage from
the service of God to the service of man, one may safely side with
all the altruists from the third Earl of Shaftesbury to John Dewey.
Unfortunately a formidable mass of evidence has been accumulating (the
Great War was for many a convincing demonstration) that, in the natural
man as he exists in the real world and not in some romantic dreamland,
the will to power is more than a match for the will to service.
The benefits that have ensued from the major concentration upon the
natural order that has been under way since the Renaissance have
been numerous and dazzling. We are still celebrating these benefits
under the name of progress. It is no longer possible, however, to
allay the suspicion that the price which has been paid for progress
of this type has been a growing superficiality in dealing with the
still more important problems of the human order. “Nothing is more
certain,” says Burke in a well-known passage, “than that our manners,
our civilisation, and all the good things which are connected with
manners and with civilisation, have, in this European world of ours,
depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of
both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of
religion.” The whole debate would seem to narrow down to the question
whether it is possible to secure on utilitarian-sentimental lines a
valid equivalent for Burke’s two principles. As for the “spirit of a
gentleman,” its decline is so obvious as scarcely to admit of argument.
It has even been maintained that in America, the country in which the
collapse of traditional standards has been most complete, the gentleman
is at a positive disadvantage in the world of practical affairs; he
is likely to get on more quickly if he assumes the “mucker pose.”[12]
According to William James, usually taken to be the representative
American philosopher, the very idea of the gentleman has about it
something slightly satanic. “The prince of darkness,” says James, “may
be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but, whatever the God of earth
and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.”
As for the “spirit of religion,” I have already glanced at its
humanitarian substitute. The humanitarian maintains that the spirit
that appears in Christianity will, if disengaged from mere dogma, be
found to be something very similar to his own spirit of service. One
should at least be able to understand the position of the person who
has become convinced that there is a supernatural element in genuine
Christianity, lost in the passage from the old dispensation to the
new, for which mere altruism is no substitute, and who therefore takes
his stand on the side of tradition. Dogmatic and revealed religion, he
argues, was alone capable of rescuing the ancient world from a decadent
naturalism. It alone affords an avenue of escape from the analogous
situation that confronts the world to-day.
III
The relation of the humanist to this religious traditionalist can
scarcely be defined too carefully. Between the humanist and the
humanitarian, I have said, there is a clash of first principles.
Between the humanist and the authentic Christian, on the other hand,
there is room for important co-operation. To be sure, many of the
leaders of the early Church were satisfied with nothing short of a
stark supernaturalism and inclined to reject the genuinely humanistic
elements of the ancient civilisation along with its naturalistic
errors. But the orthodox attitude has, in spite of the difficulties
of reconciling otherworldliness with a merely secular wisdom, come
to be one of friendliness to the classical humanities.[13] Mr. T.
S. Eliot is probably close to this attitude when he maintains that
humanism is of very great value, but only in subordination to the
historical Church. As an independent doctrine, at least in any large
way, it is, he maintains, ineffective. A broad survey of the past
does not, however, confirm the view that humanism is thus either
precarious or parasitical. The two most notable manifestations of the
humanistic spirit that the world has seen, that in ancient Greece and
that in Confucian China, did not have the support of Christianity
or any other form of revealed religion. Take again the humanism of
seventeenth-century France: the ideal of the finely poised gentleman
who “does not plume himself on anything” was often allied with
Christianity (“devout humanism”), but it was also found among the
free-thinkers (“libertines”) who were hostile to every form of belief
in the supernatural.
In general, why should not the humanist, it may be asked, devote
himself quietly to his own task--that of effecting an adjustment
between the law of measure and the ever-novel emergencies of actual
living, and at the same time refuse to take sides too decisively in
the great debate between the naturalists and the supernaturalists? If
pressed too hard by the supernaturalists in particular, why should he
not reply in the words of Pope:
“Presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man”?
One must, however, admit an element of truth in the assertion of
Plato that things human cannot be properly known without a previous
insight into things divine. Another thinker, Pascal, who had this
religious insight in a high degree, though combined with a form of
dogma peculiarly alien to most modern men, declared that unless man
has the support of the supernatural, unless in short he attains to
true humility, he will fall fatally either into the stoic pride or
else, through the intermediary stage of scepticism, into the epicurean
relaxation. The whole question bristles with difficulties: one thinks
of the immense and, on the whole, salutary influence that two Roman
humanists, Cicero and Horace, have exercised on occidental culture,
though, to adopt Pascal’s classification, the humanism of Cicero leaned
unduly to the stoical side, that of Horace to the epicurean. Yet I
believe that the humanist will finally be forced to recognise that
there is truth in Pascal’s contention, that he will have to take sides
in the debate between naturalists and supernaturalists, however much he
may deplore the frequent failure of both of these fell antagonists to
do justice to the immense range of human experience that is subject
primarily to the law of measure.
For my own part, I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the
supernaturalists. Though I see no evidence that humanism is necessarily
ineffective apart from dogmatic and revealed religion, there is, as
it seems to me, evidence that it gains immensely in effectiveness
when it has a background of religious insight. One is conscious of
such a background, for example, in Sophocles, who ranks high among
occidental humanists, as well as in Confucius, the chief exponent of
the humanistic idea in the Orient. The phrase religious insight is in
itself vague. Is it not possible to give the phrase a definite content
without departing from the critical attitude? One may be helped to
such a definition by asking oneself what element has tended to fall
out of the life of the modern man with the decline of the traditional
disciplines. According to Mr. Walter Lippmann, the conviction the
modern man has lost is that “there is an immortal essence presiding
like a king over his appetites.” But why abandon the affirmation of
such an “essence” or higher will, to the mere traditionalist? Why not
affirm it first of all as a psychological fact, one of the immediate
data of consciousness, a perception so primordial that, compared
with it, the deterministic denials of man’s moral freedom are only
a metaphysical dream? One would thus be in a position to perform a
swift flanking movement on the behaviourists and other naturalistic
psychologists who are to be regarded at present as among the chief
enemies of human nature. One might at the same time be in a fair way
to escape from the modernist dilemma and become a thoroughgoing and
complete modern.
The philosophers have often debated the question of the priority of
will or intellect in man. The quality of will that I am discussing and
that rightly deserves to be accounted superrational, has, however,
been associated in traditional Christianity not primarily with man’s
will, but with God’s will in the form of grace. The theologians have
indulged in many unprofitable subtleties apropos of grace. One cannot
afford, however, as has been the modern tendency, to discard the
psychological truth of the doctrine along with these subtleties. The
higher will must simply be accepted as a mystery that may be studied in
its practical effects, but that, in its ultimate nature, is incapable
of formulation. Herein the higher will is not peculiar. “All things,”
according to the scholastic maxim, “end in a mystery” (_Omnia exeunt in
mysterium_). The man of science is increasingly willing to grant that
the reality behind the phenomena he is studying not only eludes him,
but must in the nature of the case ever elude him. He no longer holds,
for example, as his more dogmatic forebears of the nineteenth century
inclined to do, that the mechanistic hypothesis, valuable as it has
proved itself to be as a laboratory technique, is absolutely true; its
truth is, he admits, relative and provisional.
The person who declines to turn the higher will to account until he
is sure he has grasped its ultimate nature is very much on a level
with the man who should refuse to make practical use of electrical
energy until he is certain he has an impeccable theory of electricity.
Negatively one may say of the higher will, without overstepping
the critical attitude, that it is not the absolute, nor again the
categorical imperative; not the organic and still less the mechanical;
finally, not the “ideal” in the current sense of that term. Positively
one may define it as the higher immediacy that is known in its
relation to the lower immediacy--the merely temperamental man with
his impressions and emotions and expansive desires--as a power of
vital control (_frein vital_). Failure to exercise this control is the
spiritual indolence that is for both Christian and Buddhist a chief
source, if not the chief source, of evil. Though Aristotle, after the
Greek fashion, gives the primacy not to will but to mind, the power of
which I have been speaking is surely related to his “energy of soul,”
the form of activity distinct from a mere outer working, deemed by
him appropriate for the life of leisure that he proposes as the goal
of a liberal education. Happiness, which is for him the end of ends,
is itself, he tells us, “a kind of working.” Here is a difference,
one may note in passing, between a true humanist like Aristotle and
the epicurean who also has his doctrine of moderation and so often
sets up as a humanist. It is no doubt well, as the epicurean urges,
so to indulge in present pleasures that they may not be injurious to
future ones. To employ the trivial illustration, it is well to avoid
overeating at dinner lest one impair one’s appetite for supper. But the
meaning of the Aristotelian working is that one should not be content
with transitory pleasure at all, but should be striving constantly to
rise from a lower to a higher range of satisfactions. The energy of
soul that has served on the humanistic level for mediation appears on
the religious level in the form of meditation. Religion may of course
mean a great deal more than meditation. At the same time humanistic
mediation that has the support of meditation may correctly be said to
have a religious background. Mediation and meditation are after all
only different stages in the same ascending “path” and should not be
arbitrarily separated.
This question comes up especially in connection with the rôle of
enthusiasm. Humanism is not primarily enthusiastic, whereas religion
is. There is a touch of enthusiasm even in Aristotle, in general one of
the coolest and most detached of thinkers, when he comes to the passage
from the humanistic to the religious level. “We should not,” he says,
“pay heed to those who bid us think as mortals, but should, as far as
may be, seek to make ourselves immortal.” At the same time it must be
admitted that even a true religious enthusiasm is hard to combine with
poise and that this true enthusiasm has many counterfeits. “For one
inspired, ten thousand are possessed,” wrote the Earl of Roscommon,
having in mind the religious zealots of the English seventeenth
century. The neo-classic gentleman was therefore as a rule distinctly
unfriendly to the enthusiast. The humanist, however, should not deny
enthusiasm but merely insist on defining it. He cannot afford to be
an enthusiast in Rousseau’s sense; on the other hand, he should not
neglect the truth of Rousseau’s saying that “cold reason has never done
anything illustrious.”
Though one should, in my judgment, side with the oriental as against
Aristotle and the Greeks in giving priority to the higher will over
mind,[14] especially if one attaches importance to the supreme
religious virtue, humility, it yet remains true that this will must
be exercised intelligently. Granted that the existence in man of a
power of control may be affirmed, quite apart from any dogma, as
a psychological fact, the individual must nevertheless go beyond
this fact if he is to decide rightly how far he needs to exercise
control in any particular instance: in short, he needs standards. In
getting his standards the humanist of the best type is not content
to acquiesce inertly in tradition. He is aware that there is always
entering into life an element of vital novelty and that the wisdom
of the past, invaluable though it is, cannot therefore be brought to
bear too literally on the present. He knows that, though standards
are necessary, they should be held flexibly and that, to accomplish
this feat, he must make the most difficult of all mediations, that
between the One and the Many. The chief enemies of the humanist are
the pragmatists and other philosophers of the flux who simplify this
problem for themselves by dismissing the One, which is actually a
living intuition, as a metaphysical abstraction.
Whatever reality man achieves in his dealings with either the human or
the natural order, is dependent, I have tried to show elsewhere, on the
degree to which he establishes a correct relationship between the part
of himself that perceives, the part that conceives, and the part that
discriminates. The part that conceives, that reaches out and seizes
likenesses and analogies, may be defined as imagination; the part that
discriminates and tests the unity thus apprehended from the point of
view of its truth may be defined as analytical reason; the part that
perceives is, in the case of the humanist, primarily concerned with
the something in man that is set above the phenomenal order and that I
have already defined as a power of control. One may say therefore that
standards result from a co-operation between imagination and reason,
dealing with the more specifically human aspects of experience, and
that these standards should be pressed into the service of the higher
will with a view to imposing a right direction on the emotions and
expansive desires of the natural man. The supreme goal of ethical
endeavour, as Plato pointed out long ago, is that one should come to
like and dislike the right things.
IV
Humanism, even humanism of the distinctly individualistic type I have
been outlining, may, as I have already suggested, work in harmony
with traditional religion. In that case there must be a careful
determination of boundaries. Though humanism and religion both lie
on the same ascending path from the naturalistic flux, one must
insist that each has its separate domain. It is an error to hold that
humanism can take the place of religion. Religion indeed may more
readily dispense with humanism than humanism with religion. Humanism
gains greatly by having a religious background in the sense I have
indicated; whereas religion, for the man who has actually renounced
the world, may very conceivably be all in all. On the other hand, the
man who sets out to live religiously in the secular order without
having recourse to the wisdom of the humanist is likely to fall into
vicious confusions--notably, into a confusion between the things of God
and the things of Cæsar. The Catholic Church has therefore been well
inspired in rounding out its religious doctrine with the teaching of
Aristotle and other masters of the law of measure. It can scarcely fail
to recognise that the position of the positive and critical humanist
is sound _as far as it goes_. It follows that the Catholic and the
non-Catholic should be able to co-operate on the humanistic level.
A like co-operation should be possible between the humanist and the
members of other Christian communions who have not as yet succumbed
entirely to humanitarianism.
I have tried to show that the weakness of humanitarianism from both
the humanistic and the religious point of view is that it holds out
the hope of securing certain spiritual benefits--for example, peace
and brotherhood--without any ascent from the naturalistic level. The
positive and critical humanist would seem to have a certain tactical
superiority over the religious traditionalist in dealing with the
defects of the humanitarian programme. In the battle of ideas, as in
other forms of warfare, the advantage is on the side of those who
take the offensive. The modernists have broken with tradition partly
because it is not sufficiently immediate, partly because it is not
sufficiently experimental. Why not meet them on their own ground
and, having got rid of every ounce of unnecessary metaphysical and
theological baggage, oppose to them something that is both immediate
and experimental--namely the presence in man of a higher will or
power of control? I use the word experimental deliberately by way of
protest against the undue narrowing of this word by the scientific
naturalists to observation of the phenomenal order and of man only in
so far as he comes under this order. One should also protest against
the restriction of the term reality to observation of this type.
Some of the most monstrous mutilations of reality that the world has
ever seen are being perpetrated at this moment--for example, by the
behaviouristic psychologists--in the name of the “real.” At all events
everything in the modernist movement will be found to converge either
upon the rôle of feeling or upon the rôle of experiment, and the final
question raised in either case is that of the will. As a result of the
combined influence of the various types of naturalists, the present age
is at once more emotional and more mechanical than any other of which
we have historical record. By mechanical I refer primarily not to the
multiplication of machines in the outer world but to the mechanising
of mind itself. An effective procedure is, as I have said, to meet the
mechanist on his own ground and point out to him that he is unduly
dogmatic, if he holds that his hypothesis is absolutely valid even for
the natural order, and that, if he goes further and seeks to make it
cover the whole of experience, to impose a deterministic nightmare on
the human spirit itself, he is abandoning the experimental attitude for
an even more objectionable form of dogmatism.
Similarly one should meet the emotionalist on his favourite ground
of immediacy. Inasmuch as the higher immediacy has been largely
associated in the Christian occident with the operation of God’s will,
the substitution for it of the lower immediacy has meant practically
the setting up of a subrational parody of grace. In order to make this
parody plausible, the emotionalist has had recourse to the usual arts
of the sophist, chief among which are a juggling with half-truths and
a tampering with general terms. I have commented elsewhere on the way
in which words like “virtue” and “conscience” have been so twisted from
their traditional meaning as to eliminate the dualistic element that
both humanism and religion require. If there is to be any recovery
of the truths of dualism, at least along critical lines, a battle
royal will need to be fought over the word “nature” itself; here, if
anywhere, one needs to practise a Socratic dichotomy.
The half-truth that has been used to compromise religion in particular
is that, though religion is in itself something quite distinct from
emotion, it is in its ordinary manifestations very much mixed up with
emotion. I give an example of this error in its latest and fashionable
form. In a very learned and, in some respects, able book,[15] the
Rev. N. P. Williams seeks to show that St. Augustine’s experience of
grace or, what amounts to the same thing, his love of God, was only a
“sublimation” of his “lust.” St. Augustine was a very passionate man
and his passionateness no doubt enters into his love of God. But if
it could be shown that the love of God was in St. Augustine or any
other of the major saints merely emotion, sublimated or unsublimated,
religion would be only the “illusion” that Freud himself has declared
it to be. The psycho-analytical divine, who is, I am told, a fairly
frequent type in England, is about the worst _mélange des genres_ that
has appeared even in the present age of confusion.
One may be helped in escaping from this confusion by considering, so
far as possible from a strictly psychological point of view, what the
exercise of the higher will has actually meant in genuine religion.
One must admit at the outset the difficulty of determining what is
genuine religion. Religion, not merely to-day but always, has been
subject to extraordinary perversions. It has ever been the chosen
domain of self-deception and “wishful” thinking. When one reflects
on the fanaticism, casuistry, obscurantism, and hypocrisy that have
defaced the history of Christianity itself, one is tempted at times
to acquiesce in the famous exclamation of Lucretius.[16] Yet one must
insist that religion is in its purity the very height of man. As to
where this pure religion is to be found, we should keep in mind the
saying of Joubert that in matters religious it is a bad sign when one
differs from the saints. Let us then turn to the saints in whom there
is some authentic survival of the spirit of the Founder. This spirit
surely appears in the author of the _Imitation_ when he writes: “Know
for certain that thou must lead a dying life; and the more a man dies
to himself the more he begins to live in God.” Moreover the author of
the _Imitation_ is at one here not only with Christ but with Buddha,
the chief source of sanctity in the Far East.
The point on which Christ and Buddha are in accord is the need of
renunciation. It should be abundantly plain from all I have said that
the higher will is felt in its relation to the expansive desires as a
will to refrain. The humanist does not carry the exercise of this will
beyond a subduing of his desires to the law of measure; but it may
be carried much further until it amounts to a turning away from the
desires of the natural man altogether--the “dying to the world” of the
Christian.
With this background in mind, we should know what to think of the
humanistic and religious claims of the modernist movement. This
movement has, from the eighteenth century and in some respects from
the Renaissance, been marked by a growing discredit of the will to
refrain. The very word renunciation has been rarely pronounced by those
who have entered into the movement. The chief exception that occurs
to one is Goethe (echoed at times by Carlyle). Any one who thinks
of the series of Goethe’s love affairs prolonged into the seventies,
is scarcely likely to maintain that his _Entsagung_ was of a very
austere character even for the man of the world, not to speak of the
saint. The humanitarians in particular, whether of the utilitarian
or of the sentimental type, have put slight emphasis on the inner
control of appetite. They have encouraged, either directly or through
the ineffectiveness of the substitutes they have offered for this
control, a multiplication and complication of desires that is in flat
contradiction with the wisdom of the ages. Judged by the standards of
the great traditional faiths, the religion of “progress” or “service”
or “humanity” merely illustrates on a vast scale the truth of the
old Latin adage that “the world wishes to be deceived.” The various
naturalistic philosophies that have been built up on the ruins of
tradition should, at all events, whatever their merits or demerits, be
made to stand on their own feet. It should be one’s ambition to develop
so keen a Socratic dialectic, supported by such a wealth of historical
illustration, that it will not be easy for the Walter Lippmanns of
the future to propose some form of naturalism as the equivalent of
“humanism” and “high religion.”
In his attempt to show the inadequacy of humanism apart from dogmatic
and revealed religion, Mr. T. S. Eliot has painted a picture of the
humanist exercising in a sort of psychic solitude self-control purely
for the sake of control. It is evident however that the real humanist
consents, like Aristotle, to limit his desires only in so far as this
limitation can be shown to make for his own happiness. This primary
reference to the individual and his happiness is something with which
we are nowadays rather unfamiliar. Our preoccupation, one is almost
tempted to say our obsession, is, at least in our official philosophy,
with society and its supposed interests. A study of humanism from
the sociological point of view would call for a separate essay. I
may, however, indicate briefly the main issue: the individual who is
practising humanistic control is really subordinating to the part of
himself which he possesses in common with other men, that part of
himself which is driving him apart from them. If several individuals
submit to the same or a similar humanistic discipline, they will become
psychically less separate, will, in short, move towards a communion. A
group that is thus getting together on a sound ethical basis will be
felt at once as an element of social order and stability.
No doubt a still more perfect communion may be achieved on the
religious level. There are however differences of dogma and
ecclesiastical discipline that make a meeting on this plane difficult
even for the various denominations of Christians. If one’s survey
is extended, as it should be in these days of universal and facile
material communication, to include Mahometans and Hindus and Chinese,
the obstacles in the way of a union among men that is primarily
religious are seen to be well-nigh insuperable. It might, for example,
be conducive to the peace of the world if everybody, East and West,
accepted the authority of the Pope. The chances of such universal
acceptance are, however, short of some very “visible upset of grace,”
practically negligible. One can scarcely remind oneself too often that
the great traditional faiths, notably Christianity and Buddhism,[17]
have their humanistic side where closer agreement may be possible. If
the leaders of the various national and cultural groups could bring
themselves to display in their dealings with one another moderation,
common sense and common decency, they would accomplish a great
deal--vastly more than they have been accomplishing of late. The
difficulties in the way of an understanding, even on this humanistic
basis, not to speak of any deeper religious understanding, have been
augmented by the fact that large numbers in the Christian occident as
well as in the orient, especially in China, are falling away from their
traditional disciplines into spiritual anarchy. The dangers of this
anarchy, combined, as it is, with the accumulation of a formidable mass
of machinery that, in the abeyance of any higher will, is likely to be
pressed into the service of the will to power, are appalling.
The first step, if there is to be an effective opposition to spiritual
anarchy of the current type, must be, as I remarked at the outset,
right definition. The idea is becoming fairly widespread that there is
needed at present a reaction from the romantic movement and that this
reaction should assume a religious or a humanistic character. This
idea will not in itself take us very far. Even Benedetto Croce, whose
philosophy would seem to be in its underlying postulates almost at the
opposite pole from a genuinely religious or humanistic position, has
declared that we need a “new Christianity” or a “new humanism,” if we
are to escape “from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled individualism,
from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from every aberration
which for a century and a half has been harassing the soul of man and
the society of mankind under the name of Romanticism.”
Occasional humanists may appear under existing conditions, but if there
is to be anything deserving to be called a humanistic movement, it
will be necessary that a considerable number of persons get at least
within hailing distance of one another as to the definition of the word
humanism itself and the nature of the discipline that this definition
entails. This preliminary understanding once established, they could
then proceed, in the literal sense of that unjustly discredited term,
to work out a convention. Their next concern would almost inevitably
be with education. Education is, as Professor Gass has remarked,
the one altruistic activity of the humanist. The reason is that if
the humanistic goal is to be achieved, if the adult is to like and
dislike the right things, he must be trained in the appropriate habits
almost from infancy. The whole question should be of special interest
to Americans. Economic and other conditions are more favourable in
this country than elsewhere for the achievement of a truly liberal
conception of education with the idea of leisure enshrined at its very
centre. In the meanwhile, our educational policies, from the elementary
grades to the university, are being controlled by humanitarians. They
are busy at this very moment, almost to a man, proclaiming the gospel
of service. It will be strange indeed if dissatisfaction with this
situation is not felt by a growing minority, if a demand does not arise
for at least a few institutions of learning that are humanistic rather
than humanitarian in their aims. One is at all events safe in affirming
that the battle that is to determine the fate of American civilisation
will be fought out first of all in the field of education.
Note.--For a humanistic view of the field of education, the reader
may be referred to an article by Irving Babbitt, “President Eliot
and American Education,” in the _Forum_, January, 1929, or to his
book on _Literature and the American College: Essays in Defence
of the Humanities_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908). See also Norman
Foerster’s recent book, _The American Scholar: A Study in Litteræ
Inhumaniores_ (University of North Carolina Press, 1929).--Editor.
FOOTNOTES
[2] For an outline of Chinese humanism, see the article by Chang
Hsin-Hai in the _Hibbert Journal_ for April, 1928 (“The Essentials of
Confucian Wisdom”).
[3] See _The Conduct of Life_, translation of the _Tsung Yung_ by Ku
Hung Ming (Wisdom of the East series), p. 55.
[4] “Unum hoc animal sentit quid sit ordo, quid sit quod deceat, in
factis dictisque qui modus.” _De Officiis_, Lib. I.
[5] See _Analects_ (Wisdom of the East series), p. 109.
[6] “Conclusion” to his volume _The Renaissance_.
[7] For Pater’s definition of humanism see the end of his essay on Pico
della Mirandola (_The Renaissance_).
[8] See _L’Inde el le Monde_, pp. 32, 165.
[9] See, for example, the symposium entitled _Humanist Sermons_ edited
by C. W. Reese (1927). On page 60 of this volume one encounters the
statement that “all Americans are humanists”! For a fuller elucidation
of the distinction between the humanist and the humanitarian see the
opening chapters of my book _Literature and the American College_
(1908).
[10] See my book _Democracy and Leadership_, p. 25.
[11] For the different meanings that this maxim may have see the last
chapter of my book _The Masters of Modern French Criticism_.
[12] See “The Mucker Pose” by James Truslow Adams, _Harper’s Magazine_,
November, 1928; reprinted in _Our Business Civilisation_ (1929).
[13] For the early hostility of certain Christians to Graeco-Roman
culture and the final reconciliation between this culture and the
Church, see E. K. Rand’s _Founders of the Middle Ages_, _passim_. _Cf._
also P. E. More’s “Paradox of Oxford” (_Shelburne Essays_, Vol. IX).
[14] See Ch. V of _Democracy and Leadership_ (“Europe and Asia”); also
Appendix A (“Theories of the Will”).
[15] _The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin_ (Bampton Lectures for
1924). See p. 331.
[16] “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.”
[17] Confucianism is of course primarily humanistic.
_The Humility of Common Sense_[18]
PAUL ELMER MORE
I
It is a nice question to ask whether belief in the absolute
irresponsibility of the artistic temperament has engendered the modern
ideal of absolute art, or the contrary. Which is first, the complacency
of conceit or of theory? For myself I am willing to leave the solution
of such a problem to the Demon himself, who alone knoweth his own
mind; but from the _Æsthetic_[19] of Signor Croce, the most epoptic
hierophant of the demonic mysteries in these days, I can see how
nearly the two absolutes are related, and can get some glimpse of the
procedure of the metaphysical mind at its highest point of activity.
Now Signor Croce, though really himself a child of Hegel, makes
good sport of the theoretical æstheticians in the train of Kant and
Hegel who define art as pure hedonism, or pure moralism, or pure
conceptualism; and so far he does well. You might suppose he was taking
the ordinary and sensible point of view, viz., that art must of course
give pleasure, and must be psychologically moral (not pedantically so),
and must contain ideas, but that it is a false sort of simplification
to define art itself therefore _as_ pleasure, or _as_ morals, or
_as_ ideas. If such were the motive behind Croce’s antipathy to the
Teutonic æsthetics of the last century, he would seem, as I say, to
be pleading for the liberty of common sense against the absolutism of
the Demon; but he too quickly dispels any such illusion. “Art,” he
declares, “which _depends_ on morals or pleasure or philosophy _is_
morals or pleasure or philosophy, and not art at all.” Now what kind of
logic is this that argues: Because art is not pure pleasure, therefore
pure art is absolved from the need of giving pleasure; because art is
not pure morals, therefore pure art is absolved from any concern with
morals? One might as well say, e.g., that cookery which is relished
for the pleasure it gives _is_ pleasure, and not cookery at all;
therefore cookery has nothing to do with pleasure. It is the old story
of Luther’s drunken man on horseback: prop him up on one side and over
he flops on the other. Because one absolute is not true, therefore the
contrary absolute must be true; because art which gives pleasure is not
definable simply as pleasure, therefore art is a hieratic abstraction
entirely independent of pleasure.
But if such a theory of art would seem to be buzzing in a metaphysical
vacuum, it is not without its very practical aspect, whether as
cause or effect. “The artist,” says Signor Croce, coming down
abruptly to earth, “is always above blame morally and above censure
philosophically.” There you have it, the claim to irresponsibility, so
dear to our militant gentlemen of the press, vested in the authority of
an awesome name. I do not suppose many of our emancipated writers are
deeply versed in the thin dialectic of æsthetics, but they understand
pretty well what is meant when they are told that in their work as
creative artists they need not concern themselves with the ethical laws
supposed to govern life or with the dull maxims of truth.
It may be a question, as I have said, whether the great Neapolitan
has risen from the popular lust of irresponsibility to his theory
of independent art or has condescended to the lower level from the
heights of abstract reasoning. In either case the next step, from a
definition by negation to a definition by affirmation, carries him
into an altitude beyond the reach of any earthly telescope. Art, he
has shown, is absolutely not pleasure or morals or philosophy; it just
absolutely _is_--but is what? In the answer to this question I seem
to hear no human voice but the very diction of the Demon. Otherwise
I cannot understand whence the avowed foe of Kantian and Hegelian
abstractions has derived his positive definition of art, which of
all abstractions is the most abstract and of all absolutes the most
absolute. “Art is intuition,” he says, that and nothing else; not the
vision of something, mind you, but pure vision. Or, if you desire
more words in your definition, you may have it thus: “An aspiration
inclosed in the circle of a representation, that is art; and in it the
aspiration exists solely by the representation, and the representation
solely by the aspiration.” Which words, if they mean anything, signify,
I suppose, that art is of the spirit of pure creativeness, a reaching
out towards a goal which is non-existent until visualised by the very
act of reaching out. Such a definition may engage the attention of
metaphysicians; in my common-place mind, frankly, it draws blank. I
do not comprehend what is meant by aspiring towards that which is
non-existent until we visualise it by aspiring.
Croce is the pope of the new school, and as such ought to be immune
from the questioning of the lay intelligence. For a more accessible
exposition of the ideas stirring the young modernists, I turn to the
distinguished critic and philosopher of Spain, José Ortega y Gasset,
and in particular to his essay published under the significant title of
_The Dehumanization of Art_.[20] Unless I mistake his language, Señor
Ortega finds little satisfaction æsthetically in the extreme products
of the movement he describes. But he believes that it is not the
function of a critic to value works of art in accordance with his own
taste or distaste. And especially to-day, when more than ever before
it is a characteristic of art to divide mankind sharply into those who
comprehend and those who do not, the business of criticism should be to
enter into the intention of the artist, and not to judge his work from
some alien point of view, least of all to condemn. Well, Señor Ortega
in a sense comprehends; he states the various theories adopted by the
_jóvenes_ to justify their adventurous ways with admirable perspicuity
and precision--and with that final confusion at the back of his mind
which enables him to speak as one who belongs intellectually to the
movement, however practically his taste may lag a little behind its
utmost advance.
The central thesis of Señor Ortega’s book, which at once justifies his
title and summarises the most advanced attitude towards art, is exactly
this: “To rejoice or suffer with the human lot which a work of art
may incidentally suggest or present to us, is a very different thing
from the true artistic pleasure. More than that: this occupation with
the human element of the work is essentially incompatible with pure
æsthetic fruition.”[21]
That clearly is the voice of the Demon once more, appealing to the
same lust for an irresponsible absolute as inspires the Crocean
æsthetics. And now art is to be not only independent of morals but in
its essence divided altogether from human nature; and if it still aims
to please, its pleasure is of a kind peculiar to itself and unrelated
to the coarse fodder of life. Suppose, to take the illustration given
by Señor Ortega, a notable man is lying at the point of death. His
wife will be standing by his bed, a physician will be counting his
pulse, while elsewhere in the house a reporter awaits the news and
a painter is engaged to depict the scene. All four persons--wife,
physician, reporter, painter--are intent upon the same fact, but with
varying degrees of intimacy and with different kinds of interest. To
the wife the event is an occasion of grief and anxiety; she is, as it
were, a part of it; whereas to the artist, at the other extreme, the
situation is entirely divested of human sympathy or sentiment: “his
mind is set solely on the exterior, on certain lights and shadows,
certain chromatic values.” And so it happens that if the natural
emotions felt on such an occasion by the wife, the physician, and
even to a lesser degree by the news-reporter, are what the ordinary
man (the “philistine” or “bourgeois” of the older romantic jargon)
regards as the real stuff of life, then art to the ordinary man is
removed to a sphere of incomprehensible unreality. “An artistic
object,” says Señor Ortega, “is artistic only in the measure in which
it ceases to be real.” Hence, in the scene just described, the actual
death-bed and the artist’s picture of it are two things “absolutely
different (_completamente distintos_).” We may interest ourselves in
one or the other; in one case we live with, or in, the event, in the
other case we “contemplate” an object of art as such, with æsthetic
pleasure perhaps, but with no human emotions. Just in so far as the
picture shows any feeling for, or awakens in the beholder any response
to, the significance of death, it falls below the high function of
art. The tragedy of loss, the frustration of ambition, the humility
of surrender, the consolations of hope, the victory of love, the
sanctities of religion,--any shadow of these resting upon the canvas
will detract from the purity of æsthetic pleasure. The artist and the
connoisseur in the presence of death find only an occasion for certain
lines and colours. And further, as our power of contemplation becomes
more refined, we cease to discern (or, if we are artists, to paint)
even the unreal representation of a real event; a picture will cease to
depend on, or suggest, any subject whatsoever. For art is like a window
through which we look out upon a garden. The ordinary man sees only the
flowers and leaves beyond, and is so absorbed in these as to be quite
unaware of the pane of glass, the more so as the glass is purer and
clearer. But with effort we can make ourselves conscious of the medium
through which we are looking; and as our vision is thus concentrated on
the glass, the garden fades into a confused blotch of colours or even
passes out of conscious perception altogether.
That is Señor Ortega’s vivid metaphor for the Crocean theory of
art as pure intuition--which he professes to reach, however, by no
theorising of his own but from study of the actual practice of certain
of the _jóvenes_. For those who believe in the divine mission of art
the elevation of society might seem to lie in obeying the command
of Mr. Skionar in Peacock’s _Crotchet Castle_: “Build sacella for
transcendental oracles to teach the world how to see through a glass
darkly.” It all sounds rather funny to me. But I hope I am not laughing
at an unfair caricature. What else in fact is the meaning of those
sapient critics, who might join me in repudiating the language of
metaphysics, yet insist that in judging a picture we shall pay no heed
to the subject represented but consider it as pure representation,
or who say that the value of a work of art depends not at all on
the character of the human experience put into it but only on the
sincerity of self-expression?--as if there were some mystical virtue
in self-expression even when the self has no experience worthy to be
expressed. It is, in fact, pedantic talk of this sort in the mouths of
respected critics that indicates how far the depredations of the Demon
have extended into the realm of common sense.
As for the creators, so called, there may be a young votary of art
here and there who is trying honestly to put these abstractions into
practice; and for him, I should suppose, the goal of dehumanisation and
derealisation will have been attained when his pictures are simplified
to a cunning design of line and colour with no suggestion of a definite
subject, or still further to a spread of pure colour with no design at
all; his music to a pure tone without melody or even variation; his
poems to a succession of beautiful words unsullied by sense. That would
seem to be the nearest practical equivalent to seeing a pure pane of
glass. One wonders why the pilgrim of vacuity should be so slow and
hesitant in his progress towards so easy a mark. Perhaps he foresees
that absolute art, so reached, will cease to be art at all. Perhaps
he has a foreboding that the prize if obtained would not be very
valuable. It is hard to imagine the pleasure or profit to be derived
from concentrating one’s attention upon a pane of transparent glass
until one sees nothing through it; most of us would prefer to retain
our impure perception of the flowers in the garden beyond. Despite the
majestic logic of youth we persist in thinking that such a picture
as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is a truer work of art than the
deftest whirl of colours ever painted; that the _Æneid_ is richer in
poetical joy than _Kubla Khan_ (not to mention the latest lyric from
the American colony in Paris); that Bach’s Mass in B Minor is still a
miracle and a rapture of sound. Yet all these--the painting and the
epic and the mass--are brimming with human emotion and with a brooding
sense of the eternal values of life. They are great for various
reasons, no doubt; but certainly among those reasons is the fact that
they are not art at all as the modernists would have us believe.
The simple truth is that the effort to create pure art is nothing
more than idolatry to a fetish of abstract reason--unless you prefer
to ticket it as empty conceit--and could never engage the practical
interest of any but a few witless cranks. There is a profound confusion
in Señor Ortega’s interpretation of what is happening among the mass of
the younger artists, as indeed there is often in their own statement of
what they are endeavouring to do. They may be seeking an absolute, but
it is not an absolute of purity in any sense of the word.
Now I grant at once that there is a difference between art and life,
that the attitude of the painter, to return to the old illustration,
is not identical with that of the wife in the house of mourning.
There is in art a change, a transmutation, a something taken away
and a something added. “Art,” said Goethe, “is art only because it
is not nature.” And Aristotle, perhaps, had the same truth in mind
in his famous theory of the purgation of the human passions. In that
sense we can accept a maxim that comes from Japan: “Art lies in the
shadowy frontiers between reality and unreality.”[22] The point I
would make is the falseness and futility of the logical deduction that
art can therefore dispense with the stuff of humanity or nature, or
can weigh anchor and sail off into a shoreless sea of unreality. What
has actually happened is this. Always the great creators have taken
the substance of life, and, not by denying it or attempting to evade
its laws, but by looking more intently below its surface, have found
meanings and values that transmute it into something at once the same
and different. The passions that distract the individual man with the
despair of isolated impotence they have invested with a universal
significance fraught with the destinies of humanity; the scenery of the
material world they have infused with suggestions of an indwelling
otherworld. And so by a species of symbolism, or whatever you choose
to call it, they have lifted mortal life and its theatre to a higher
reality which only to the contented or dust-choked dwellers in things
as they are may appear as unreal. That, for instance, is precisely what
Perugino has achieved in his picture of a death-scene entitled the
Mystic Crucifixion, where pain and grief and the fear that clutches the
individual heart in its hand of ice have been transmuted into a drama
of divine redemption through suffering, while the tender burgeoning of
spring thrown up against the far-off juncture of earth and sky gives
hints of a mode of existence in joyous and infinite freedom. Even the
lesser creators, those who in innocence of spirit have undertaken
merely to reproduce what they see, may have done so with a clarity and
largeness of vision capable of working a magic alchemy of which they
themselves perhaps never dreamed.
That was the tradition of agelong practice; it is what we mean,
or ought to mean, by classical. And then, after the devastating
materialism of late eighteenth-century philosophy there came a change
of ideals. The veritable feeling for the otherworld and for spiritual
values was lost, while at the same time the new school, stirred
with vague aspirations, was not satisfied with a simple and, in its
way, wholesome naturalism. Above all these prophets of the romantic
movement, as we designate it, revolted from the restrictive rules
of an art which was neither classical nor innocently naturalistic,
but pseudo-classical, and which had developed from one side of the
Renaissance. They too perceived that no great art was possible without
escape from the levelling tyranny of natural law, and, being unable
to transcend nature, seeing indeed no higher reality into which
nature could be raised, they sought freedom by sinking below nature.
In painting, as Mr. Mather has shown with fulness of knowledge
and admirable acumen, this process of escape meant “a successive
elimination of academic authority, imagination, memory, fidelity to
nature, and nature itself. It would seem as if the last sacrifice had
been made; but no. In all these rejections and in the most grotesque
experiments the painter had retained his seriousness and self-respect.
This too went by the board in a brief moment after the War, when the
Dadaists bade the artist create in a mood of joyous bluff, meanwhile
mocking himself and his world. The oft-repeated demonstration is
complete once more--the latter end of expansive Romantic individualism
is Romantic disillusionment and Romantic irony.”[23] And the same
history might be given of modern music and literature, though in
the case of the latter the disinvolution, by reason of the medium
employed, is more complicated. For instance the liberation of art
from the moral obligations of life, so vaunted by Mr. Cabell and
others of the left wing in America as a new achievement, is really
contemporaneous with the romantic movement. At least as far back as
1837 we find George Sand declaring that by almost universal consent
the arts have become accomplices in this strange tendency towards
“amoralism.” Now conscientious theorists may hold that amoralism is a
step in the direction of freedom; in practice it became commonly a mere
euphemism for immorality, not to say vulgar indecency. The climax of
the movement in that direction was reached in the realism of Zola and
others who, quite frankly and systematically and “scientifically,” made
human nature coterminous with the bestial in man. Art may have been
emancipated from one set of bonds, but it was wrapt and enfolded and
constricted in a bondage tenfold straiter. It may have been dehumanised
in the sense that it had repudiated the government of reason which to
the older humanists was the distinguishing trait of man as man; it
certainly was not purged of its attempt to evoke passions which on a
lower plane are _menschlich allzu menschlich_.
As a matter of fact the radical writers of to-day who are accomplishing
anything of magnitude are still predominantly of that school of
realism. But a few restless souls, those in particular whom Señor
Ortega has in mind, driven on by the despotic Demon of the Absolute,
have not been content to abide in this halfway house. They see clearly
enough that art has not been purified by such realism, but mixed and
muddied by deliberate opposition to the ethical interpretation of life;
they will detach art from even that poor remnant of deliberation which
made a selection among the elements of composite human nature with
a certain regard, though an inverted regard, for moral values. They
hold deliberation to be the foe of liberation. Hence the later theory,
exemplified in English by James Joyce, that art shall not reproduce
a picture of life as the humanist sees it, or even from the inverted
point of view of the realist, but for its subject matter shall descend
to what they call the pure “stream of consciousness.” The hero of
fiction shall have no will, no purpose, no inhibition, no power of
choice whether for good or evil, but shall be merely a medium through
which passes an endless, unchecked, meaningless flux of sensations and
memories and emotions and impulses.
And so the limit of elimination has been reached--at least the
practical limit, since below the stream of consciousness there would
seem to remain nothing to represent save bottomless inanity. But
this fact is to be noted: though the process of evolution may seem
to have been carried on in the name of absolute art, the actual goal
attained is an absolute of quite another order; there has been no true
liberation, but a progressive descent in slavery. As, successively, one
after another of the higher elements of our composite nature has been
suppressed, a lower instinct has taken its place. The submergence of
the humanistic conception of man as a responsible creature of free will
has been accompanied by an emergence of the romantic glorification of
uncontrollable temperament; this has been supplanted by a realistic
theory of subjection to the bestial passions, and this, at the last, by
an attempt to represent life as an unmitigated flux, which in practice,
however it be in literature, means confinement in a mad-house. The
practitioners of the newest art call themselves _surréalistes_,
super-realists; they flatter themselves, they are sub-realists.
Art may be dehumanised, but only in the sense that, having passed
beyond the representation of men as undifferentiated from animals,
it undertakes to portray them as complete imbeciles. To speak of the
works produced by the boastful modern school as pure art is, from any
point of view, mere bluff. By their fruits you shall know them. Turn
the pages of the little magazine published in Paris under the title
of _transition_, wherein Mr. Joyce and a group of denationalised
Americans and Americanised Frenchmen collaborate to their own mutual
satisfaction: you will there find what the Simon-pure article is in
theory and practice. For instance a certain M. Louis Aragon,--described
by his admiring introducer as “an intellectual on a lifelong holiday,
a twentieth-century pilgrim with a pack of words on his back,”
etc.,--expounds the theory thus:
Reason, reason, o abstract day-phantom, I have already driven you
from my dreams. And now I am at the point where they are ready
to blend with the realities of appearance. There is no longer
room only for me. In vain reason denounces the dictatorship of
sensuality. In vain it puts me on guard against error. Error is
here the queen. Come in, Madame, this is my body, this is your
throne. I pat my delirium as I would a beautiful horse.... Nothing
can assure me of reality. Nothing, neither the exactness of logic
nor the strength of a sensation, can assure me that I do not base
it on the delirium of interpretation.
And so M. Aragon, concluding “that only the syllables of reality are
artistically usable,” exemplifies the new style:
_Ité ité la réa
Ité ité la réalité
La réa la réa
Té té La réa
Li
Té La réalité
Il y avait une fois LA RÉALITÉ._
Such is the manifesto of Super-realism, “the Freudian period,” as the
addicts of the stream of consciousness call it, “to the realistic
misconception.” Their title, I have said, is a pretty mistake for
sub-realism; but they are not mistaken in their claim to have reached
a kind of absolute. At least I cannot imagine what lower level of
imbecility may still be honoured with the name of art.
(If any votary of “pure art” chances to read this essay, he will say:
So Keats and Milton were treated by critics of their age.)
II
One of the hardest things for a student to learn, which yet, if he
could but know it at the beginning, would save him from endless
perplexities and perhaps from final despair, is just the simple fact
that _brain-power is no guarantee for rightness of thinking_, that on
the contrary a restlessly outreaching mind, unchecked by the humility
of common sense, is more than likely to lead its owner into bogs of
duplicity if not into the bottomless pit of fatuity, that, to repeat
the phrase of Bacon, himself a shining example, the _intellectus sibi
permissus_ is the easiest of all dupes for the Demon of the Absolute.
There has been no more powerful intellect for the past hundred years
than Kant’s; I doubt if any writer ever filled the world with more
confusion of thought or clouded the truth with a thicker dust of
obscurity. And it is in this spirit of distrust, not incompatible with
a kind of admiration, that I criticise the works of one who to-day has
reached the pinnacle of fame as a thinker.
Professor Whitehead’s philosophy spans the double field of religion and
science; and in each of these, I presume to say, he has come by the
circuitous ways of abstract reasoning to conclusions that in a lesser
man would be regarded as preposterous. If such a statement shocks you
or sounds disrespectful, take yourself the argument of his _Religion in
the Making_ and strip it to the bones. You will find that it proceeds
from the definition of religion as “the longing for justification,”
and is directed by the fact that “to-day there is but one religious
dogma in debate: What do you mean by ‘God’?” Upon this basis, then, Mr.
Whitehead undertakes to find such a meaning for the word “God” as will
satisfy man’s “longing for justification.” Such a simplification of the
religious problem will strike some inquirers as high-handed, but I let
that pass; it has at least whatever merits appertain to simplicity. And
I admit ungrudgingly that in the course of his lectures Mr. Whitehead
makes many shrewd observations on the deeper mysteries of human life.
Memorable passages might be quoted, for instance such sentences as
these, that touch the Crocean metaphysic on the quick: “To be an actual
thing is to be limited,” “Thus rightness of limitation is essential for
growth of reality,” “Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can
procure nothing.”
But in the end how does Mr. Whitehead reply to his own question: “What
do you mean by ‘God’?” For convenience’ sake I quote this summary of
his answer from a eulogistic article in the _Hibbert Journal_ for July
1927:
All being does this [_i.e._, “comes to a focus in each thing”]
because it is its nature so to do. _This inherent nature of all
being is God._ All being does this because it is organised
according to the principle of concretion. All being does this
because of a certain order or character which pervades it. That
order pervading the universe that makes it concrete is God. God is
not himself concrete, says Whitehead, but he is the principle which
constitutes the concreteness of things.
That is to say, in still simpler language: An individual object is not
cut off from the universe, but stands in some relation to all other
objects and owes its character to this relationship; this is so because
it is the nature of things to be so; such is the law of “concretion,”
and the “principle of concretion” is God.
Now, apart from the final clause, a plain man might suggest that the
argument, so relieved of the obscurantism of metaphysical jargon, is
more true than original--true to the point of insipidity. As for the
conclusion, no doubt, so left in its native jargon, it comes with the
shock of originality; but has it sense? Will any man admit that the God
whom he worships and to whom he prays--and without worship and prayer
the use of the word “God” is a pure solecism--is no more than the
“principle of concretion” in the universe? Has such a definition any
bearing on religion as the “longing for justification”? Is it anything
more than a phantom of abstract science surreptitiously substituted for
the object of faith? The fact is that between the last clause of the
argument and what precedes there is a sheer hiatus. It is the age-old
fallacy of metaphysics: you take a word used in ordinary speech (“God”)
with a perfectly clear connotation; you define the word in a manner
to suit your convenience (“the principle of concretion”); you prove
that there is something in the nature of things corresponding to your
definition, and then casually assume that your proof holds good of the
word in its popular sense. It is the oft-repeated adventure of the
Absolute: you wrap a common-place up in abstract terminology, and then
in that fog of language you find yourself precipitated into an abyss of
nonsense (that the “longing for justification” is satisfied by belief
in “the inherent nature of all being”).[24]
But this is by the way. Our present topic is rather Mr. Whitehead’s
philosophy of science, which is his real concern, and in which the
terms “God” and “religion” are manifestly unwarranted intrusions.
Here, again, to the student of contemporary thought Mr. Whitehead’s
_Science and the Modern World_ must be in many ways a welcome book. His
comments on the connexion between the poets and the physical theories
of their day are illuminating and bring to the subject a knowledge not
often found in the literary critic. And I for one am much beholden to
him for his treatment of the ghastly relic of materialism bequeathed
to us by our fathers--I would almost say his indecent burial of it,
were the epithet indecent applicable to the disposal of a corpse which
has remained too long above ground. And very cleverly he directs his
attack to the two points where the mechanistic philosophy is most
vulnerable--its apparent simplicity and its presumptive regard of facts.
There was indeed at first sight a seductive simplicity about the
theories of Huxley and his militant brothers. It is so easy to say
that the world is nothing but a machine nicely constructed of atoms,
running smoothly and undeviatingly under the mechanical laws of
motion; to deny that anything new or incalculable ever breaks in to
disarrange the regularity demanded by science; to dispose of the
passions and appetites and the very consciousness of man as mere
products of atomical reaction. It was the kind of simplification that
promised to solve for us all the annoying problems of life, exactly
the kind of bait that the Demon of the Absolute loves to dangle before
a mind unprotected by the humility of common sense. Certainly if
ever any group of men had a cosmic footrule in their pockets, it was
this particular group of mid-Victorians who married the atheistical
philosophy of the eighteenth century to the physical discoveries of
the nineteenth. Unfortunately, what seemed a process of simplification
has led step by step to such a complexity of adjustments to keep
the machine going that long ago the plain man, if he dared, would
have scouted the whole conception as a fantastic dream. And here Mr.
Whitehead, by virtue of his standing as a mathematician, speaks with an
authority for which the plain man must be very grateful. “The physical
doctrine of the atom,” he says, “has got into a state which is strongly
suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.” In all
conscience, is it not true that to accept the more recent developments
of scientific mechanism requires about the same sort of credulity as
was demanded of the theologian in the Middle Ages when asked to debate
the number of angels who could stand together on the point of a needle?
And as the mechanistic theory, when used to explain the inner workings
of matter, instead of simplifying science, breaks down under a weight
of infinite complications, so, when applied to the nature of man, it
shatters itself on what Mr. Whitehead rightly calls certain “stubborn
and irreducible facts”--the most stubborn and irreducible of these
facts being, as every unperverted mind knows, that we are not pure
machines, and that any argument which would subject the human will and
consciousness to the mechanical laws of motion is void because based
on false premises. Against the high-handed assumptions of Darwinian
materialism and the fanatical dogmatism of its votaries (relics of
which still circulate in the backwaters of the biological laboratory),
as against all forms of complacent obscurantism, whether theological or
scientific, “Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages: ‘My brethren,
by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be
mistaken.’”
It is the bare truth that one must rake the records of history to
discover a more complete and abject subservience to the Demon of the
Absolute than that of the philosophy, falsely called science, of the
period now closing. And, as I say, any one who clings to common sense
must be thankful to Mr. Whitehead for lending his authority as a
scientist to the unlocking of these shackles. But then, why should so
masterly an intellect, again like Luther’s drunken man, topple over on
the other side into a contrary but equally impossible absolutism? Why?
“The only way of mitigating mechanism,” he says, “is by the discovery
that it is not mechanism.” And so, instead of admitting humbly that
mechanism is mechanism while beside it there exists something of a
totally different nature, and that the ultimate nexus between these two
fields of experience surpasses our comprehension, he must demonstrate
mechanism out of the world altogether. In his philosophy there will be
no more solid obstinate material things such as go to the making of
machines, but only “events.” Time and space, which used to be regarded
as modes of perception, become internal components of things; value,
which used to be a name for our conscious estimation of what we could
do with things or for their effect on our spiritual life, now proves to
be “the intrinsic reality of an event.” There is, you see, an entire
reversal of the mechanistic hypothesis. Formerly it was held that the
human soul obeys the same laws as a stone; now we are to believe that
a stone is of the same nature as the soul. In either case we avoid the
discomfort of a paradoxical dualism and reduce the world to a monism
which may plausibly call itself science, though as a matter of fact Mr.
Whitehead’s theory, if carried out, would simply abolish science.
And it is clear enough that the new monism is open to precisely
the same criticism as was that of the mechanists which it looks to
supplant. Aiming ostensibly to simplify, it really renders the nature
of things incomprehensibly complex. Promising to release us from the
known paradox of a world composed of two irreconcilable classes of
things, it ends by forcing a perfectly arbitrary paradox upon us in
its definition of inanimate objects. To define a stone as an event
consisting of a bundle of time, space, value, and relationships, does
not seem to me to be moving in the direction of lucid simplicity. “What
is the sense,” Mr. Whitehead asks, “of talking about a mechanical
explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?” And the
question is entirely pertinent, if by the word “mechanics” we mean
slyly to imply something more than the observed actions and reactions
of material bodies in motion. Mr. Whitehead therefore discards the
“traditional scientific materialism” for an “alternative doctrine of
organism,” that is, for a “theory of _organic mechanism_.” Well and
good. But is it unkind to ask the use of talking about an organical
explanation when you do not know what you mean by “organism,” or to
hint that no very clear idea will be evoked by joining together two
unknown quantities, “organism” and “mechanism,” and calling the world
an “organic mechanism”?
And again, what of the “stubborn and irreducible facts,” in whose name
Mr. Whitehead attacks the rationalism of the Huxleyites and their
predecessors of the eighteenth century? If we are to cast away their
imposing structure of logic as unreasonable for the simple reason
that, after all is said, we still know that the human mind (or soul,
if you please) is something other than a stone, shall we swallow the
contrary theory, which has not even the virtue of logic, and which
transfers human qualities to a stone? Aristotle made the proper and
sufficient distinction long ago, when he said that a stone obeys laws
and a man forms habits: you may throw a stone into the air a thousand
times and it will continue to do the same thing, whereas a man learns
by experience. But alas for those “stubborn and irreducible facts”! How
bravely we all summon them to our aid! How desperately we run from them
when they appear!
But if this merging together of the animate and the inanimate in a new
naturalism makes a travesty of the inorganic world, its real menace
is that, equally with the older naturalism, it reacts to deprive
humanity of what is distinctly human. The solid objects of “our naïve
experience” have been made organic by a kind of relaxation into fluid
composites of time and space and value and relationships; they have
evaporated into a semblance of psychical events (the very term “events”
indeed is little more than an awkward translation of Berkeley’s “ideas
in the mind”), and the peculiar note of an event is its transitoriness:
“one all-pervasive fact, inherent in the character of what is real,
is the transition of things, the passage one to another.” Thus it
happens that the organic and the inorganic worlds flow together in an
indistinguishable flux, wherein the soul also, dissolved by association
into a complex of relationships, loses that central permanence of
entity which used to be held to mark the dignity of man. Nor, if we
look beyond, is there anywhere “an ultimate reality” to which we can
appeal “for the removal of perplexity,” but only an endless concurrence
of events. “In the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover [itself a
conception, one might suppose, far enough removed from ‘our naïve
experience’ into the abyss of abstraction], we require God as the
Principle of Concretion”--not a person, not an entity of any sort,
nor even a law apparently, but a mere name for the fact that concrete
groups of qualities are everlastingly forming and reforming in the
infinite vortex of existence. A cynic might distinguish between the
old naturalism and the naturalism now proposed to take its place by
saying that under the régime of the former true science might flourish
but no humanism or religion, whereas the metaphysical naturalism of
Mr. Whitehead would leave us neither true science nor humanism and
religion, but only mathematics. The Demon of the Absolute, whether he
appears as the advocate of a mechanical fatalism or of the universal
flux of relativity, is brother germane to Apollyon, the Destroyer.
The curious thing in all this farrago of insight and error is the
superstitious hold of the word science on a mind otherwise so awakened.
Mr. Whitehead perceives that one scientific hypothesis swallows up
another--as indeed he could not fail to see that his own hypothesis
turns its predecessor upside down; he admits with engaging candour
that one and all they rest on a “naïve faith” which cannot be verified
and is “indifferent to refutation”; yet he clings fanatically to the
scientific attitude as possessing a monopoly of truth and honesty.
“When,” he says, “Darwin or Einstein proclaim[s] theories which modify
our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that
there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been
abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been
gained.”
I suspect that an utter confusion of thought has arisen here
from the ambiguity of a word--as has happened immemorially with
metaphysicians better and worse than Mr. Whitehead. Science as an
accumulation and classification and utilisation of observed facts
may go on from victory to victory; but science as a name for such
hypothetical theories of time and space, matter and motion and life,
as those broached by the Darwinians of the nineteenth century, or the
Einsteinian relativists of the twentieth, is not a progress in insight
but a lapse from one naïve assumption to another in a vicious circle
of self-contradicting monisms. It really is not easy to understand the
state of mind of one, cognisant of the history of thought, who urges
us to seek relief from the present _débâcle_--Mr. Whitehead himself
places our intellectual and spiritual level lower than it has ever been
since the Dark Ages--by introducing the hypothetical method of science
into religion. This is his analysis of the present condition of the
popular mind: “A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined
with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher
animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical
inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is
half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation.” My reading of history
is different. I should assert that our vacillating half-heartedness
is the inevitable outcome of the endeavour, persistent since the
naturalistic invasion of the Renaissance, to flee from the paradox of
life to some philosophy which will merge, no matter how, the mechanical
and the human together. I should assert that the only escape from our
muddle is to overthrow this idol of Unity, this Demon of the Absolute,
this abortion sprung from the union of science and metaphysics, and to
submit ourselves humbly to the stubborn and irreducible fact that a
stone and the human soul cannot be brought under the same definition.
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
For legitimate science one may have the deepest respect. But to
scientific absolutism masquerading as religion, one may say justly and
truly what was said so unjustly and cruelly to Keats: Back to your
gallipots!
FOOTNOTES
[18] Sections IV and V of the title essay in _The Demon of the
Absolute_ (New Shelburne Essays, Vol. I), 1928; reprinted with the kind
permission of the author and of the Princeton University Press. Section
IV (I, as here reprinted) concerns “The Fetish of Pure Art” and section
V (II) “The Fetish of Pure Science.”
[19] _Nuovi Saggi di Estetica_, 1920.
[20] _La Deshumanización del Arte_, Madrid, 1925.
[21] _Alegrarse o sufrir con los destinos humanos que, tal vez, la obra
de arte nos refiere o presenta, es cosa muy diferente del verdadero
goce artistico. Más aún: esa ocupación con lo humano de la obra es, en
principio, incompatible con la estricta fruición estética._
[22] _Masterpieces of Chikamatsu, the Japanese Shakespeare_, translated
by Asataro Miyamori, p. 48.
[23] _Modern Painting_, by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., p. 375.
[24] There are passages in Mr. Whitehead’s books in which the word
“God” is used properly, even nobly, with its religious connotation; and
indeed, as Professor A. E. Taylor has shown in the _Dublin Review_ for
July 1927, part of the difficulty in grasping his argument is owing to
this intellectual double-dealing. But in the end the conception of God
as a physical law, or impersonal principle, quite wins out.
_The Pride of Modernity_
G. R. ELLIOTT
I
In European literature from Homer down to Milton and Racine (not to
speak of Oriental literature) pride, wrong pride, is represented as
far and away the chief of human evils. Such is not the case with the
comparatively brief stretch of literature that ensues. Of course there
are sharp exceptions to the rule. But speaking by and large recent
literature--if that of the past two hundred years may so be termed in
view of the long eras behind it--has not held up pride as the towering
villain of the human drama. That villain has become more and more
shrunken and shadowy. The _hubris_ of the Greeks, the proud presumption
against the high gods that constituted for ancient writers the crown of
human errors, seems now an old, unhappy, far-off thing, quite hopeless
for literary purposes in the opening twentieth century. Even more
hopeless seems the lineal successor to _hubris_, the Pride that led
the seven deadly sins in mediæval pageantry, and doomed the heroes of
humane tragedy in the Renaissance.
The surface reason for the fading of pride on our literary scene is
obvious enough. Pride used to be considered not only the most immoral
but also the most dramatic quality of human life. But recently life,
or our imaginative way with life, has assumed a non-dramatic air.
The interminable series of the falls of proud heroes and princes,
historical or legendary, that runs through the bulk of the world’s
literature--well, this series seems now to have terminated.
Democracy’s interest in such personages is lackadaisical. I heard
a bright American undergraduate refer to them as “those old guys
that used to get bumped off quick.” And one must bear in mind that
America, if still a bright undergraduate, is widely representative of
modern civilisation. Yesterday a remote collection of insignificant
states, she is now becoming an international state of mind and, more
significantly, of imagination. In this state of imagination the old
proud-falling potentate cuts a small figure. Recently, to be sure, many
princes have fallen, in fact the majority of them; but they have fallen
softly. The downfall of a business corporation is far more noisy and
generally disturbing; but a corporation is impersonal and undramatic.
As for pride, doubtless some American presidents have shown promising
tragic signs of it, but of course these had to be nipped in the bud.
A prince, even so powerful and autocratic a prince as the American
president, cannot fall proudly and dramatically when he has to fall
regularly every four years.
Pride is not popular with democracy either as a vice or as a virtue.
Even a just pride in oneself is publicly regarded as not justifiable.
Self-esteem must be submerged in party loyalty; and party loyalty, in
turn, must whitewash its rising arrogance with humanitarian sentiment,
with eloquent devotion to the welfare of men in general. To be sure,
intelligent persons dislike the blatancy of this sentiment. Most of
them nevertheless are actually in accord with the very heart of it.
They wince and shrug at the slogan trumpet of “Service to Mankind,”
but they quietly salute the flag. They bow in spirit to the reigning
standard of “Social Value.” Tacitly accepting it as prime motive they
deprecate their own self-esteem. They abet the general feeling that
pride as the ruler of this world, good and evil pride alike, has
modernly been deposed: it is a thing of the past.
This feeling, more than any other feature of modernity, constitutes our
break with the past. It has inspired the general conviction that the
modern age, so far from being merely one phase, even the most important
phase, of human history, has brought about a permanent alteration in
the basic conditions of human history. And here again the majority
of the leaders of opinion, while disavowing the popular view in its
blatant extreme, have been moulded in spirit by the accumulating
pressure of it. At the same time our knowledge of the _facts_ of the
past has continued to increase. Popular biographies and surveys have
circulated through a vast reading public. Hence has arisen what may be
termed the modern historical paradox. The opening twentieth century has
a wider speaking acquaintance with the past, and a fainter grip of its
essential reality, than was ever the case before. The past is quite
vivid to us, and quite unreal. Its main motif, its pride, is a dramatic
ghost.
Recently Lytton Strachey’s keen book on Queen Elizabeth and her Essex,
and Francis Hackett’s glowing story of Henry Eighth and his wives, have
made the pageant of the sixteenth century brilliantly alive for us. But
in the end the pageant is more a pageant than ever; the past is more
utterly past. The scene sparkles along before our eyes in sharp and
multitudinous detail. Above all, the persons are amazingly human, as
they loom toward us in vivid “close-ups.” Yet in the end they are human
foreigners. They belong to a remote clime, and our attitude toward them
is ironic and superior even when most sympathetic. In fact they seem
to us _amazingly_ human just because we are surprised that they can be
human at all. For the central motive of their lives, their pride of
spirit, is or seems to us entirely out of date. Their ordinary desires
were the same as ours; we see that more fully every day. But the power
of their pride, which swamped or swept before it all those common
desires, like the gale that ruled their little sailing-ships on the
Atlantic, is obsolete. It appears almost as strange and superstitious,
when we pause to reflect upon it, as the spasmodic fits of humility
that made those proud ghosts grovel at the feet of their kings and
gods. We think we have changed all that.
But so deep-going an alteration in human nature, such a huge
discrepancy between present and past, is disconcerting to the mind.
It must needs be reduced and accounted for. Our emotional conviction
of the obsolescence of pride, like every other strong and persistent
feeling harboured by human beings, must needs be rationalised. And the
rationalisation is now in progress. Pride has seemed to our imagination
very unreal in the present; therefore our reason is demonstrating that
it was also quite unreal in the past. Historical science aided by other
sciences has undermined the pride of the past. It appears now that
proud princes, as well as proud nations and empires, fell of old not by
reason of pride but by reason of economics--or the lack of economics.
Or else there were geographical, ethnological, biological, or
psychological causes. The last-mentioned category is the most effective
of all for eliminating moral factors from human history. For example,
only an old-fashioned reader may still fancy that Henry the Second,
by conquering the violence of his pride, could have refrained from
causing the slaughter of Becket. That, to be sure, was the subsequent
opinion of Henry himself. But, psychologically speaking, Henry and the
old-fashioned reader are mistaken. Henry was subject to certain stimuli
and certain complexes that completely determined, and completely
explain, his extraordinary behaviour before and after the murder of the
archbishop.
Emerson, looking back mildly from Concord upon the greedy and murderous
pride of old days, found human history very tiresome because it was
so very bad. To-day many disillusioned persons are finding it still
more tiresome because it seems to them neither bad nor good. It is
non-moral, and therefore non-dramatic. Never does it hang dramatically
in the fearful balance of the free human will between a false pride and
a right humility. It merely moves back and forth like the waves and
currents of the sea. History, unhappily, just happens.
Perhaps, however, this ultra-modern view of history, in which pride
seems so unreal, is itself the offspring of a very real pride. Modern
pride is not of necessity less real than ancient pride just because, so
far, its way is less conscious and dramatic. After all it takes time
to dramatise ourselves to ourselves; and the modern age, so modernists
say, is not yet in full swing. They say that the modern theatre has
merely made a beginning and that in the future it will do great things.
If so, I would claim that the greatest of those great things must be an
adequate dramatisation of modern pride. But we cannot wait for that.
If we did, it would never come. It cannot come until there is general
recognition of the fact that pride is still the grand protagonist in
the human drama; and that under its drab modern dress it has lost not a
whit of its ancient sinew.
Pride is most virulent, indeed, when it wears plain clothes, when it
hides itself from itself. Self-blindness, not dramatic display, is
and always has been the very heart of it. Precisely when pride is
most insidious is it least dramatic. Recognition of itself, which is
the preliminary step toward cure, is also the preliminary step toward
dramatic manifestation. Pride was very dramatic in old literature
just because it was unearthed from its very _un_dramatic lair in old
human nature. Discovery is the essence of drama. Life is intensely
dramatic as soon as its least discoverable motive is discovered, as
soon as its “last infirmity,” its most hidden pride of spirit, is shown
in action. Therefore if a superficial glance persuades us, as I said
at the beginning, that pride has faded in modern literature because
modern life is non-dramatic, a deeper search informs us that modern
life _seems_ non-dramatic because the meaning of pride has faded in
our thought. We need to rediscover the truth of the truism that pride
is the most insidious and blinding of all human qualities. Then we may
discover the way of modern pride. We must see how utterly non-dramatic
pride can be before our poets may show us how intensely dramatic
modern life is. We cannot envisage the drama of modern life in its
full reality, we cannot touch the very heart of its tragedy, until we
realise the peculiar blindness of modern pride.
II
For example. Some twelve years ago President Wilson announced on behalf
of the United States, or was quoted as announcing, that we were “too
proud to fight.” Soon afterwards we were fighting, not without martial
pride, in the greatest war of all time. The irony of this sequence was
too broad to escape notice. Yet the notice was comparatively slight.
And the whole matter has faded with ominous speed from the imagination
of a public debauched with the most adulterous mixture of pacific
and pugnacious prides that the world has ever known. The Wilsonian
remark was easily smiled into oblivion. The full dramatic irony of
the situation, and the tragedy behind it, cannot appear until that
proud utterance is recognised, not as the passing whimsy of a single
person or party or nation, but as a vivid symbol of the modern spirit
at large. It may fairly be regarded, indeed, as the verbal apex of
the whole bad pyramid of modern pride--the pride of quick and direct
solutions, the pride of immediacy.
The basis of that pyramid is religious. No doubt the superstructure
owes much to our triumphantly swift results in science, industry, and
humanitarian reform. But the pride of practical achievement, thoroughly
wholesome in its proper _locale_, would not have formed a modern
Babel unless assembled and underpinned by modern religion. And modern
religion, while denouncing more and more the various arrogancies of our
material civilisation, has not unearthed the deep foundation which it
itself has provided for them. As religion is properly the founder and
guardian of human humility, so religious pride is the prime evil. We
see this very easily in the past. We know that the most blinding and
hateful pride that grew among the ancient Greeks and Romans was not
the pride of city-state, of empire, of symmetric culture. It was the
arrogance of the religious philosophy of the Stoics, their assumption
of a pseudo-divine impassivity of spirit. Likewise the mediæval
glorification of chivalry, and even of ecclesiastic and theological
edifice, is as nothing to modern eyes in comparison with the spiritual
presumption that grew in mediæval asceticism. We see how vicious it was
for the Stoic to be proud of his pride, and for the monk to be proud
of his humility. We have not yet seen how vicious it is for the modern
citizen to be proud of being neither proud nor humble.
He is spiritually proud of having escaped from spiritual pride. He
believes he has left that historic vice far and forever behind.
In his leisure hours he has learned all about it, he thinks, from
interesting books, periodicals, preachers, lecturers, travels,
historical moving-pictures, and maybe survey courses in college. He
is amused and in better moments saddened at the tremendous dramatic
display of religious pride in old times,--unaware that this evil never
_displayed_ itself to the hearts it mastered, nor does to-day. What,
then, can he know of real humility? “Why,” I was recently asked by
a sincerely puzzled undergraduate whose psychological interests had
led him to scrutinise certain ancient documents, “why were the old
Christians always jawing about humility?” The modern man is conscious,
explicitly or implicitly, of possessing a new form of humility much
superior to the old. He is proud of his freedom from the fearful
self-abasement of his benighted ancestors. He is certain that his own
brand of humility, his kindly modesty in relation to nature and to
other men, is far more reasonable and real. Reality, indeed, is his
keynote. He believes he sees the facts of human nature with a plain
and full reality, or immediacy, that was impossible to men of old,
distracted as their vision was by the extremes of pride and humility.
He has done away with those two “mighty opposites.” His realism, his
direct contact with life, has antiquated their histrionic conflict.
He is superior to that primitive battle in the human breast. He has
emerged from that cave warfare into the light of immediate reality. He
is “too proud to fight.”
And this pride of immediacy, as I have called it, is at bottom
religious. It was founded by the Protestant Reformation. More broadly
speaking, it grows from that urgent religious revolution still going
on which was publicly begun by the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth
century. It goes on in Catholic and Protestant realms alike and has
many modes, ranging all the way from the glittering wit of French
Catholico-Modernism to the rash eloquence of the Protestant pulpits
of New York. Revolution it is with a vengeance, not re-formation.
And if it be true that the modern intelligence under the influence
of science is coming to see the natural need of ordered evolution,
instead of destructive revolution, in all human affairs, then we should
see this need primarily in religion. Here the cost of revolution is
heaviest. For the mischief of the revolutionary method--namely, that
it externalises the issue--is greatest in that sphere which should be
of all the most internal. The mental surfaces of religion are thrown
into false prominence as the insignia of controversy. Sacred rites and
dogmas, through the protective devotion of the loyalist and the pointed
hostility of the rebel, are externalised. The imaginative flexibility
properly belonging to them is congealed into a stiff surface that
hides their inmost meaning, human and divine. Instead of vital human
organisms, nourished in their growth and change by something of the
divine circulation, they become fixed mechanisms; to be maintained in
running order or else discarded altogether--windmills, pumping the
living water direct to the household of faith, or suddenly assaulted
into junk-heaps by quixotic insurgents.[25] Loyalists and rebels,
in reaction from each other, attribute to their own doctrines an
impossible immediacy of truth. Thus both parties foster the pride of
spiritual immediacy.
Obviously, however, it is not the conservative but the protestant or
modernist pride of immediacy that, for the time being at least, has won
the day. Indeed it has flourished like a weed in the very midst of our
best achievements. The great achievement of modern times is the general
realisation that life is of necessity experimental, that change is a
constant law for us, and that the human spirit is more important than
human customs and institutions however sacrosanct. Hence our pride of
freedom, freedom from the past. And this pride is proper and sound
in so far as it is a proud gratitude for the general dissemination
of a truth that the great saints and sages, under all dispensations,
knew--the experimentality of life. But our pride is rank and noxious
when we imagine we know this truth as well as the saints and sages knew
it, if not better. To be sure, we know it more widely in a certain
sense than they did, having discovered with the aid of science many
exterior illustrations of it which were unknown to them. We know it
with a wide and superficial immediacy. But they knew it with a profound
immediacy.
They knew the basal experimentality of life because they knew it was
basifixed. They knew the depth and height of change because they knew
the permanency below and above it. They knew the Permanency that does
the experimenting, the Changeless that enables us to know change. Of
this we have lost hold. And the main source of our modern spiritual
catastrophe, the cancerous growth that disguises itself and induces
the thronging diagnosticians to limit their attention to secondary
symptoms and remedies, is the ancient evil in modern form, blind
spiritual pride. The modern imagination has more and more lost hold of
the changing Permanency as the modern mind has more and more developed
its arrogance of change, its pride of immediacy. This very pride keeps
us from seeing the permanence of the law of pride and humility in
human nature. We patronise the wise men of old--confident writers on
“personal religion” in American magazines patronise them--assuming that
when they signalised spiritual pride as the _permanent_ root of human
ills, they were speaking only for an age and not for all time, at any
rate not for our time.
This pride means a false emphasis on “personal religion” over against
institutional religion. “Personal religion” now comprises a vast
variety of creeds. Many of these are asserted by their proponents,
sometimes angrily asserted, to be not religious at all, but they really
are religious in the broadest or lowest extension of this term. A few
years ago newspaper reporters discovered in a western state a not
insane man who claimed that the earth was flat. As to the long story
of geodesy, he said it meant little to him, for he had “a science of
my own.” Nowadays many a person has in the same way “a religion of
my own.” But this phenomenon, unlike the other, is too popular just
at present to have any comic news-value. It would start a public
laugh only in the thirteenth or, who knows, in the thirtieth century.
To-day many persons who religiously swallow the authority of science,
who religiously believe that Einsteinism is true and wish they could
understand what it means, reject all authority in religion.
They say that Jesus himself rejected it, and patronise Him as the first
of the moderns. They isolate Him from the religious organism to which
he was deeply attached; which shaped his principles no less than his
images; and through which indeed, during the long preceding centuries
of Hebrew history, his sublime nature itself had been (if this may be
said without irreverence) gradually “evolved.” Thus they affix to Him a
singularity no less miraculous, no less disruptive of the laws of human
nature and history, than that attributed to him by popular orthodoxy;
but far better calculated to debauch with blind pride the souls of his
worshippers or, as the case may be, his modern rivals or superseders.
They have learned from Him, not wisely but too well, that the Sabbath
was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. They hug the false
inference which he so sternly and constantly rejected, namely, that
man was made to disuse instead of to use the Sabbath, to win spiritual
maturity by discarding institutional religion. Jesus discarded
revolution. He continued and reformed a great religious tradition. He
made it capable of feeding itself--and us--upon the best of Greek as
well as Hebrew thought. He made it nobly catholic in the very process
of nourishing his individual soul upon it. He was crucified because
he was more deeply true to it than the modernists, as well as the
loyalists, of his day. Our modernists, however, deem that his hand was
raised and pierced to direct us to bite the hand that fed us.
The gnawing pride of religious individualism cloaks itself in the
assumption that the individual has transferred his reverence _entire_
from the traditional deity to “the present; God” as Emerson called
Him, or to the present Reality as successors of Emerson often prefer
to call It. But actually that transfer is never accomplished. The
reverence never arrives entire. Always some of it, often most of it,
leaks away unnoticed during the transshipment. Therefore this exchange
is never attempted by the greatest men of religion, nor advocated
by the truest realists or humanists. Jesus and Socrates both found
the “Father’s business” in the Temple, in the moral and imaginative
organism of orthodox religion, and never more so than when they were
doing their best to cleanse it of thieves. They were wrongly accused
of an intention for which some of our modern spiritual leaders have
been wrongly praised, the intention of destroying the Temple in order
to rebuild it on their own insights, as it were in three days. No
doubt all men of deepest insight are strongly tempted, in their first
maturity, by this pseudo-divine impatience with tradition. They yearn
to show immediately that the Power within them is more reliable than
the “pinnacle of the Temple.”[26] But they perceive the spiritual
pride of this yearning, its tempting of God, and they forthwith
school themselves to the divine patience. They recognise that the
Temple is essential for _their own_ fullest development. They do not
patronise it diplomatically for the public welfare while deprecating
it for themselves. They see that the fullest type of spiritual life
is attainable only through the unbroken “tension,”[27] the constant
critical interaction, between personal and institutional religion,
between individual inspiration and a rich tradition. They know that
their own humility, like that of the multitudes whom they influence,
must grow and bear fruit in the kind of temple that George Herbert saw,
the temple which is at once, and mysteriously, within and without. In
short, the greatest leaders of the spirit faced the pride of spiritual
immediacy and subdued it.
But Emerson did not. He only partly faced it, and he very considerably
succumbed to it.[28] He fell, and modern spirituality fell with him.
The greatness of this default in so great a man is admitted very
reluctantly by those of us who have loved him from youth. When they
were beginning life, he told them what a happy day it was for the youth
when he discovered that “the above” was the same as “the within.” He
did not tell them that “the within,” on the same happy day, begins to
leak down through an unseen pride to “the below.” He told them that “I
the imperfect adore my own Perfect.” He was not careful to explain to
them how very imperfect is this Perfect--or else, how scantily It is my
own.
Emerson’s effect on young men is most significant, I think, in the
case of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s Oxford days, Newman impressed
him with a sense of the laborious difficulty of spiritual truth. But
that sense was considerably soothed and weakened, I think, by the
cheery, confident voice that came to him from across the Atlantic;
throwing into contrast the melancholy beauty of Newman’s voice and
relegating its religious message to a past which, however alluring
in its beautiful melancholy, seemed now so utterly past. Arnold lost
Newman for religion while continuing to patronise him for beauty and
culture. He did not discern how greatly Newman, on account of his fresh
and profound humility, joined with a mind unsurpassed in the modern
age for analytic penetration, was needed by this age as a “friend and
aider of those who would live in the spirit.” Therefore Arnold left
the way open for T. H. Huxley to persuade the oncoming generation, in
the blundering pride of his naturalistic sophistry, that Newman’s way
with truth was in the main sophistic.[29] I am very far from wishing to
disparage Arnold, as I am accused of having done in previous papers.
It is just because he was so great and influential a critic, such a
fine stronghold of humanism in the midst of the nineteenth century,
that his deficiency in this matter is costly to-day. His tendency to a
certain superior ease, not free from presumption, in his treatment of
religious truth was doubtless due in good measure to the influence of
Emerson. Hence when Arnold came to America in the eighteen-eighties he
could tell us how matchless Emerson was as a modern “friend and aider
of those who would live in the spirit” without telling us how deficient
this friend was in the pertinent and prime requisite of spiritual
humility.
Just here, perhaps, some readers are priding themselves on never
having cared for Emerson, in other words on never having been young.
But maybe they have absorbed some jots and tittles of his toxin
by way of Arnold and the college professors, or of Huxley and the
scientific metaphysicians, or of Whitman and the current poets.
By de-personalising his individualism in a rare and not unspecious
fashion, Emerson could send it seeping through an extraordinary variety
of individuals. To-day wherever two or three, or two or three hundred,
are gathered together in the name of God (modern)--in the name of the
Over-Soul or the Under-Soul, of Reality, Nature, Humanity, Hinduism,
Good Will, Progress, World Peace, World Religion, Individual Freedom,
yes and even Enlightened Disillusion--there is Emerson in the midst
of them. To be sure it is but a shade, a distorted shade, of the
master. Yet it reminds us what a crooked, widening shadow is thrown
forward through the years by a hidden grain of pride in a master mind.
Emerson’s spiritual pride was veiled by his personal modesty, which
was the tolerant deference and flexibility of the modern spirit at its
brightest. His luminous nobility of nature and the underlying soundness
of his humanism[30] enabled him to give unexampled force and radiance
to the proud errors he inherited from the eighteenth-century naturists
and the great Romantic poets. It was he, above all, who made naturism
seem deeply natural and Romantic irresponsibility nigh divine.
He disclaimed responsibility for his words, yet spoke as one
having authority. He claimed the moody freedom of a Romantic poet
together with the plain weight of a prose prophet of common sense.
He consummated the noxious amalgam that his predecessors in prose
and verse had prepared: he _solidly_ confused poetic immediacy of
experience with the immediate presence of Truth. Admirers, half
perceiving his confusion, have wholly excused it on the ground of his
unique constitution--just as he did! If gold rust, what will iron do?
If Emerson could be vitally yet complacently muddled, what of the
Emersonians? If the modern outlook is now confused and unhappy, one
reason is that the chief modern sage was confused and at the same time
spiritually proud.
The balefulness of his confusion was concealed from him by the subtle
mingling of his pride into his modesty. He was too modest to believe
that his individual outlook could become a public tragedy, and too
proud to doubt that his individual inspirations were universally valid.
He attributed these too much to deity and not at all to Rousseau. He
disavowed all predecessors and all disciples. In his study or along the
woodpath he deemed he was alone with the Soul; never realising how much
the thoughts that arose in him were determined by the souls who had
influenced his soul and by the souls whom his soul wanted to influence.
His solitude of the Soul was thronged with unacknowledged souls. He
dislimned them all into deity. His religious predecessors had loudly
demolished one religious form after another to leave no barrier, so
they thought, between the soul and God. He, the last great Protestant,
serenely set fire to the limits of the soul itself. With suave and
awful presumption, he melted all souls into God. The outcome is a new
barrier between them and Him, a cool, unobtrusive glaze of pride.
The modern pride that Emerson helped so much to crystallise, wears a
lucent, modest air. It looks like a lens turned directly upon Reality.
But it has the opaqueness of a mirror and is turned upon ourselves--if
only by the grace of God we could see our reflections in it. Its
surface seems plain, undramatic, when compared with the ancient modes
of _hubris_,--until one perceives therein the swarming shapes and
conflicts of the modern tragedy.
Dramatic enough is the way this pride, during the past two hundred
years, has worked out cogently from its religious centre to its secular
circumference, in recent years with catastrophic speed. In religion
it has meant more and more a blind emphasis upon the _immediacy_ of
spiritual values--as though their close presence to Everyman were
the same, or almost the same, as his real possession of them. Modern
religionists have debased the great doctrine of the Immanence of God
and, therewith, the doctrines of divine love, the brotherhood of man,
the goodness of the human heart, and the “positiveness” of morality.
The results for Everyman are now glaring.
Deity, from Everyman’s modern viewpoint, is fast disappearing into
human nature; or into that mystic conglomerate of man and the universe
which is either called Nature or, as Mark Twain might say, is “the same
gentleman under another name.” New names are being invented for It
daily by pseudo-science. Advanced Protestant theology lies at the proud
foot of this conqueror. Forgetting that modern religion at the first
did help to wound herself, the more conservative type of theist blames
science for harming religion. The up-to-date theist blames religion
for not equalling the flight of science, unaware how terribly religion
has maimed her wing with pride. A common type of minister deprecates
the spread of atheism while confidently advocating the very doctrine
that fosters it. If he is shrewd enough to glimpse his dilemma, he
can justify himself with Emersonian blandness by pointing out that
the abuse of an excellent idea is not a good ground for the disuse
of it--the excellent idea being a conceited, facile, and slippery
sentiment of divine immanence.
This immanentism has proudly pawed down holy truths to the everyday
level of Everyman. And he, finding that when thus muddied they sour
the daily bread of his happiness, is now rejecting them wholesale;
thereby exhibiting the destructive aspect of that divine justice, that
relentless Love of Perfection, which his pastors have hidden behind
a gross version of the divine love for men. Our religious leaders,
announcing promiscuously the perfect love that casteth out fear--a
doctrine which the holiest saints approached with awe--have succeeded
in casting out the true fear that belongs with our imperfect love. They
have speciously disparaged “negative” in favour of “positive” morality.
With Emersonian impatience they have shrugged at the _definite_ moral
precepts of the ages, as trite and rather forbidding antiquities, while
advocating an _indefinite_ moral sentiment, as the prime discovery and
panacea of the modern age. They have slurred the divine negation, the
“Everlasting No,” which, acting down through the poor human conscience,
constitutes the great _unadulterable_ factor of positive morals and, in
the end, the most positive provision against positive unhappiness.
This proud religious blindness has opened the highway for blind secular
naturism. The one has played into the hands of the other; the blind
has led the blind toward the pit of spiritual anarchy. Consider, for
example, the quick succession and interplay of these three phases of
the modern spiritual drama: first, the Protestant notion of immediate
justification by faith in Christ; second, the humanitarian notion of
justification by faith in mankind; and third, the cynical notion of
justification by faith in nothing--except primitive desire. In the
third act of the tragedy, as in the other two, the leading motive is a
specious emotional immediacy fed by subconscious pride. For the Nothing
that modern sceptics are devoted to (its finest dramatic representation
is in the works of Thomas Hardy) includes a concupiscent Something
by the exercise of which, so they feel, we may be saved--or at least
vitally damned. Hence our very disillusion to-day is flown with pride.
Our current disillusionists, not humbled by the fact that the modern
rejection of moral severity is eventuating in a febrile weakness of
the vital human appetites, continue to disparage that severity and to
advocate, as our only hope, a romantic resurgence of those appetites.
They yearn for a flood-tide between rotten banks; fancying, apparently,
that “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains,”
immediately. They hymn a spurious Primitive as their Protestant
forbears hymned a spurious Christ.[31]
Consider, too, the dramatic inevitability with which the “psychists”
and the “legislationists,” so to call them, have come swarming more
and more into the breaches that modern religion has made in the human
conscience. The psychists are proudly animated with the old Sophist
hope of reducing that mysterious citadel and of rearranging the
whole soul on modern rational lines. They are teaching the oncoming
generation to _think_ in a fashion indicated in the following remark
made to me by a thoughtful youth: “When a fellow tries to do the right
thing, he has a satisfaction that seems at the time very real; but of
course, as soon as he _thinks_, he sees that this satisfaction isn’t
real at all.” At a recent American congress of thinkers, one of them
explained how religion and morality are being taken over and saved, in
so far as worth saving, by psychology. He was confident of tucking the
setting sun, quite immediately, into his grandstand.
The legislationists, on the other hand, would save the fading rays
by immediate public measures, national and international. In a world
dim with unprecedented bloodshed, misty with subtle suspicion and
self-seeking, and darkening ever more with impiety and lust, they would
produce by political or social machinery the lights of peace, good
will, purity, and temperance. They are busily wiring a twilight world
for incandescent goodness. They would arrest and soften with electric
legislation the awful working-out of divine laws. The leader in this
project is an ideal figure of Columbia. But under grave scrutiny the
radiant figure reveals a good many lineaments of her who was the leader
of the seven deadly sins. One recalls with something of a shiver the
queenly “progress” of Lucifera in her pleasant twilight--oblivious of
the dead men’s bones thick under foot and the “foggy mist” all along
the way.[32]
Columbia, the progressive modern spirit, is too proud to face the
fearful carnage of human values and the foggy confusion of principles
brought about by the modern _heart_. Kindly persons after criticising
various modern ills, take comfort by concluding that, after all, the
modern age is sound and right at heart. But here, precisely, is the
source of all those ills. The modern heart has gone wrong. The chief
leaders of imagination during the past two centuries assumed that
modernity meant a real change of heart, a change for the better; that
owing to the long schooling of the past and the new lights of the
present, the human heart could now afford to relax its old combat
with itself. This assumption is parroted to-day, with varying degrees
of subtlety, by preachers, philosophers, educators, youngsters,
legislationists, artists, Rotarians, and disillusionists. At the same
time they are demonstrating conclusively that the old human heart,
unregenerate, is still with us. They are showing its ancient and
amazing capacity for inventing new ways of disguising old Duty,--the
kind of duty that means a daily, painful, but not inglorious battle
within the heart itself. They are showing us how inglorious human
thought and art can become, how shallow, cheap, and in the end
intolerable, when the human _heart_ has become “too proud to fight.”
III
This catastrophe, when fully recognised, can point us to fresh hope
and faith. We may win afresh the old faith which goes hand in hand
with a certain disillusion, a certain kind of scepticism, foreign to
our current disillusionists. This faith, says Newman, “looks for no
essential improvements or permanent reformations in the dispensation
of those precious gifts which are ever pure in their origin, ever
corrupted in man’s use of them.”[33]
So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has not produced
the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a good many earlier ages.
“My _ideas_ of life have become so rotten,” thus a Pragmatised and
Behaviourised youngster confessed to me, “that I wonder my _life_ is
not rottener.” He looked startled when I told him to give his ideas
time. However, it appeared that, partly in spite of and partly by means
of his marked self-consciousness, he had attained to some veracity
of inward unhappiness. We may hope that his case is quite typical.
In other words, our self-conscious modern age has provided a wide
and unprecedented demonstration of the fact that the chief danger to
human happiness is immorality of _ideas_. Previous ages have done
lip-homage to high moral standards while grossly violating them in
practice. The modern age has proudly assumed that it has grown far
beyond such hypocrisy. Meanwhile it has developed the subtler hypocrisy
of cultivating depraved and specious ideas while shrinking from the
_full_ consequences of them in conduct. The result is that life looks
dully undramatic, culture and art degenerate, and thoughtful persons
who are harmless enough in their acts have a real misery in their
spirit. Surely, therefore, we have now a chance to learn afresh the
_inward_ relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that “precious
gift” which we have so bitterly corrupted, the law of humility. We may
now perceive that the universal proverb “Pride goes before a fall” is
no less applicable to our age than to the old aristocratic ages; and
that, far from being merely a maxim of external prudence, it is the
folk-sign of an _inward_ region of cause and effect that we, with all
our self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated.
We may find again the inward and yet superhuman rigour of the Laws. We
may learn that they are supernatural without being ever _un_natural;
always immanent in us and yet, in a mystery beyond the reach of our
science, always transcendent of us. Browning’s Paracelsus, embodying
the modern mixture of romance and science, complained in regard to his
own catastrophe that “God’s intimations fail in clearness rather than
in force.” Precisely so; but there is no use in whining about it. The
human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can, Laws which we did
not invent; which no man, except when stupified by pride--either his
own pride or the pride of his teachers, relentlessly visited upon him
to the third and fourth generation--can conceive to be merely human
inventions.
Those Laws fail in human clearness, certainly, but not in force. They
came to send a sword into the earth, more than Peace. They have been
the cause of agony and misery for millions of innocent or ignorant
people; and no man has succeeded in making clear the full ground of
this. From the standpoint of human justice, those Laws are fearfully
general, vague, and incalculable. Yet our truest happiness, and indeed
our truest originality, depend on a constant effort to elucidate them
and apply them afresh to each new generation and individual. This task
is of course, in a worldly sense, an impossible one. New sins and
difficulties, or rather old sins and difficulties in inexhaustibly new
modes, appear at every step. Salvation for the individual never becomes
easier; and the social frame is so built, beneath our building, that
it cannot be saved. Old seers and new scientists are true to a deep
human instinct in prophesying that some day the world will be destroyed
by fire, collision, or decay; will “dissolve like an insubstantial
pageant faded.” Our surest Comfort, at the opposite pole from modern
comfortableness and not divisible from right conduct, is in knowing
that those Laws, while “ever corrupted by man’s use of them” are indeed
“precious gifts ever pure in their origin.” Clough, that fine religious
humanist who faced the modern situation without blinking, had a sound
humility when he wrote:
“I steadier step
When I recall
That though I slip
Thou dost not fall.”
The fresh humility that we need must be built up patiently by religion
and by humanism; each working in its own way and carefully respectful
of the other, even (perhaps _especially_) when these two approaches are
equally employed by one person.
Religion is normally theistic, and therewith mediatorial and
sacramental. Otherwise she is not catholic and, _in the long run_,
loses her right humility. This should be evident enough from the long
history of religion, Christian and non-Christian, past and present.
Theism decays continually, but by reason of its own sins rather than
the virtues of opposing doctrines. Pantheism, deism, and all the others
flourish in its decadencies, more or less parasitically, but cannot
take deep root in human humility. I do not mean that theism is true
because it works, but that it works because at its best it is our
truest mode of conceiving the Eternal One. Voltaire’s epigram, “God
created man in His own image and man promptly returned the compliment,”
is superb and lasting because the doctrine here parodied is lasting
and sublime. The parody is catholically critical because the doctrine
itself is deeply catholic. Modernism, when strictly criticising
catholic doctrine, is helpful; when frankly rejecting it, respectable;
when blandly attempting to reduce it to poetry, baneful--baneful in
its hidden pride--and, I trust, hopeless. Not similarly hopeless
is Latin Fundamentalism; by which I mean the attempt of Latinised
theology, no matter in what branch of the Christian church it appears,
to define religious mysteries with a literalism that is too precise
to be accurate. Most hopeful is the work of a small and quiet group
of theologians, belonging to various churches, who are resuming and
carrying forward the thwarted hope of the great Christian humanists
of the Renaissance. They are striving for a non-revolutionary, a firm
and organic, development of Christian doctrine; that is, for a real
catholicity. It is they, studious, ethical, open-eyed, and humble who
are rebuilding the foundations of the Temple.
Yet the Temple, or let us say “the church militant here upon earth,”
is at its best inadequate. The man of good sense has always found and
will always find it necessary to take the church with a grain of salt,
even though the salt loseth its savour without the church. Good sense
is a distinct foundation; and humanism is built upon it. Humanism
may be theistic or _non_-theistic; it is unsound when it is anything
between. When non-theistic, it falls short of the full truth that is
in the human imagination. The pre-eminent example of course is the
sublime religious humanism of the Buddha. However, if it be true that
the primitive Hindu pantheon had 330,000,000 gods, doubtless the Buddha
had several million good reasons for not being a theist. Theism at
its worst fosters, as nothing else can, the proud imaginations of the
human heart. Humanism, which in one of its most important functions is
a criticism of religion, is essential for sound religious humility.
Religion needs the humility derivable from the consideration that
happiness may be obtained without religion. Humanism is the study
and practice of the principles of human happiness _uncomplicated_ by
naturistic dogmas on the one side and religious dogmas on the other.
When religion, as at present, has degraded “God’s love” and abolished
“God’s anger,” humanism will insist that the former doctrine (though
at its best supreme) is no less _metaphorical_ than the latter, and
not less subject to unconscious superstition. When religion assists
irreligion in softening God’s laws, humanism will insist that a
rediscovery of their severity is essential for right humility and
happiness.
Just here I am forced to express the hope that those estimable critics,
Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Walter Lippmann, will at one point counteract
each other’s influence upon the public. Mr. Eliot, aiming toward
humane religion, tends to reduce humanism to a mere balance of mind,
a ghost of the Arnoldian culture, subservient to anglo-catholicism.
Mr. Lippmann, aiming toward religious humanism, tends to reduce deity
to “an ideal of the human personality,”[34] a rather ghostly ally of
practical morals. Each is somewhat swayed by the modern desire for
immediate measures.
Providentially, however, a more catholic attitude has already been
erected by two older critics, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor
Irving Babbitt--the two most potent and distinguished personalities,
though not the finest writers, that have so far appeared in English
literature of the twentieth century. The one, a devout Roman Catholic
of England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of
humanism. The other, a rigorous moral humanist of New England, has
indirectly done much for the best interests of religion. Their
extraordinary scholarship is guided by a sound humility of spirit. In
their writings, neither ventures further than his equipment warrants
into the other’s field, and they do not contradict each other in
fundamental points. They agree in the conviction that now, for the sake
of religion itself, the way of humanism must be clearly discriminated
from the way of religion. Mr. Babbitt has urged that religion at its
best is far above, and at its worst far below, a sound humanism. Baron
von Hügel has urged that Christians should face now, more frankly and
fully than they have ever faced before, the fact that the ethical or
humane way has a distinct and _divinely ordained_ validity of its own
for those who cannot honestly follow the religious way; and that the
full health of each way depends upon the health of the other.
This truly catholic attitude, which is essential for modern humility,
is not palatable to the pseudo-catholicity of the modern mind. We
have fancied, especially in America, that expert reason aided by
democratic tolerance could soon discover the underlying relationships
between the different ways of salvation, thus federating these in
a single “concern,” a sort of efficient successor and substitute
for the universal infallible church of the Middle Ages. Behind this
enterprise stands the overweening assumption of modern philosophy
that the universe itself is a single organism with a large variety
of inter-assimilable aspects, such as religion and science, love and
morals, good and evil, God and Nature. Tennyson would not have been so
shocked by his rediscovery of the perennial fact that God and Nature
are at strife if he had not been so infected by the modern notion that
they ought not to be,--that properly they belong in a universal banking
trust whose members, however they may quarrel on the surface, never
suffer a real severance of business relations. Nor would our current
disillusionists feel so badly about the inevitable dissolution of that
trust if their grandfathers had not credited it so heavily. Let us
now recognise pride as the grand sponsor of that trust--the pride of
unity and immediacy, or of universal “continuity” as the late T. E.
Hulme would say. Let us humbly admit that the universe is faulted,
geologically speaking, deeper and higher than our knowing. What of
ultimate plan and unity its strata may have, God only knows.
Our youths who have learned to smile with a weary superior air at
the traditional division of reality into God, Man, and Nature, would
breathe more freely and begin again to taste the vital zest of the
universal drama, if we would now teach them that this traditional
division is _less naïve_ than the theory of universal continuity; is
better grounded in universal human experience; and, above all, is more
truly accordant with the profound division which any thinking man
may find within himself to-day when he is sufficiently self-reliant
and experimental to plumb beneath the surfaces where our ephemeral
psycho-physicisms weave and flutter. Recently humanism, in its attempt
to fulfil and deepen the experimentality of the modern spirit, has
of necessity placed its chief emphasis upon that inward division. It
has insisted that the _opposition_ between the higher and lower wills
within us, whether they be called “divine” and “natural” or what not,
is essentially inexplicable by expert reason and is nevertheless, from
the present standpoint of human happiness, the most important feature
of the universe arrived at by free and full experimentation.
This humane _dualism_ strikes at the very heart of modern pride,
the pride of spiritual _monism_. It sets a true immediacy over
against a false immediacy. It assigns a central value to the paradox
established by the immediate experience of Everyman when he tries
(in the terminology of common sense) to be “at one with himself” by
keeping his “better self” above his “worser self.” It depreciates
the expert reasonings and romantic emotions which, overriding that
vital paradox of good sense, would leap immediately at spiritual
unity and continuity. Consequently the humane dualism, more than any
other doctrine of recent criticism, has met with angry rejection or
obfuscating comment. A good example of the latter is afforded by
a generous and intelligent reviewer who comments as follows upon
the dualistic humanism of Milton: “Milton, after all, had not read
Darwin; we have ... Milton’s energetic dualism was based on religious
conceptions which are genuinely outlived; the power behind his allegory
of the soul was his belief that the world was shaped and created for
mankind; and, conceiving of ourselves now so much more humbly than he
did, we cannot set our lives on such a stage.... We cannot invent an
opposition we do not feel.”[35]
The above, in a representative modern fashion, confuses modesty and
humility. The modern modest dogma that the world was not “shaped and
created for mankind” has shown itself, when all its implications are
considered, no less deficient in real humility than the conceited
belief that the world was created for human comfortableness. This
belief was far more radically repudiated by Milton than by us. Only
with the aid of modern pride can we be sure that his _basic_ religious
ideas have been “_genuinely_ outlived” and that we, having read Darwin,
conceive of ourselves “much more _humbly_ than he did.” He, to be
sure, was no adept either in Darwinian or in Emersonian modesty. As a
man among men he had strong intellectual and even personal pride. But
above it he had true spiritual humility; which may consist with, and
derive support from, that virtue too much obscured by modern modesty,
namely “self-esteem, founded on justice and right, well managed.”
This kind of self-reliance enabled Milton to assign full value to
the moral division he found within himself. His “energetic dualism,”
as the reviewer calls it, his dramatic sense of the _real_ opposition
between the nature of lust, pride, and Chaos and the nature of purity,
humility, and Peace, was not “based on” transient religious concepts.
It was “based on” the duality he found at the centre of himself as well
as at the centre of European experience, Christian and pagan. He would
have found it also at the centre of ancient Buddhism, if he had known
this as we know it to-day. But, says my reviewer, “we cannot invent an
opposition we do not feel.” Very true. Nevertheless, with the aid of
right self-esteem and humility, with a patient critical reverence for
what is best in ourselves and in accumulated tradition, European and
Oriental, we may not only “feel” but realise, in thought and conduct,
an opposition we did not invent.
Only thus can we proceed to a spiritual use of our scientific modesty.
Over against the self-flattery of religious superstition, science
has revealed the indifference of a vast physical universe. Here is
wholesome seed for a fresh humility. But so far its growth in the
modern spirit is blighted; blighted much less by the old superstitions
which the modern religionist enjoys attacking than by the new
superstition which he himself has fostered--the bastard ideal of love.
This ideal, religiously derived from an illegitimate mixture of two
fallibles, democracy and St. John, infects to-day the blood of many
who, rejecting St. John and perhaps also democracy, believe loudly in
Sex; or who, tired of Sex also, believe in nothing because it seems
the sole alternative to the spurious all-immanent divinity of modern
love. This love, though masquerading as powerful and strenuous, is
essentially soft. It has succeeded in masking the Cross, not only
the Christian but the universal Cross, in soft flummeries. The hard
universe of science disowns it. And so does the severity of the divine
Laws. If we learn again to revere these in their full severity as we
find it in history (especially recent history) and in ourselves, to bow
before their awful beauty with a love that fears to call itself worthy
of casting out fear, then the outward laws can again become real images
of the inward Laws.
Outward nature with her unfathomable self-subsistence, her rigorous
detachment from the egoistic delusions of the human heart, and her
firm satisfactions for those who seek only to know and follow her
laws, can again be seen as a real though very distant representation
of the Divine Nature itself. The dual nature of man, freed from the
intervolving vapours of old metaphysical dualisms and new metaphysical
monisms, guarded from insidious loves, and cultivated with renewed
moral vigour, can be seen again as the isthmus between Time and
Eternity: our firm and fruitful land between unfathomable, unmixing,
but not unkindly seas.
FOOTNOTES
[25] Recently I attended on successive Sundays an extremely Catholic
and an extremely Protestant celebration of the Holy Communion. The
solemnity of the former was injured by the priest’s sermon, which
evinced the pumping process, the “defence-mechanism,” referred to
above. At the other service, the mound of bread-cubes that appeared on
the table below the pulpit, alongside a pitcher of grape-juice, was
suggestive, I fear, of the above mentioned junk-heaps. For the minister
interrupted his readings from old sacramental liturgies to explain how
much the ceremony rightly meant to his sect, and how much it wrongly
meant to the Catholics.
[26] Luke IV, 9-13.
[27] This word is borrowed from the late Baron Friedrich von Hügel, in
whose life and writings the truth of it is powerfully and beautifully
illustrated.
[28] His crucial period in early maturity, his “temptation in the
wilderness,” is examined in my article “On Emerson’s ‘Grace’ and
‘Self-Reliance’” in the _New England Quarterly_, Vol. II, No. 1, 1929.
[29] See the essays on Newman, Arnold, and Huxley in Robert Shafer’s
_Christianity and Naturalism_, 1926.
[30] See the chapter on him in Norman Foerster’s _American Criticism_,
1928.
[31] An interesting critique bearing on this subject is “The Modern
Distemper” by Professor Ralph Barton Perry in the _Saturday Review of
Literature_, June 1, 1929.
[32] Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_, Book I, canto 4. This great poetic
fable would be studied in our schools and colleges with deeper emotion
if its application to modern pride were not screened off by modern
pride itself.
[33] From _Parochial and Plain Sermons_, 1880, Vol. II, No. XXXI.
[34] _A Preface to Morals_, p. 326.
[35] From a review of my book _The Cycle of Modern Poetry_ in the
_Times Literary Supplement_ (London), June 20, 1929.
_Religion Without Humanism_
T. S. ELIOT
I must rely, in these few pages, upon a brief summary of the
limitations within which I believe humanism must work, which I
published in the _Hound and Horn_, June, 1929. In that paper I stated
my belief that humanism is in the end futile without religion. Here I
wish to put forward briefly a view which seems to me equally important,
the counterpart of the other, and one which ought to be more welcome to
humanists. Having called attention to what I believe to be a danger,
I am bound to call attention to the danger of the other extreme: the
danger, a very real one, of _religion without humanism_.
I believe that the sceptic, even the pyrrhonist, but particularly the
humanist-sceptic, is a very useful ingredient in a world which is no
better than it is. In saying this I do not think that I am committing
myself to any theological heresy. The ideal world would be the ideal
Church. But very little knowledge of human nature is needed to convince
us that hierarchy is liable to corruption, and certainly to stupidity;
that religious belief, when unquestioned and uncriticised, is liable
to degeneration into superstition; that the human mind is much lazier
than the human body; and that the communion of saints in Tibet is of
a very low order. If we cannot rely, and it seems that we can never
rely, upon adequate criticism from within, it is better that there
should be criticism from without. But here I wish to make a capital
distinction: criticism, infidelity and agnosticism must, to be of
value, be _original_ and not inherited. Orthodoxy must be traditional,
heterodoxy must be original. The attitude of Voltaire has value,
because of its place in time; the attitude of Renan has value, in its
historical perspective; Anatole France I can only consider as a man who
came at the most unfortunate date for his own reputation--too late to
be a great sceptic, and too soon to be a great sceptic. There must be
more orthodoxy before there can be another Voltaire. And precisely I
fear lest humanism should make a tradition of dissent and agnosticism,
and so cut itself off from the sphere of influence in which it is most
needed.
For there is no doubt in my mind that contemporary religious
institutions are in danger from themselves; that they have with few
exceptions lost the “intellectual,” except that pernicious kind of
intellectual who adopts dogma merely because doubt is out of date.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in America. All the religious forms
which have some ancestry, and many which have none, flourish there;
but among persons whom I have known, there is hardly one who had any
connection (not to say any conviction) with any of them.
But America is not isolated in this respect; it merely shows us under
a magnifying glass what occurs everywhere. The two dangers to which
religion is exposed are apparent everywhere--and they are both cases
for which “humanism” or “culture” might be called in: _petrified
ecclesiasticism_, and _modernism_.
The great merit of the Catholic Church, from the worldly point of view,
is its catholicity. That is to say, it is obvious that every religion
is effectively limited by the racial characters of the people who
practise it, and that a strictly racial or national religion is certain
to hold many irrelevances and impurities, from lack of an outside
standard of criticism. When the Catholic Faith really is catholic, the
aberrations of one race will be corrected by those of another. But it
is obviously very difficult even for the Roman Church, nowadays, to
be truly catholic. The embarrassment of temporal powers, the virulence
of racial and national enthusiasms, are enormous centrifugal forces.
The great majority of English speaking people, or at least the vast
majority of persons of British descent; half of France, half of
Germany, the whole of Scandinavia, are outside of the Roman communion:
that is to say, the Roman Church has lost some organic parts of the
body of modern civilisation. It is a recognition of this fact which
makes some persons of British extraction hesitate to embrace the Roman
communion; and which makes them feel that those of their race who have
embraced it have done so only by the surrender of some essential part
of their inheritance and by cutting themselves off from their family.
But if one feels that the culture of the Roman Catholic Church to-day
is imperfect--and also in danger of splitting up into various local
and national bigotries and political factions which will retain only
the name and the observances of catholicism--one cannot get any
satisfaction from what happens outside of that church either. The Roman
Church in America has little contact with some of the most valuable
elements in American culture; it not only lacks humanism, but is in
danger of adding vulgarity. In England it is negligible. But both in
England and America, Protestantism is in still worse case. It can be,
and usually is, equally vulgar; it can be equally narrow and bigoted;
with the alternative that when it is not narrow and bigoted it is
liberal, sloppy, hypocritical and humanitarian. The Roman Church is
dangerous in one direction; the Protestant Churches are dangerous in
two directions.
I have already said what I think of humanism without religion; I
respect it, but believe it to be sterile. Religion without humanism
produces the vulgarities and the political compromises of Roman
Catholicism; the vulgarities and the fanaticism of Tennessee; it
produces Mrs. MacPherson; and it produces liberal uplift; and it
produces the Bishop of Birmingham. For it is the chief point of this
short paper, that religion without humanism produces the opposite
and conflicting types of religious bigotry (liberalism in religion
is a form of bigotry). We have Cardinal O’Connell; the late W. J.
Bryan; and we have the cultivated divines of the most radical wing
of Unitarianism. The sum of _disjecta membra_ is completed by the
humanists.
I have examined several popular theological works by Anglican
clergy of the liberal school.[36] It would I am sure be difficult
to convince any of these worthy people that they were humanitarian
without being humanist. Humanitarians (and among them we must include
anti-humanitarians like Dean Inge, a sentimentalist _à rebours_) are
often highly cultivated people who have read many books; some of them,
in England at least, can read Latin and Greek; the Bishop of Birmingham
took honours in mathematics. Yet in surrendering dogmatic faith they
are at the same time surrendering their humanism. It is from such
people that we hear most about “science and religion”; it is such
people who pay, and lead the flock to pay, that exaggerated devotion to
“science” which the true humanist deplores.
It is curious that whilst on the one hand the liberal theologian tends
to pay homage to an illusory divinity called “science” the advanced
scientist tends to pay homage to an equally vague “religion.” People
seem to suppose that by science yielding points to religion, and
religion yielding points to science, we shall quite soon arrive at a
position of comfortable equilibrium. What will be “real” will be the
technical progress of science, and the material organisation of the
churches: we shall still have professors of physics and we shall still
have clergy, and nobody will lose his job. Scientists and clergy alike
seem to speak nowadays as if they were in terror of the spectre of
unemployment: “I will not make exaggerated claims,” they both seem to
say, “lest I may be discovered to be superfluous.”
But this apparent approximation of science and religion, which we
discover in such theological works as those I have mentioned, and in
such popular scientific works as those of Whitehead and Eddington,
is a delusion. The meeting is a mere cancellation to zero. Nothing
positive is attained by reciprocal surrender. The theologian says “of
course dogma is not truth,” and the scientist says, “of course science
is not truth.” Every one is happy together; and possibly both parties
turn to _poetry_ (about which neither scientist nor theologian knows
anything) and say “_there_ is truth, in the inspiration of the poet.”
The poet himself, who perhaps knows more about his own inspiration than
a psycho-analyst does, is not allowed to reply that poetry is poetry,
and not science or religion--unless he or some of his mistaken friends
produce a theory that Poetry is Pure Poetry, Pure Poetry turning out to
be something else than poetry and thereby securing respect.
Both parties, the liberal theologian and the scientist, are deficient
in humanism. But what is more serious, to my mind, is that the humanist
is deficient in humanism too, and must take his responsibility with
the others. What happens, in the general confusion, is not only that
each party abdicates his proper part, but that he interferes with the
proper part of the others. The theologian is terrified of science, and
the scientist is becoming terrified of religion; whilst the humanist,
endeavouring to pay proper, but not excessive due to both, reels from
side to side. And the world reels with him.
On the following point I speak with diffidence, recognising my lack
of qualification where qualification is severe and exact. Humanism
has much to say of Discipline and Order and Control; and I have
parroted these terms myself. I found no discipline in humanism; only
a little intellectual discipline from a little study of philosophy.
But the difficult discipline is the discipline and training of
emotion; this the modern world has great need of; so great need that
it hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is
only attainable through dogmatic religion. I do not say that dogmatic
religion is justified because it supplies this need--that is just the
psychologism and the anthropocentrism that I wish to avoid--but merely
state my belief that in no other way can the need be supplied. There
is much chatter about mysticism: for the modern world the word means
some spattering indulgence of emotion, instead of the most terrible
concentration and askesis. But it takes perhaps a lifetime merely to
realise that men like the forest sages, and the desert sages, and
finally the Victorines and John of the Cross and (in his fashion)
Ignatius really _mean what they say_. Only those have the right to talk
of discipline who have looked into the Abyss. The need of the modern
world is the discipline and training of the emotions; which neither
the intellectual training of philosophy or science, nor the wisdom of
humanism, nor the negative instruction of psychology can give.
In short, we can use the term Humanism in two ways. In the narrower
sense, which tends always under emphasis to become narrower still, it
is an important part in a larger whole; and humanists, by offering
this part as a substitute for the whole, are lessening, instead
of increasing, its importance; they offer an excuse to the modern
theologian and the modern scientist (only too ready to grasp it) for
_not_ being humanistic themselves, and for leaving humanism to its own
specialists. Humanism can offer neither the intellectual discipline
of philosophy or of science (two different disciplines), nor the
emotional discipline of religion. On the other hand, these other
activities depend upon humanism to preserve their sanity. Without it,
religion tends to become either a sentimental tune, or an emotional
debauch; or in theology, a skeleton dance of fleshless dogmas, or in
ecclesiasticism, a soulless political club. Without it, science can be
merely a process of technical research, bursting out from time to time,
and especially in our time, into sentimental monstrosities like the
Life Force, or Professor Whitehead’s God.
But in the full and complete sense of the word, Humanism is something
quite different from a part trying to pretend to be a whole, and
something quite different from a “parasite” of religion. It can
only be quite actual in the full realisation and balance of the
disciplined intellectual and emotional life of man. For, as I have
said, without humanism both religion and science tend to become other
than themselves, and without religion and science--without emotional
and intellectual discipline--humanism tends to shrink into an atrophied
caricature of itself. It is the spirit of humanism which has operated
to reconcile the mystic and the ecclesiastic in one church; having done
this in the past, humanism should not set itself up now as another
sect, but strive to continue and enlarge its task, labouring to
reconcile and unite all the parts into a whole. It is the humanist who
could point out to the theologian the absurdities of his repudiation,
acceptance, or exploitation of “science,” and to the scientist the
absurdities of his repudiation, acceptance, or exploitation of
religion. For when I say “reconcile,” I mean something very different
from the dangerous and essentially anti-humanistic adventures of the
Bishop of Birmingham or Professor Whitehead. And let us leave Einstein
alone, who has his own business to attend to.
As I believe I am writing chiefly for those who know or think they
know, what “humanism” means, I have not in this paper attempted any
definition of it. I take it that the reader thinks he knows what it
means, and that he will understand that I am putting before him the
difference between what I think he thinks it means and what I think I
think it means.
I have just one note to add, which is the preface to an extensive
sequel. I believe that at the present time the problem of the
unification of the world and the problem of the unification of the
individual, are in the end one and the same problem; and that the
solution of one is the solution of the other. Analytical psychology
(even if accepted far more enthusiastically than I can accept it) can
do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce
unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political,
and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce
the great society with an aggregation of human beings who are not units
but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs. The problem of
nationalism and the problem of dissociated personalities may turn out
to be the same. The relevance of this paragraph to what precedes it
will, I hope, appear upon examination.
FOOTNOTES
[36] E.g., _Should Such a Faith Offend?_, by the Bishop of Birmingham;
_I Believe in God_, by Maude Royden; _The Impatience of a Parson_, by
H. R. L. Sheppard.
_The Plight of Our Arts_
FRANK JEWETT MATHER, Jr.
I
Any expression of a humanistic society through the arts depends upon
the acceptance by the artist of some sort of central authority. The
authority is not that of official organisations or written codes; it is
rather that of approved traditional ideals in which both the artist and
the laity believe. In their application to the work of art, such ideals
appear concretely as accredited conventions. In a humanistic society,
these conventions assume no burdensome or arbitrarily authoritative
form. They represent merely a body of successful experience--ways
that have been tried and found good. The accepted convention tells
the artist how he must begin; it does not tell him how he must end.
It does, however, warn him off from any too abrupt breaking with
tradition, and from any too urgent assertion of his individual taste
save in so far as that taste finds sanction in precedent and in opinion
other than his own. Right here is the stone of stumbling. The humanist
artist willingly admits that his own genius is not his final authority.
He checks its impulses by the practice and teaching of other geniuses,
and by the degree of acceptance which its expression commands from
competent criticism and patronage. It is not enough that he shall have
expressed just himself; it matters quite as much that he shall have
communicated himself to a fit public with whom he shares a confidence
in the guiding conventions of his art and in ideals mutually honoured.
On the side of the artist, this relation will indicate a procedure of
delicate adjustment. The accepted conventions of his art and the ideals
of the society for which he works, will of course not fit him precisely
any more than a ready-made suit fits perfectly either the artist or
layman. The practical problem of the humanist artist, then, will be
how far he shall reshape himself to the expectations of his public;
and how far he may change these expectations in a sense favourable to
his individual bent. And this implies chiefly a very superior sort of
judgment and common sense. The humanist artist will feel that it is a
vain thing to have expressed himself, however gorgeously, if nobody
knows that he has expressed himself, and he will also admit that the
mere feelingful and urgent self gains richness and value only when it
is measured by other selves in society.
On the side of society and patronage, a humanised art would imply
in practice a central authority lightly and genially imposed, a
just offishness towards the artists who too overtly repudiated the
tradition, withal a somewhat sceptical hopefulness towards experiment
and innovation, a hospitable desire to understand the artist even when
his communication is obscure, a wish to have its own ideals expressed
through the arts. In short a humanised society co-operates with the
artist to a degree difficult even to imagine to-day. It provides him
with incentive, furnishes most of his æsthetic notions, helps him to
realise himself through opportune criticism and companionship, thus
taking an active part in what is the essential thing--the formation of
his spirit.
So far I have dealt in convenient abstractions which are in part
misleading. I have made the reciprocal relation between the artist and
public too conscious, much more conscious than it has been in history.
I shall presently try to correct the error by appealing to precedents
concretely in given time and place. However, the over-emphasis on
consciousness as producing mutuality between artist and public may
well be pragmatically justified. It seems unlikely that our society
will simply gravitate towards humanism. On the contrary, if we are to
achieve a humanistic social balance, it will apparently be done only
through much taking of thought, on the part of both the enlightened
laity and the intelligent artist. So the analysis I have tried to make
of the mutually helpful relation of artist and layman in a humanised
world, though it overstresses the conscious element in this reciprocity
in seeming disregard of past history, may for that very reason suggest
a programme for history yet to be realised.
Programmes, however, are entirely valueless except as they rest soundly
on dynamic states of mind. Our problem as humanists is to create a
state of mind in which neither artist nor layman will exaggerate
the worth of his idiosyncrasy, nor yet follow the general drift
unthinkingly. We are trying to make a man who is a friendly critic both
of himself and of the society in which he moves, a man who accepts
the growing complexity of living as offering him fascinating and
profitable problems of adjustment. To maintain this hope in the face
of the chicken-and-lobster-eating motorist, the radio fan, the devotee
of the “talkies,” the sycophant artist who bows to base authority, and
the behaviourist artist who admits none but that of his own glands--to
keep the hope of making humanists in the face of the daily American
spectacle requires an audacity which even the Expressionist might
envy. But we contributors to this symposium have actually seen a few
humanists made, have helped a little to make them perhaps; and we are
dealing with spiritual values which transcend ordinary statistics.
A few thousand genuine humanists in America would make our society
humanistic; a hundred humanist painters, sculptors, architects,
musicians, and men of letters would make our art solidly humanistic.
In this hope we keep our tiny banner up beside the hoardings that
promise to beautify our teeth, remove our corns, clothe our bodies
appealingly, or incase the relentlessly exposed legs of our women in
silk as durable as filmy.
II
That adjustment between artist and layman which seems so difficult
to-day, until the seventeenth century and the beginning of modern times
came of itself and in some such fashion as this--it hardly matters
whether the scene be Italy, Spain, France, England, China, Japan,
India, or Persia: in every case the basis was fine craftsmanship.
Pretty much all objects of common use were delicately conceived and
carefully made. The amateur of to-day gladly pays great prices for the
ordinary grave figurines and temple vessels of China, for the horse
trappings of the Scythians, for the common household gear and even the
workman’s tools of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, for the
comfit boxes and carved fobs of feudal Japan, for the peasant furniture
of Brittany and Scandinavia. This general high level of craftsmanship
depended chiefly on the fact that even the humblest craftsman was also
a designer. To the joy of fit execution was joined that of successful
invention.
A very few craftsmen became what we now call artists,--that is made
finer inventions on a more impressive scale, designed a cathedral or a
palace instead of a simple house, decorated an entire chapel instead
of a bride chest or tournament shield, made a bronze statue instead
of a chiselled ink stand. But the line between the craftsman and the
artist was not a sharp one. At Florence a Donatello belonged to the
Stonecutters Guild and officially was merely a very highly esteemed
stonecutter. And every future artist entered upon his career as a
simple apprentice in a craft. The tragedy and frustration so common in
the artists’ career to-day were absent. The apprentice with only a fine
craftsman’s endowment lived out his life contentedly as a craftsman.
But he was free, had he the ability, to become an artist and to achieve
the companionship of princes.
The step from craftsman to artist lay really in the artist’s
intelligent assimilation of greater subject matter or in his fuller
expression of subject matter common to artist and craftsman alike.
Such subject matter was furnished him by his ecclesiastical and
temporal betters; he did not invent it. There was no hardship in this
imposition, for the values of his betters were also his own. There was
a like-mindedness and real co-operation between artist and patron. A
romantic and sentimentally individualistic criticism has challenged
this case. No person who knows either history or human nature, however,
will hold that Giotto was hampered because he had to paint the legends
of Saint Francis and those of the Virgin; that Raphael was great in
spite of the fact that he had to find symbols for syncretic theology;
that Hogarth is belittled by the fact that he so genially followed
the literary, satirical current of his age. A humanistic criticism
will hold, on the contrary, that an essential factor in the greatness
of these artists was that, their themes coming almost ready made,
they were spared the waste and perturbation of so-called original
invention and were free to face in tranquillity their real problem of
transformation and execution.
To recapitulate: the craftsman, until at most a couple of centuries
ago, depended on a universal taste for the well-made thing, while the
artist depended on the taste of a minority, the taste of an aristocracy
with which he himself felt in harmony. The few remaining fine craftsmen
of to-day find no general taste for the well-made thing upon which they
may depend, while the myriad artists of to-day face no aristocracy
whatever, no accepted body of taste whatever, but rather a congeries
of pseudo-aristocracies each with its shifting preferences, which
hardly deserve the name of tastes at all.
How the isolation of the artist with the virtual extinction of the
craftsman has come about is a commonplace of history which need be
recalled here only in its broad lines. The factory within a century
has done away with the craftsman designer. Still earlier the crumbling
of the old aristocracy of birth and religion at once put an end to
community of taste at the top, and gave exaggerated scope to the
already strongly rising ideal of originality and individuality as
highest æsthetic values. A stable and spiritually profitable patronage
ceased and was succeeded by a capricious and heavy handed patronage
from a new wealth undisciplined either by tradition or by fine and
broad personal experience. The artist’s immemorial task of realising
himself in society became almost impossibly difficult. If he were
weak and clever, his resort was to sycophancy; if he were strong and
wise, there was little for him but patience, resignation, and a tragic
hopefulness; if he were strong and unwise, he became a rebel. And the
rebel, in a manner perfectly familiar to the neurologist, built up his
compensations, by which he extolled that isolation which was really
his sore misfortune as his superiority and his advantage, until after
three generations it has become a common conviction among artists that
their proper task is self-expression in a void, that there should be no
desire to communicate and, obviously, no need to be understood.
And just at the moment when the position of the artist was becoming
barely tenable, the number of artists increased inordinately. The
craftsman who didn’t want to go into a factory but wanted to use his
head and hands delicately, had to become an artist, while wholesale
methods of education in the practice of art made the way to becoming an
artist easy to any young person with a modicum of money and diligence.
As if that were not enough, the false glamour thrown about the artist
life by romantic poets and novelists brought new hordes of the unfit to
join the bewildered survivors from the old régime.
III
Now, any going back to the conditions of the Middle Ages or to those of
the Renaissance is of course impossible; but if craftsmanship and art
are again to become normal functions in a helpful social order, the old
formulas, at least in principle, must hold. There will be no generally
fine craftsmanship until most people want well-made things and get
them from craftsmen who design; and the so-called fine arts will have
no general importance until there are many patrons with a common bond
of taste which is sympathetic to most artists. Is there anything which
promises so desirable a reconstruction?
On the side of craftsmanship, I fear nothing is to be expected. The
gallant counter-attacks of a John Ruskin and a William Morris against
modern industrialism show just how much and how little can be gained
from a militant reaction. A hundred passionate spinsters are printing
batiks or glazing pottery in as many æsthetic last ditches, but they
are mostly doing so at the expense of rich and generous eccentrics,
in short are merely subsidised artists disguised as craftsmen. We
are getting better designed things from the factory--the museums are
working usefully to this end--but this reform only enlists a handful
of professional designers, and does nothing to produce the old type
of creative craftsman. In short we probably must say good-bye to the
craftsman save as a picturesque survival, like the man who is skilful
with the rapier or the long bow. All we can hope for is that some
improvement in the general taste, which I think is reasonable to look
for,--since for a century it could hardly have been lower,--may cause a
discriminating demand for better designed factory goods. This of course
leaves the problem of the artist and the craftsman just where it was,
with the sole difference that the passing of the craftsman shuts off
the possibility of any return of the artist to his traditionally best
school, the shop of a good craftsman.
So if there is to be any useful rebuilding, I feel it must proceed
after the very modern precedent of the skyscraper, from the top
down. Much might conceivably be done to produce a more coherent and
intelligent patronage for the fine arts, much is already being done
by museums, art dealers, colleges and universities, and all manner of
art societies. Indeed the increased activity of museums, collectors,
and colleges in behalf of the acquisition and appreciation of fine
works of art has persuaded Mr. R. C. Duffus that we are well launched
on an American Renaissance, and to that effect he has published a very
interesting book. Far be it from me to minimise the importance of
activities in which I have been and am deeply engaged myself. One may
gladly admit that to multiply our art treasures--and for a generation
the multiplication has been astoundingly accelerated--is in itself an
unqualified benefit. But the mere accumulation of great works of art
and much talk about them does not imply understanding of them, and the
question the humanist must raise is always--Are these masterpieces
understood? And how are they understood? Mediæval Rome lay in full
artistic decadence when much of the glory of her old art was visible
on every hand. To understand any nobly conceived work of art, one must
have lived nobly in deed, in imagination, or in both. To own a great
work of art may be a mere counsel of personal vanity; to expound a
work of art, a mere assertion of self-importance. A whole school of
interpretation, which has its faculty, museum, and journal, tears the
work of art from its human context and studies its forms as if these
were ends in themselves. And this sort of teaching is popular. Along
such lines one may make a generation of resolute pedants. For the
humanist such teaching is not merely defective but positively harmful.
On the other side, there is much sound and modest teaching, and the
next generation of art patrons will be far better trained than that
which is passing.
Yet all such useful activities are simply marginal. Without a
predisposition in its visitors, the museum might just as well be
unvisited, since it then has no more dignity or value than the peep
show. It is a proper uneasiness before flattering statistics of
attendance that has rightly induced our museums to inaugurate direct
instruction in appreciation. It is a weakness and limitation of such
teaching that it too often merely foments a diffused interest in art
taken as an entity and not as related to human values generally. For
appreciation really requires a right and balanced attitude towards
life. It was really more important for Florence that her great
citizens, while bowing to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur
that was Rome, wanted a full and honourable life in Florence--it was
really more important, I say, that they cared discriminatingly for the
dignity of their ordinary activities and for the authority of their
faith, than that they cared _specifically_ for painting, sculpture, and
architecture.
In short some aristocratic vision of the good life has always been the
foundation on which great national art has been reared in the past.
It behooves us then to ask what is in America our accepted vision of
the good life? For upon it must rest our art. What do we all agree to
(saving always negligible minorities of “knockers”)? I fear it would
come to these few articles of faith:--to make a lot of money by fair
means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die
with one’s boots on. This is a credo which has within its limitations
positive merits, and it is by no means lightly to be decried, but it
palpably offers little spiritual nourishment to the “art-artist,”
to quote a recent mayor of New York. A certain kind of art it feeds
admirably. And it naturally gets the art it feeds--the immaculate bank
clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like apparition in the porcelain
tub, the beach party in the classy car--the art of the advertisement
generally. And this ideal also finds its authentic expression in the
cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the moving picture, and the
potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over the radio. These are our
representative arts, as sculpture was the representative art of Greece,
or painting of Florence.
The prospect is more pleasing when we turn to architecture, really the
only art that is perennial. Here there is at least a great progress, a
far higher level of taste than that of a generation ago, a competent
and audacious coping with unprecedented problems. Yet here as elsewhere
the cult of haste works harm. No architect of a skyscraper is given
time to think his building out. Perfection in the arts rests largely on
trifles lovingly meditated, and what successful architect has time for
meditation? We have in abundance such arts as we deserve, and we shall
have better arts only as we deserve them through better ideals of life
generally.
Painting and sculpture are kept alive by a sort of artificial
respiration. It is to be hoped that the increasing public use of
both in decoration may restore to these traditionally leading arts
a fuller measure of vitality. As it is, these arts have joined
fine craftsmanship as an elegant survival, like fencing or court
tennis. Since painting and sculpture are the arts I most love, it
would be pleasant indeed to come forward with a programme for their
rehabilitation. But I have no such programme. I feel rather that we
should at once accept the situation and emphasise it. The only remedy,
and a partial one at that, is, I think, this: since painting and
sculpture have become exotic, relatively unwanted, and subsidised
arts, let us rebuild on their rarity value. If instead of making
it ridiculously easy to learn painting and sculpture, we made it
difficult, we should probably have better painting and sculpture. This
could be done by withdrawing charitable support from the art schools,
keeping open such as reasonably pay their way, and by suspending the
artificially encouraged salesmanship of painting and sculpture. There
would remain the human problem of what to do with the thousands of
young men and women who legitimately wish to work delicately with their
hands; but in a civilisation that is supplied from the factory, that
problem seems insoluble. And withal there may be a satisfactory outlet
in amateurism--this has happened notably in the art of the theatre at
the very moment when the moving picture seemed to announce the end
of the spoken play. In general I am not discouraging the support of
survivals. Indeed I see in such support a singularly sympathetic act of
patronage. But one should know what he is about. I have, for example,
a predilection for the quill pen, but I should be very unwise to endow
an institution for writing with the quill. And we are very unwise in
America when, not really wanting their works, we artificially multiply
painters and sculptors.
Whatever reform comes from within the arts, will probably not come
from carefully fostered survivals nor yet from conscious revivals,
but rather from the response of the wanted arts to a finer demand.
The comic strip and the moving picture seem barometric to me, as does
illustration for advertising. Whenever I see a marked improvement in
these popular arts, I shall expect to find greater improvement in the
traditional fine arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture. And
while I am only a casual observer of these barometric arts, what I
have observed of design for advertising and of the moving picture
does not cause me either to hope unduly nor yet to despair utterly.
Certainly both have improved much within my experience. There remains
the dilemma: can the democratic arts really acquire distinction, that
solicitude for perfecting trifles which we have already remarked, or
must they stop at a certain level simply because they are democratic
arts? It would be hazardous to answer this question, but historically
no democratic art, with the possible exception of engraving, has as yet
transcended fine craftsmanship and successfully invaded the realm of
great ideas. That realm has without exception been occupied by the arts
that were frankly aristocratic.
IV
Our desired rehabilitation of the traditional and also of the new
arts may in the last analysis depend upon the creation _within_ our
democracy of the right sort of an aristocracy. Here we are back to
the central problem of humanism--how to produce a superiority that
is generally accepted and socially available. If we can make such
an aristocracy, it will foster the artist and the arts justly and
generously; it will provide a world in which the creative artist is
no longer a tolerated alien but solidly at home. Whenever such an
aristocracy has a clear and noble vision of the good life, it will want
symbols for its ideals, and will call upon the only man who can provide
such symbols--the artist.
One would like to think that the oncoming generation, with unparalleled
advantages in museums and in collegiate instruction in art, endowed
with a great open-mindedness, audacity, and hopefulness--one would like
to think, I say, that this young generation will provide the needed
humanistic support for art. But association with youth, delightful as
it is, gives me no very clear hope in any humanistic direction. The
most typical and engaging youths and maidens of to-day illustrate
merely the lovelier and more attractive traits of the barbarian. They
have an unlimited confidence, very beautiful in its way, with the
smallest background of lived or imagined experience. They think life is
so simple that they may ignore all the traditional solutions for its
manifold problems, trusting to their own instinct of the moment to meet
emergencies that have engaged the best wits of generations of sages
and saints. We have, characteristically tinged with humanitarianism,
the mentality of the noble bandit sheik or the generous sea rover,
who knows what he wants and asks nothing from tradition or authority.
To make humanists of this generation of self-elected spiritual
adventurers implies preliminary contrition and moral rebuilding. There
was a better chance really of making humanists out of my own somewhat
over-sophisticated and _fainéant_ generation. At least we started
from the sound postulate that life was complex, and the problem of
living a problem of delicate adjustment in which one needed whatever
help he might draw from any time or source. So I am really glad that
I shall probably not see the young generation when it passes the
forties. Bruised in its self-confidence, perplexed and baffled by a
life envisaged too simply, it is all too likely to manifest a general
revulsion to indiscriminately chosen formalisms--social, political, and
religious--with the result that the middle-aged dull dog of to-day will
be as nothing in view of his successor of twenty years hence. On the
better side, a general return to formalism may be the opportunity for
an intelligently aggressive humanism. It will be an advantage to find,
what we to-day sadly lack, a basis of agreement on any traditional
plane, however narrow. Thus the new generation may after all serve the
ends of a future humanism, if only by living into entire discredit
their barbarous programme of individualism.
In fine, the problem of a humanistic art is no discrete problem, but
rather that of humanism generally. It has been my task merely to define
the issue in a single aspect, and not at all to find a solution that
could be adopted to-morrow. The deep gap that isolates the serious
artist from a public content with the puerilities of the radio and
the “talkie,” will scarcely be bridged to-morrow or the day after.
Many critics, indeed, hail the latter-day individualist as the finally
liberated artist, and bid us joyously expect even more individualism
than that which has already been so generously vouchsafed us. This
may be a true prognosis. No one can safely deny the possibility that
art may be permanently “on its own.” If so, art will of course become
merely an eccentric activity, an indulgence and luxury of coteries,
hence of no more concern really to the humanist than the trade, say,
of the perfume maker. On the other hand, no one can safely deny the
possibility that art may once again be profoundly integrated with
society. Every contributor to this volume is perforce thinking toward
that reintegration, even if the theme be not in his mind nor the words
on his pen. To my younger colleagues, then, in whom the hope of a
new humanism lies, I leave the problem and the solution, with that
chastened confidence which befits a humanist grown old in the most
unpopular of faiths.
_The Dilemma of Modern Tragedy_
ALAN REYNOLDS THOMPSON
I
Most modern tragedy is depressing; classic tragedy is elevating.
That the best tragic art of the past, in spite of the calamities it
presents, elevates the spirit is obvious; but the cause of the “lift”
it produces is obscure. If the cause were technical and formal beauty,
_Ghosts_ ought to be more inspiriting than _Macbeth_. If it were wholly
the melody of verse--which most modern drama has foregone--no great
classic tragedy could endure translation. But Greek tragedies can
still powerfully exalt an audience, though presented in the English
renderings of Campbell and Potter!
The problem seems particularly to have appealed to the German
metaphysical mind. Hegel thought tragedy a transcendental
reconciliation of opposites. Schopenhauer found in it resignation to
loss of individuality and return to the universal Will. Nietzsche
turned the latter’s pessimism into the semblance of optimism by
defining the spirit of Dionysus as an intoxicated joy in annihilation
and union with nature.
But one hardly need resort to metaphysics, since the experience seems
sufficiently explained by psychology. It is in my opinion chiefly
the result of admiration. Every tragedy grows from a struggle of the
individual against circumstance; but this emotional elevation we are
discussing, as distinguished from more melodramatic thrills, seems to
arise not from the mere struggle but from an impressive exhibition
of will. The spectator is inspirited because in tragedy he sees an
exhibition of convincing heroism. The tragic hero achieves a spiritual
victory in spite of a physical defeat. “To affect the soul, and excite
the passions, and above all to move admiration,” says Dryden, “is the
delight of serious plays.”[37]
In some respects the reverse of this view is the neo-classic doctrine
of poetic justice, which is still held by some critics. According to
poetic justice it is not the hero whom we are to admire, but the moral
law which destroys him. Thus Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn writes: “Traditionally
the serious drama deals with the transgressions of an immutable moral
law by a self-originating will.... In each instance the destruction of
the protagonist reconciles the spectator to a universe in which guilt
is punished and justice is upheld.” That some such view governed the
_intentions_ of religious dramatists like Æschylus or Racine we must
admit; but for the modern sceptic at least their plays are inspiriting
in proportion as the struggle exalts the endurance, if not the goodness
of the hero. That such was even the intention of other dramatists,
Shakespeare in particular, is more than doubtful.
Other critics like Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch foretell the extinction of
tragedy because it is dependent on an anthropocentric view of the
universe. It is the “tragic fallacy,” says Mr. Krutch, to fancy that
one’s “passions are important throughout all time and all space.”
Though we may agree that they are not, to conclude from that rather
obvious fact that tragedy is dead seems not wholly logical. Whatever
the nature of the world, human greatness remains important for human
beings; and Mr. Krutch would seem to give away his case by so plainly
admiring greatness in the very tragedies whose passing he deplores.
The ethical victory of the tragic hero is not a vindication of a moral
order in the universe; neither is it a victory for an elaborated system
such as religion fosters. Macbeth is wicked but admirable. Something
primitive and universal in mankind responds to courage, fidelity,
endurance, even for evil ends. Such admiration rises spontaneously
from our strongest impulses, those toward survival and success. In
the theatre to behold a man steadfast in his will even to death is to
feel our own natures enhanced and to discover in ourselves unrealised
powers. Such heroic manifestation of will is essential to tragedy of
the great tradition, and is found in Sophocles, in Shakespeare, in
Corneille alike.
Several influences have combined in destroying heroic tragedy. It
was the tradition of the Renaissance to make the hero a prince, the
mere semblance of nobility securing a deferential response from the
audience. Modern democracy has changed all that. Industrialism,
furthermore, has fostered the feeling that success is synonymous
with getting rich. And science has not only helped destroy popular
traditions that might have nourished a modern spirit of admiration,
but has fostered a wintry air of scepticism, making man appear not an
imperfect angel but a super-educated monkey. Psychology in particular
has been industriously cutting at the root of heroism, the belief in
free will, by exhibiting the mechanical causes for conduct.
The writer of tragedy who succumbs to these influences finds himself
thus in a dilemma. Unable to believe in greatness, he cannot inspire
others. If he would gain elevation, he must falsify his beliefs; if
he would express his candid view of life, he must forego the tragic
lift. Heroic tragedy was the outcome of a view perhaps pessimistic
about things in general, but always optimistic about the human quality
of individuals. The modern view is pessimistic about everything. As
Hardy expressed it, the prospect most harmonious with the temper of
the thinking modern would be a gaunt waste in Thule. As a result the
dilemma of the naturalist poet is this: _He cannot be both honest and
sublime._[38]
II
This statement will be more convincing when illustrated with examples
drawn from various manifestations of the tragic spirit--in narrative
poetry and the novel as well as in the drama.
I have emphasised the effect of science; and at first thought it might
seem that the great romantics of a century ago, who preceded the
scientific disillusionment, still kept the heroic tradition alive. It
is true that they inherited the tradition, but in their hands it became
not heroism but heroics. The romantic tendency was to seek thrills
rather than truth, and to draw less from human nature than from a
literary fashion.
_Hernani_ and _Ruy Blas_, for example, are highly effective
constructions of clap-trap, to which Hugo’s beautiful and rhetorical
verse gives a semblance of significance. But they can be taken
seriously only by abandoning the intelligence. To-day they seem no more
tragic than Dumas _père_ or the _mélodrames_ of the Boulevards from
which Hugo learned his technic. As melodrama they are, to be sure,
still entertaining.
Such romantic literature of escape did not of course decrease in
popularity with the development of science, but it distinctly lost
literary prestige. After the fifties and sixties the romantic who would
be taken seriously had to cope with scepticism and disillusionment.
Thus Rostand, writing _Cyrano de Bergerac_, was careful to preserve the
smile of sophistication; he delicately played with pathos, and even
flirted with comedy. We can take the extravagances of the drama half
in the spirit of play and enjoy them as a fairy tale. Its heroism is
the heroism of fancy, not of life. It is in a similar spirit that we
enjoy the thrillers and detective tales of to-day. We seek them for
recreation only; and it is difficult to imagine that such romance can
ever again be thought of as seriously tragic.
The romantic writer, however, can scarcely be expected to be content
with the rôle of popular entertainer. Though for the past fifty years
on the defensive, he has persisted in attempting the exaltation of
tragic art. Maeterlinck, for example, sought to reconcile pessimism
with romance by developing a fatalistic “static drama” and throwing
over it a Pre-Raphaelite mist of romantic symbolism. With him a symbol
became less a visible sign of another object than a stimulant to
emotional intoxication; and if we look at the early plays with clear
heads we see that they are rooted in a determinism fatal to the heroic
tradition. Later Maeterlinck grew more optimistic, but in _Monna
Vanna_, which was inspired by Browning, we get exaltation of passion
rather than will.
Whereas Maeterlinck tried to preserve romantic values, if not heroism,
by reconciling them with science, the great Russians, Tolstoi and
Dostoevski, evaded scientific pessimism by escape into a romanticised
Christianity. The result was no less fatal to heroism. As they saw it,
the Christian paradox was that the worst persons achieve the greatest
regeneration; and they presented it with extreme violence. Thus in
Tolstoi’s _The Power of Darkness_ the leading character is not only
a drunkard, a lecher, and a murderer of his own child, but he is
hopelessly craven, stupid, and weak. Yet he wins salvation by public
confession. Such a conversion seems more emotional than religious,
since it is the result of no discipline of the will. But apart from
such questions it would appear obvious that such a play as this is
poles apart from heroic tragedy. It is Tolstoi’s sentimentalised
conception of Christian poetic justice which is exalted.
The exaltation which the romanticist failed to achieve, the scientific
naturalist did not even attempt. Ibsen, apart from his great intrinsic
importance, is interesting because he shows the transition from the
one mode to the other. His early plays were modelled after Scribe and
Schiller; and use of the sagas links him with the heroic tradition.
Though sceptically, he exalted the will and prophesied the superman.
But his mature work shows the effect of science: men are portrayed
more as victims than shapers of events, and responsibility is shifted
from the individual to society. His transition from romanticism to
scientific naturalism was made easy by the fact that romanticism had
already identified man with nature. Disillusion concerning the latter
brought about degradation of the former.
Though the increasing use of symbolism gives Ibsen’s later work a
romantic tone, the plays are built on studies of mental abnormalities
which seem almost intended to demonstrate the non-existence of heroism.
The fall of the master builder is indeed a symbol of the falsity of
what Shaw calls “ideals.” But Ibsen’s anti-heroic tendency is seen
perhaps most forcefully in the famous tragedy of his middle period.
In _Ghosts_ the formal resemblances to Greek tragedy and the element of
human error obscure the essential differences. The animus vitalising
the action is the attack upon a false code of morals--or “ideals”--of
which the heroine is the victim. And, as is proper in a naturalist
tragedy, the _Spirocheta pallida_ is made the _deus ex machina_. The
emotional effect, furthermore, is not elevation but horror. We can
admire the author for honesty and daring, but not the characters. The
best of them, Mrs. Alving, is admirable only in intention, and false to
her convictions, as the author makes a point of showing. She is at the
curtain so far from a “spiritual victory” that there remains for her a
dilemma which is probably the cruelest in dramatic literature: killing
her own son or letting him live an idiot.
The contrast between this play and, let us say, _Hamlet_ is plain when
we compare Oswald’s cry, “The sun--the sun,” and the final speech of
Fortinbras:
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov’d most royally; and for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
The former is the bitter irony of disillusion, the very mockery of the
romantic cliché, “Then came the dawn.” The latter ends the play with
eloquent praise.[39]
III
The elevation which Ibsen gains in _Ghosts_ through beauty of structure
and atmospheric effect does not carry over to the theme; here the
author frankly chooses honesty and foregoes sublimity. Few or no
writers since have been at once as great and as honest. If we observe
the literature of the last quarter century to see how it has met the
dilemma, we shall find perhaps an explanation of current anarchy and
experimentation. Some take refuge in subtle evasions, disguised by the
cleverness of novel technic or material. But those who do not evade the
issue follow two roads: _the road of laughter_, which goes by way of
irony and satire; and _the road of tears_, by way of pathos or cruelty.
The former path, since it leads away from the tragic emotions, need
not detain us long. With effort the romantic can school himself into
a detachment of head from heart in which he can smile at the contrast
between his dreams and the reality. His laughter may be bitter, but
it is laughter. Pirandello, aware of the flux and illusoriness of
life, deliberately contrasts it with the permanence and significance
of fiction; and extracts mirth from the grotesquerie and cleverness
of his paradoxes, in spite of the disillusionment underlying them.
Anatole France armoured his sensibility with detached artistry and the
_esprit gaulois_. Aldous Huxley, too much the moralist to be wholly
detached, solaces himself with savage satire. The whole work of Cabell
is a series of repetitions of one bitter “jest” involving the night
before and the morning after. Such writers, emotionally romantic but
intellectually sceptical, choose to laugh at their predicament rather
than weep.
The road of tears concerns us directly. It usually follows the way of
pathos. Though Aristotle made pity and fear correlative emotions, it is
a fact that we feel the former more for the weak victim like Ophelia
than for the hero, and that the more we admire, the less we need weep.
Pathos must be subordinate in heroic tragedy if the play is to elevate
our spirits. Obviously, however, the modern who sees nothing to admire
is left with pathos as his chief effect.
Pathos and horror we find in Hardy, little mitigated by any admiration
except for the author’s artistry. Rarely we find a heroism of sorts
in characters like Michael Henchard; but it is significant that the
author ended his novels with _Jude_. Galsworthy’s habitual irony always
borders on pathos if not sentiment. French “naturalism” is harsher and
at times, as in _Madame Bovary_, finds expression in bitter irony. But
pathos is none the less its most powerful effect. _The Old Wives’ Tale_
of Arnold Bennett is an English imitation; here we feel the pathos of
mere mortality quite apart from anything the very ordinary characters
do. In Theodore Dreiser, “naturalism,” though sadly in need of pruning,
still bears its bitter fruit. It is characteristic of its spirit that
Dreiser uses the word “tragedy” with reference to the fate of a Clyde
Griffiths.
But since pathos skirts the gulf of sentimentality, the “hard-boiled”
generation since the war have turned from it. Those of the younger
group who cannot laugh have as a result begun to explore another
emotion, which lies even deeper in our nature, and which is also
compatible with disillusionment. The savage in all of us finds a fierce
and hard delight in torture. Significantly the word “sadism” has become
fashionable. We may name the emotion “cruelty,” though the word is
perhaps inadequate.
In the drama an important forerunner of contemporary exploitations
of cruelty and sex, as well as of expressionism, was Frank Wedekind.
Cruelty is manifest in James Joyce. In D. H. Lawrence it accompanies
a pathological exaltation of sexuality, and thus gives him greater
hardness than his American parallel, Sherwood Anderson. A very
interesting instance of it is the work of a contemporary American poet
whose fame is still unequal to his remarkable achievements. I speak of
Robinson Jeffers.
Jeffers’ long narrative poems spread a more than Thyestian banquet of
horrors. With surprise we learn that in private life the author is so
unwilling to inflict pain that “he never picks a flower wantonly.”
But in his art he more than compensates for such sensibilities. _Roan
Stallion_, for example, depicts the passion of a modern Pasiphaë. The
unlucky husband is trampled by the stallion, and the woman shoots the
animal. _Tamar_ deals with incest between brother and sister, and ends
with a fire which burns down the house and its more or less crazy
inmates. _The Tower Beyond Tragedy_, though treating the Clytemnestra
legend with great power, ends in the incest motive between Orestes and
Electra.
The perversity of theme, however, is partly compensated by elevation of
treatment, for Jeffers has a certain grandeur of style, drawing as he
does upon Greek literature, the Bible, modern psychology, and physical
science for thought, and the beauty of natural scenery for description.
A passage which illustrates at once his power of style and his drift
toward cruelty is found in preparation for the crucial scene of _Roan
Stallion_.
Humanity is the start of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break
through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
Tragedy that breaks man’s face
and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural
crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature,
the wild fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning
demons that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly
with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape
He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the
Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this
cosmos? For him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the
mould to break away from, the coal
To break into fire, the atom to be split.[40]
In interpretation of his thought Mr. Louis Adamic quotes Mr. Jeffers
as saying that civilisation tends inevitably toward downfall through
sexual introversion. Although to attempt to “break out of humanity”
after the fashion exalted in _Roan Stallion_ is, to be sure, dangerous,
“misinterpreted in the mind of a fool or a lunatic,” nevertheless the
fault of the civilised person is that he “regards man exclusively,”
“founding his values, desires, his picture of the universe, all on
his own humanity.” Mr. Jeffers thus levels his attack directly at the
foundation of humanism, and allies himself with the naturalists who
seek salvation in the physical.
He thus flies from normal humanity into cruelty and perversion. But the
end of these is death. And in poem after poem is expressed the longing
for the peace and endurance of granite,--of the grave. The violent
destruction of the individual is the logical outcome of his creed, and
the denial of human values leads to the annihilation of humanity.
This tendency, the extreme development of which we find in Jeffers, we
find in less degree in our leading American dramatist. But in Eugene
O’Neill it is obscured by other qualities; and generalisations are
rendered difficult because he is groping and experimental, not only in
technic but in philosophy. Because of this difficulty as well as for
his intrinsic importance, O’Neill requires special consideration.
IV
A writer’s ’prentice work is likely to be revealing, and O’Neill’s
is no exception. The one-act play _Thirst_, for example, reveals an
imaginative absorption in the violences and brutalities of life. Most
of the one-acts in the volume with _The Moon of the Caribbees_ have
more normal and convincing characterisation, but about half are built
upon abnormal situations involving incipient insanities or morbid
passions.
This interest in mental abnormality has not diminished. O’Neill’s plays
are studies in psychopathology. _Beyond the Horizon_ deals with a weak
romantic who takes refuge from harsh reality in dreams, and finally
dies of consumption. _Gold_ is a melodrama growing out of an insane
delusion. _Diff’rent_ is the horrible case-history of a victim of
sex-repression. _The Hairy Ape_ describes a character who, if he is not
a mere symbol, develops from incipient to raving madness. A play with
a normal beginning, “_The First Man_,” turns out to be a study of an
emotional fixation. _Welded_ depicts two egotistical introverts in whom
goes on the torturing conflict between passionate love and uncontrolled
temperament. The flames of lust and greed, fanned into madness--these
are the materials of _Desire Under the Elms_. _The Great God Brown_,
viewed apart from its symbolism, portrays split personality and
madness. _The Fountain_, beneath its exotic romanticism, is the story
of an _idée fixe_. The plot of _Strange Interlude_ might have come
from the case-book of Freud. If we cannot judge the chief character
of _Lazarus Laughed_ by human standards, we can recognise in Caligula
and Tiberius realistic studies of psychic abnormalities born of lust,
cruelty, and fear. And the author’s latest play, _Dynamo_, is a study
of religious mania.
The blighting effects of our industrial and social life seem hardly
adequate to explain this persistent interest in the pathological. To
follow the method of the new psychology which O’Neill uses so largely,
we are likely to be correct if we seek an emotional frustration; but
American life is hardly the chief cause. Similar interests are seen,
for example, in Ibsen, Strindberg, and Wedekind, all of whom must
have had their effect on the younger dramatist. My suggestion is that
O’Neill has found his highly romantic temperament incompatible with the
teachings of science, and has sought to evade the dilemma of modern
tragedy by the road of tears, exploiting both pathos and cruelty.
That his temperament is highly romantic is obvious. His early work is
almost Conradian in atmosphere; and his great vigour of imagination is
strikingly displayed in the gorgeous settings and strange situations
of plays like _Marco Millions_ and _The Fountain_. Indeed, in the
melodrama of fear and horror he is a genius, fertile in themes to
startle and amaze, and skilful in adapting them effectively to the
stage. Such a play as _Ile_, moreover, is not only horrible but
poetically true. _The Emperor Jones_ is in my opinion his masterpiece,
perfectly constructed and artistically inevitable. The settings and
plot contribute with as inexorable an art as that of Poe to a single
emotional effect, which is furthermore bound up with a clear and
convincing problem in character. The theme of _The Emperor Jones_ is
the regression of a negro to savagery; and as we watch the succession
of weird visions, and feel the emotional crescendo of the tom-toms,
at the same time we see the disintegration of the negro’s mind. The
parallel progress of outer and inner effects is beautifully executed;
and behind the individual we become aware of the dark tragedy of his
race.
But with so luxuriant a fancy, O’Neill has never been content to
construct a dream-world of his own, out of despair of the real one.
He has never abandoned the search for his dreams in actual life, and
as a consequence in his later plays his visions of beauty are forever
being distorted by the lurid light of disillusion. Thus he has seldom
written pure romance. _Marco Millions_ becomes heavy satire; and _The
Fountain_ leaves a bitter taste. For the most part he seeks to deal
realistically with contemporary life.
To see men as mere parts of a mechanistic and soulless universe, and
at the same time to long passionately for the beautiful visions of
imagination, is to find those visions a torture unless they can in some
way be reconciled with reality. Lesser writers have often been diverted
into a seeming reconciliation of them by becoming ardent propagandists;
by adopting programmes of reform, and writing problem or thesis plays.
But while O’Neill shows the romantic’s characteristic hatred of
tradition and restraint, he is not content to do less than face the
fundamental problem. And if he hates “puritanism” and sympathises with
its victim, he by no means blindly admires the libertine. Indeed, he
seems to find no man whom he can whole-heartedly admire; he can exalt
no character or cause, and thus does not gain the elevation of heroic
tragedy. He finds life a muddle; he leaves it a muddle.
Too often, indeed, the muddlement gets into the construction as well
as the themes of his plays. _Desire Under the Elms_, one of the most
nearly tragic of his plays, starts as a study of greed, with old Cabot
as the central character. Cabot, in fact, has heroic qualities, for
he is a man of will. But half way through, the play turns off into
the more alluring theme of sexual lust; old Cabot is thrust into the
background; and the ending is, surprisingly, the traditional one of
crime and retribution. The play lacks artistic unity; it falls in two.
The lack of unity is felt, again, in _Anna Christie_, which in spite
of the author’s expressed intention has for the audience simply a
conventional happy ending. It is strikingly manifest in _Strange
Interlude_. The central character of this alone knits together the
various situations and themes of the nine acts. Of the situations
three or four distinct plays might have been built. Of the themes
there are at least eight; and it is impossible to say which the author
considered central. Much, for example, is said about “happiness”
as the end of life. Again, the doubtful value of self-sacrifice is
illustrated. From Darrell’s point of view, love, that blind biological
urge, seems to be a modern variety of Fate. More than once Nina
expresses the notion that God is a woman. The most powerful scene of
the play is where Nina exults over her “three men”: are we to look
for possessiveness in love as a theme? Or a woman’s need of several
sorts of love? Or is the play a study in relativity with reference
to insanity? Certainly the character with the insane inheritance is
actually the most normal person. Or perhaps we have a study in the
results of meddling with other people’s lives. The popular success of
this play is hardly an indication of unification. That success seems
to be attained in spite of lack of unity, and to rest chiefly on the
novelty of the nine acts and of the technic of spoken thought, on the
frank treatment of sex, and on the great power of characterisation and
of separate situations.
Here is a writer with a genius for the theatre, a powerful imagination,
and great emotional force, who except in shorter studies of
melodramatic horror seems unable to canalise his energies into rounded
and unified works of art. He suffers the conflict he symbolises in
“Dion Anthony,” between his inborn longing for goodness and beauty,
and an acquired frustration, cynicism, and despair. Often the despair
conquers; but we must honour him for the fact that, having no faith,
he persists in seeking one. Unlike lesser writers he is no compromiser
with truth as he sees it; but in one play at least he has persuaded
himself into a positive affirmation. The play is _Lazarus Laughed_.
The symbolist technic of this play forces attention upon the
underlying theme. Only Lazarus is unmasked, and he is thus shown
freed from the illusions of mortality. The rhythmical repetitions and
symmetrical groups of the choruses materialise ethical sympathies and
antagonisms. And the theme is stated repeatedly: there is no death.
But when we try to understand this affirmation we are repeatedly
baffled. It cannot be the Christian belief in personal immortality. The
resurrection of Lazarus would give ground for such a view were it not
obvious that the author has taken over a Christian legend merely as
starting point for his non-Christian allegory. Not only is Christian
immortality not preached, but Christian morality is not expounded.
The hero displays not humility but arrogance. For him men are not
evil until redeemed by the grace of God; they are innately good but
perverted by fear. He thus incites them not to love one another because
children of a loving God, but to live passionately and instinctively.
To be freed from the fear of death means for those who come under
his spell not to live on earth after the Golden Rule, in meekness to
forgive and suffer wrong; but to drown all human interests in a mad
delight in death. And they laugh with exultation at the prospect of
annihilation. The paradox seems essentially irrational.
Cries Lazarus: “Once as squirming specks we crept from the tides of
the sea! Once as quivering flecks of rhythm we beat down the sun. Now
we re-enter the sun! Cast aside is our pitiable pretence, our immortal
egohood, the holy lantern behind which cringed our Fear of the Dark....
We will to die!” In a manner strikingly similar to that of Jeffers,
O’Neill exalts pan-evolutionary nature; having passed beyond horror at
the scientific demonstration of an inhuman universe, he attempts to
pull himself out of humanity into a rapturous acceptance of Nature.
But Jeffers finds no source for laughter in his god “that laces the
suns with planets, the heart of the atom with electrons.” Whence does
O’Neill derive his mirth?
He may well have got his inspiration from Nietzsche. I have summed
up Nietzsche’s idea in _The Birth of Tragedy_ as “an intoxicated joy
in annihilation and union with nature.” Significantly it is just
following an attack on Christianity that he exalts the laughing mood.
We must fear the “romantic,” he says, because the romantic tends to end
comforted like a Christian. “No! ye should first of all learn the art
of earthly comfort, ye should learn to _laugh_, my young friends, if ye
are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps,
as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the
devil--and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of
that Dionysian ogre, called Zarathustra:
“‘Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget
your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers--and better
still if ye stand also on your heads!...
“‘This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--to you, my
brethren, do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated: ye
higher men, _learn_, I pray you--to laugh!’”
It needs intoxication--of one Dionysian sort or another--to find such
incitements mirth-provoking. It is necessary to abandon all reasonable
grounds for comfort except the rather chilly one that we are physically
made of stardust, and therefore should rejoice to dissolve our living
complexity back into it. _Lazarus Laughed_ indeed arouses a fair
measure of the necessary intoxication, so imaginative and emotional is
it. But its comfort can last, I fear, only while we actually hear the
laughter of Lazarus.
V
Thus our most gifted American dramatist, together with other finer
spirits of to-day, is unable to accept traditional modes or satisfy
the desire for admiration and worship. Romanticism, in identifying man
with nature, hastened the decay of a heroic tradition which it at first
attempted to foster; and under scientific naturalism the decay ended
in dissolution. Whether the author uses a so-called “naturalistic”
technique after Ibsen or Maupassant; or whether, like Wedekind or
Jeffers or Cabell, he seeks other modes of expression, so long as he
thinks of man as in no way superior to the outer world or different
from it, he is none the less subject to the naturalistic point of
view.[41]
Recently, to be sure, certain developments of science have given rise
to hopes of mysticism within a naturalistic monism. The argument,
so far as an unscientific reader understands it, seems to run thus:
Einstein has offered proof that time and space form a continuum and
that events are “relative.” Studies of the atom have upset orthodox
conceptions of physics, and physicists themselves are beginning to
talk about matter in terms that sound for all the world like Bishop
Berkeley. Science admits a mysterious enveloping Unknown.
The new hypotheses, of course, merely re-enforce the acknowledgment of
ultimate mystery which thoughtful people have always made. The novelty
of the new mysticism is that it builds not on theology or metaphysics
but mathematics and laboratory experiment. The next step in its
argument is the dubious one.
If science grants an enveloping Unknown, the man who would explain
that Unknown in terms of his desires is as likely to be right as one
who explains it in inhuman terms. And if there is a chance that one’s
desires may be true, it needs no psychologist to assure us that plenty
of people will immediately assume that they are true. For them science
seems to justify mysticism and open the door for the hosts of dreams,
so long shut out of a rationalistic universe. But the weakness of
such wishful thinking seems obvious; and to the humanist the whole
argument is beside the point because it would vindicate human values by
naturalistic data.
If some scientists are nowadays growing mystical, it is not therefore
logical to deny the facts that their controlled experiments have
demonstrated. The dilemma of modern tragedy remains very real. There
is no refuge in obscurantism through return to illusions which science
has shattered. Reason denies the objective reality of our dreams; and
so long as the honest man accepts a monism which identifies man with
nature, he can find no justification for tragic exaltation.
The humanist, however, denies the necessity for this identification.
Without in the slightest degree disparaging the truth or worth of
physical knowledge he maintains that the realm of value has significant
validity when taken as distinct from the realm of fact. The realm of
value belongs to man; that of fact, to outer nature. One depends on the
other, but the two are different.
Value depends on the operation of physical laws, but it remains value.
The fallacy of the naturalist has been the assumption that to explain
the cause of a thing is to explain away its value. Human emotions may
be caused on the naturalistic plane by the secretion of endocrine
glands or what not; on the human plane they remain what they were to
Homer or Shakespeare. It is interesting to know about chromosomes
and Mendelian laws, about biochemistry and vital machinery; but human
values remain the same. Whatever the findings of science, man humanly
speaking is still what he always was: comic, pitiful, despicable--now
and then sublime.
The humanist is concerned with the realm of values, and thus is
concerned with ethical laws. The lives of all men progress under
these laws; and the endeavours of great men have been to discover and
formulate them. To the humanist it seems evident that literary art,
dealing as it does with human actions, must deal with ethical laws,
which are the foundation of conduct. And it would seem obvious folly to
attempt to divorce literature from them.
Romantic art as recreation is a blessing to jaded mortals; and
naturalistic art at its best is, within its limits, penetrating. But
to the humanist it seems that both types of art have failed in dealing
with ethical laws. The romantic is always an extremist, demanding
perfection, or denying the existence of goodness. The naturalist has
become so absorbed in the mechanism of the instrument that he has
become deaf to its music. The humanist desires emotional satisfaction;
he desires to face the truth. But he also wishes to preserve a
normal humanity in which human values are central. Though hearing
the revelations of science, he keeps his ear attuned to the music of
humanity. Though enjoying the thrills of liberated feeling, he is
unwilling to purchase them at the expense of moderation or proportion.
He believes not in prohibition but in temperance.
Ethical laws are what make man human, and it is these that the artist
must ponder. And to find guidance he cannot do better than follow
Arnold’s advice--not less sound for being tiresomely familiar--to know
the best that has been thought and said in the world. He must break
with the contemporary tradition of romantic scorn for tradition; he
must seek to become a part of the great tradition, by knowing the
best. To become a part of it does not mean to attempt mere imitation;
it means that the artist will be forevermore dissatisfied with
pettiness or insincerity in himself, and will have a lofty but possible
standard by which to measure his work.
Those who work in the “modern temper” are unable to discover a worthy
heroism to exalt. But if one turns to the records of classic art, he
will find a nobility of spirit no less admirable to-day than in the
past. His response will be an evidence of the existence of heroism,
a proof of its reality in human nature. It will be a proof of its
reality, of course, not in perfection but in aspiration. And if one
looks about him he will find the same aspiration in living men and
women. He will find it even expressed in deeds--imperfectly, humanly.
If he should be artist enough to give adequate expression to what
he feels and sees, he could rise above the dilemma against which
naturalism has forced our modern literature.
Cynicism will, to be sure, urge that every man finds what he looks
for, and to look for greatness will lead to a denial of evident
imperfections. The humanist professes himself not unaware of the
latter. Long before naturalist novelists pictured the _bête humaine_,
Christianity declared man innately evil; but unlike naturalism,
Christianity believed man capable of redemption by Grace. The humanist
as such is not concerned with theology, and is content to believe that
Grace, however it comes, is sometimes found. He is inclined to doubt
that it comes only to those who have joined a church; he is inclined
to believe that nobility is found now and again in all sorts and
conditions of men. But the main thing is that it exists; and no artist
who does not see the good with the evil sees life steadily and whole.
To follow the narrow path between cynicism and romantic idealisation;
to recognise the imperfections in man and the inevitable domination of
physical force over the individual, and yet to preserve admiration for
the indomitable spirit which drives the individual to will and to do
nobly; and finally to find adequate means of artistic expression--that
is the task of one who would write great tragedy. Though hard, it is
still possible. Only when the artist follows lofty standards can he
hope to control and guide his own efforts toward sublimity. While
humanism offers him no magic key to success, it offers him hope, and a
discipline.
FOOTNOTES
[37] I have considered the tragic emotions more fully in an article,
“Melodrama and Tragedy,” _Publications of the Modern Language
Association_, September, 1928.
[38] Since this paper was written my attention has been called to
“Humanism and Tragedy,” an admirable article by Mr. F. McEachran
(_Nineteenth Century and After_, July, 1929). Based on Professor
Babbitt’s three levels of human conduct, naturalistic, human, and
religious, Mr. McEachran’s thesis is that tragedy, since it demands an
assumption of human dignity, cannot develop in a naturalistic age like
the present, and is difficult in a religious one. The age of Pericles,
of Elizabeth, and of Louis XIV were humanistic; they were followed by
naturalistic decadence in which man and nature were equated and tragedy
became impossible. Mr. McEachran’s “human dignity” and my “heroism”
seem equivalent.
[39] It is to be noted, as further illustration of the anti-heroic
tendency of modern thought, that critics have sought to explain Hamlet
as not a hero but a psychopath. What Shakespeare wished his audience to
feel, however, seems open to no doubt.
[40] From _Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems_, Boni & Liveright,
1925.
[41] Should I remind the reader that in thus generalising I admit
exceptions? One such, whom I have discussed elsewhere (_Sewanee
Review_, April, 1929) is, in my opinion, Joseph Conrad.
_An American Tragedy_
ROBERT SHAFER
I
Mr. Theodore Dreiser’s critical friends have always been ready to admit
his deficiencies as a literary artist, and these deficiencies are
really extraordinary. Nevertheless, by universal consent Mr. Dreiser
stands at the head of the realistic movement in American fiction, not
merely because he is its pioneer, and has endured obloquy and even
persecution for the Cause, but primarily on account of his seriousness
and singleness of purpose, his depth of keen feeling, and his earnest
reflectiveness. His work also anticipates in important respects
the efforts of the post-realists and super-realists, so-called,
and altogether has a present salience which insistently demands
consideration.
The work, however, cannot be assessed--cannot indeed be
understood--apart from the man; and fortunately Mr. Dreiser has written
much about himself.[42] He was born in 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana,
of German Catholic parents who struggled vainly against poverty.
In the schools of another Indiana town he received the elements of
an education, but apparently learned little of value to him beyond
reading and writing. In boyhood and youth, in school or out, he became
acquainted with a number of the better-known writers, chiefly of
fiction, of the nineteenth century, but without gaining from them
more than momentary entertainment. He has said that as a boy he “had
no slightest opportunity to get a correct or even partially correct
estimate of what might be called the mental A B abs of life.” [sic]
If the truth is to be told, one reason for this lay clearly within
himself. For he was, as his records show him, a stupid boy and young
man, lapped in vague reverie and hazy dreams of enjoyment, and roused
slowly to puzzled observation and thought. “No common man am I,” he
used to tell himself when he was scarcely out of his ’teens, with no
evident reason save that with adolescence came an intense craving for
freedom from the shackles of common life--freedom to indulge fully
his temperamental longing for sensuous and materialised delight. This
self-conceit helped to prevent him from learning what could have been
learned during his boyhood, and, as he grew older, aroused in him
bitter resentment against the limitations of his early environment.
Those limitations, at the same time, were extreme. The Dreiser
household was one combining almost unrelieved ignorance with perfect
tastelessness, presided over by a father whose consuming interest was
a Catholicism degraded into mere ceremonies and prohibitions. Mr.
Dreiser explicitly denotes the quality of the purifying influence
dominant in the home and community of his youth: “One should read only
good books ... from which any reference to sex had been eliminated,
and what followed ... was that all intelligent interpretation of
character and human nature was immediately discounted. A picture of a
nude or partially nude woman was sinful.... The dance in our home and
our town was taboo. The theatre was an institution which led to crime,
the saloon a centre of low, even bestial vices.... It was considered
good business, if you please, to be connected with some religious
organisation.... We were taught persistently to shun most human
experiences as either dangerous or degrading or destructive. The less
you knew about life the better; the more you knew about the fictional
heaven and hell ditto.... In my day there were apparently no really
bad men who were not known as such to all the world, ... and few if
any good men who were not sufficiently rewarded by the glorious fruits
of their good deeds here and now!... Positively, and I stake my solemn
word on this, until I was between seventeen and eighteen I had scarcely
begun to suspect any other human being of harbouring the erratic and
sinful thoughts which occasionally flashed through my own mind.”
By the time Mr. Dreiser had fairly formed the suspicion that, despite
appearances, other people might not be much better than himself, his
family had begun to break up, following the death of his mother, and he
himself had been thrust into the world--or rather into Chicago, where
the Dreisers by now lived--to earn his way. He did manage to spend one
year at Indiana University, to the great improvement of his health,
but with no positive intellectual benefit, so that he refused to waste
a second year, which he might have had there. He confesses this, it
should be said, in no boastful spirit. He was in fact made to realise
at Bloomington that there were elements of knowledge which it would be
useful to him to acquire--but he found the effort hopeless. His mind
could not be constrained, and, besides, the deficiencies of his earlier
schooling stood in his way. Hence he returned to Chicago, to become a
collector for an easy-payment furniture shop.
It was at this time that his feelings--scarcely yet his imagination or
his reason--were awakened by the spectacle of “America on the make.”
He found that spectacle intensely vital. At the same time, too, he was
doing the first reading that really came home to him:--he was reading a
daily column of Eugene Field’s in a Chicago newspaper. It gave him the
notion of doing something like that himself, and sent him hunting for a
post on a news-sheet. This he finally obtained, and at the reporter’s
desk achieved his real education, one not beyond his grasp. His first
instructor promptly informed him that “life was a God-damned stinking,
treacherous game, and that nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of
every thousand were bastards.” The truth of this generalisation Mr.
Dreiser proceeded to establish for himself, by observation of those
of life’s realities which constitute news, and by intercourse with
fellow-journalists. He discovered that practically all men, high or
low, were lying hypocrites, outwardly professing a fine morality, but
privately violating this without hesitation whenever it would serve
their turn in the pursuit of gain or in the satisfaction of lust.
This was the reality, at any rate, which the young reporter saw, and
which, as he says, broadened considerably his viewpoint, finally
liberating him “from moralistic and religionistic qualms.” So
liberated was he, indeed, that he came to judge men “thoroughly sound
intellectually” in proportion as he found them “quite free from the
narrow, cramping conventions of their day.” So liberated was he that he
came to see the “religionist” for what he was: “a swallower of romance
or a masquerader looking to profit and preferment.” He came also to see
behind “the blatherings of thin-minded, thin-blooded, thin-experienced
religionists” only “a brainless theory.” Nor was this the limit of
his discoveries. He came further to see that life was not simply a
ruthless struggle for material advantages, because, howsoever ruthless
and intelligent one’s struggle, still, one might be defrauded by sheer
accident. Chance seemed, at times, the final ruler of all things--many
of the reporter’s assignments combining “to prove that life is
haphazard and casual and cruel; to some lavish, to others niggardly.”
Mr. Dreiser, it is fair to say, was the more ready to learn these
lessons of experience because, as he plainly tells his readers,
he himself was lustful and passionately eager for the material
satisfactions of life. He longed to join in the antics of the rich, who
alone, as he judged, were bathed in happiness. He felt, as he gazed
enviously upon the gilded sons and daughters of earth, that, from no
fault of his, life was tragically cheating him. And this sense of
grievance, feeding upon itself, passed easily through a sentimental
phase into bitterness, as his reminiscences show: “Whenever I returned
to any place in which I had once lived and found things changed, as
they always were, I was fairly transfixed by the oppressive sense of
the evanescence of everything; a mood so hurtful and dark and yet
with so rich if sullen a lustre that I was left wordless with pain. I
was all but crucified at realising how unimportant I was, how nothing
stayed but all changed.... Life was so brief, ... and so soon, whatever
its miserable amount or character, it would be gone.... But I, poor
waif, with no definite or arresting skill of any kind, not even that of
commerce, must go fumbling about looking in upon life from the outside,
as it were. Beautiful women, or so I argued, were drawn to any but
me.... I should never have a fraction of the means to do as I wished or
to share in the life that I most craved. I was an Ishmael.”
Not always, of course, was Mr. Dreiser sunk in a bitterness induced
by self-pity and sentimental regret. Often in moments of successful
work or of flattering companionship he was quickly lifted up into a
mood of expansive self-satisfaction, equally unbalanced. Then he would
say to himself: “I must be an exceptional man.... Life itself was
not so bad; it was just higgledy-piggledy, catch-as-catch-can, that
was all. If one were clever, like myself, it was all right.” It was
indeed magnificent, so long as the slave of temperament could dream
of his heroic future as something assured. But dreams, like life, were
unstable, and the fever for self-advancement, becoming intolerable
from its intensity, would transmute itself--not every time into frank
self-pity--but sometimes into tearful “sympathy for the woes of others,
life in all its helpless degradation and poverty, the unsatisfied
dreams of people.” And from the downtrodden for whom he wept he also
drew a lesson. The hideous inequalities both of fortune and of capacity
which he saw, proved to him that democracy, like morality, was a sham,
a hollow convention, irrelevant, indeed opposed, to the facts of life
and practice.
Mr. Dreiser’s journalistic career took him from Chicago to St. Louis,
and thence, with several stops on the way, to Pittsburgh, during a
period of rather more than three years. In these years, he says,
speaking of his “blood-moods or so-called spiritual aspirations,” he
was “what might be called a poetic melancholiac, crossed with a vivid
materialistic lust of life.” His body, he adds, “was blazing with sex,
as well as with a desire for material and social supremacy.” It is
not surprising, consequently, that he found himself able to entertain
carnal desires for several women at the same time--though this at first
surprised him, and troubled him also, until his day of liberation from
“moralistic qualms.” It is not surprising either that he presently
was captivated by a charming country girl, several years older than
himself, who had no single idea and only one desire in common with
him. He had welcomed his liberation from “moralistic and religionistic
qualms” the more complacently because of the simplification of thought
and conduct to which it pointed. From this time the conduct of life
was to be straightforward as well as simple, in accordance with the
brutish yet vital law of following your dominant impulse regardlessly,
ruthlessly, slavishly. But now this liberation itself was mainly
instrumental in plunging him into a new, long-continued, and grievous
difficulty. For his simple country maiden, though she was drawn to
him as he was drawn to her, was nevertheless rigidly conventional,
immovably “moralistic,” one of the predestined pillars of an ordered
society and a stable family. She steadfastly refused to yield him her
body without marriage, and he, alas, was not only unable to support her
but deeply unwilling to marry her even if he could.
Clearly this pair did not understand all that divided them in spirit,
but, still, Mr. Dreiser knew from the first some portion of the truth.
For he knew what love really was: it was a mere “blood-mood”; it was a
vivid lust crossed with poetic fires; it was irresistible, of course,
but it was like everything else, transient, shifting, evanescent. He
already suspected, as he later concluded, that monogamy--marriage
indeed of any kind--was a debasing institution which not only killed
the love that brought men to it, but also deformed and dwarfed their
personalities. It might not harm stupid and lethargic men, but the man
of individuality, at least, the highest type of citizen, required utter
freedom to follow his vital impulses--required the joys of the sexual
act “without any of the hindrances or binding chains of convention.”
He knew, in fine, that “the tug of his immense physical desire for his
beloved” might easily have been satisfied, despite his poverty, without
compromising the future, and without doing a hurt to society, had there
only been “any such thing as sanity in life,” outside of himself. He
even knew, after the first raptures of idyllic feeling had passed,
that any other beautiful woman would have served his need as well;
but, nevertheless, he clung to this one, because in fact no beautiful
woman whom he found accessible did keep alive in him the same fever of
desire. Yet his beloved remained immovable, and so drew him on, through
several years of miserably divided feeling, into a marriage finally
accomplished after his carnal fires had cooled, owing to the passage
of time and the casual ministrations of certain other fair creatures,
more pliant, but unsatisfying.
I dwell upon this painful episode, following Mr. Dreiser’s own example,
because it tells so much. It was the crucial event of his early life,
and it left an ineffaceable scar. The fact is, indeed, that without
definite knowledge of this miserable union, it would not be easy to
understand how Mr. Dreiser became so obstinately fixed in those notions
of life which journalism and its associations gave him and which he was
eager to accept. Without definite knowledge of this marriage, further,
it would be impossible fully to understand his novels; for none of them
could have been written quite as it stands save in the light of this
afflictive experience of his, and several, it is extremely likely,
could not otherwise have been written at all.[43]
Some knowledge of another side of Mr. Dreiser’s life, however, during
his years of work for the news-sheets, is also necessary for those who
would understand his novels. He has told us that in St. Louis the great
literary idol of his associates was Zola, and after Zola, Balzac. These
novelists, and especially the former, were constantly held up to him as
models by one of his assignment-editors, who made it abundantly clear
what Zola stood for. Mr. Dreiser read none of the Frenchman’s books
at this time, but he did read an unpublished novel by two St. Louis
newspaper men which made a deep and lasting impression upon him and
which, as he later discovered, was wholly inspired by Zola and Balzac.
This was “the opening wedge for him into the realm of realism,” and,
too, “it fixed his mind definitely on this matter of writing,” firing
him with a desire to create something of the sort himself. He thought
the novel “intensely beautiful,” “with its frank pictures of raw,
greedy, sensual human nature, and its open pictures of self-indulgence
and vice.” In these indirect ways, evidently, Zola exerted upon the
young reporter an influence real and significant. It was, indeed,
probably much more important than the direct influence exerted by
Balzac not long thereafter; though the accident which brought Mr.
Dreiser to a fevered and ecstatic reading of many of Balzac’s novels,
while he was in Pittsburgh, marked what was for him “a literary
revolution.”
The crowning stage of Mr. Dreiser’s education, however, was now to
come, while he was still in Pittsburgh, with his discovery of certain
of the writings of Huxley, Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer. Huxley, Mr.
Dreiser credits with finally dispelling the “lingering filaments” of
Christianity still trailing about him; and Huxley’s work of dispersion
was completed by Spencer’s _First Principles_. This book wholly
“threw him down in his conceptions or non-conceptions of life” by its
“questioning or dissolving into other and less understandable things”
all that he had deemed substantial. “Up to this time,” he says,
“there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to get on and
the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place
was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that
there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one
had to, and that it was of no importance. Of one’s ideals, struggles,
deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were
chemic compulsions.... Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated,
and a badly and carelessly driven one at that.”
The seeming ill logic of some of these remarks--the sudden concern
over spiritual things felt by one who had hitherto devoted himself
whole-heartedly to the world by sensuous appearances--is not
unimportant. Clearly Spencer’s book left an abiding mark on Mr. Dreiser
because it represented in a general way the abstract conclusion towards
which his own observations had been pointing. Without knowing it, and
without any attempt to set his intellectual house in order, he had
himself been drifting towards a mechanistic naturalism. Spencer made
him aware of this, and if, as he thought, that awareness left him
crushed and hopeless, it at least seemed to clear his mind of rubbish,
and to give his view-point self-consistency and finality. Nevertheless,
he did not come forth a Spencerian; and, indeed, his debt to the
_Synthetic Philosophy_ may easily be exaggerated--the more easily
because it really is important.
Mr. Dreiser emphasises the fact that his reading of the _First
Principles_ was followed by an emotional revulsion--a revulsion which
the Synthetic Philosopher can scarcely alone have caused. And in
truth just at the time when he stumbled upon Spencer his feelings
were strained to the breaking-point. He had just returned from a last
desperate, yet unsuccessful, effort to seduce his country maiden,
which left him crushed, not only by that defeat itself, but by the
consciousness that the gratification he was bound to secure was now
driving him towards a marriage for which he had no capacity, no desire,
and no prospect of sufficient means. Moreover, immediately after his
Western visit he had gone, for the first time, to New York, where he
had received an extraordinarily vivid impression of all the glories
and delights of that worldly success, with its attendant wealth, which
he so intensely craved. The sight had fired him to renew his efforts
after so grand a reward, but, at the same time, had made him gloomily
feel his distance from it, lodging in his mind a stubborn doubt if it
could, after all, ever be attained by him. The combined weight of these
experiences had intensified his already bitter sense of the world’s
indifference to his desires and aims, of the world’s unconscious
cruelty, and of its brutal injustice. He had eagerly embraced the world
at his earliest opportunity, had reviled those who opposed themselves
to it--and what was the world doing for him, what was it not blindly
and carelessly doing against him? He was brought to the point of
sheer despair, and was ready to turn upon the world--yet not ready to
turn his back upon it. For he had not the slightest conception of any
other than sensuous and worldly values, of any other than material
gratifications which might bring to him fulness of life. Years ago he
had defiantly closed _that_ door, without in the least knowing what
he was doing, and it was never to be opened to him. He was miserably
exasperated by defeat, but the world’s appeal was still insistent and
compelling, and would be heard and obeyed for many a year, whether or
not it became suspect for a siren’s call.
In these circumstances the _First Principles_ came really as a
god-send. The book had the impressive appearance of being the voice
of science itself uttering at last the Truth. Yet its weight and
authority left undisturbed Mr. Dreiser’s worldliness and some of his
dear prejudices. It left, indeed, everything as it was with him; but
it did appear to rob everything of value, and so, as he thought, left
him crushed and hopeless. Actually, however, it offered him a species
of consolation for the crushed and hopeless state into which he had
already been plunged by his efforts after a “realistic” way of life.
A species of consolation;--because, though the dehumanised conception
of the world and life presented by naturalism was “cold comfort,”
still, it did enable one who felt badly used to turn upon the universe
and _say_, if not feel, that life was a meaningless and unimportant
phenomenon anyhow.
The _Synthetic Philosophy_, Mr. Dreiser tells the world, “eternally
verified” his “gravest fears as to the unsolvable disorder and
brutality of life.” Precisely; as these turns of phrase show, it left
his feelings what they had been, likewise his desires and aims, and
his sentimental humanitarianism and more. What Spencer gave him was
something to fall back upon and _say_ in hopeless or disillusioned
moments, but something which, leaving him otherwise where he was,
even helped to preserve him inviolate from self-criticism or
self-discipline. Following the guidance of temperament and mood, he
took from Spencer what he wanted, and nothing else; and it so happened
that this included little or nothing specifically characteristic of
Spencer as against various other naturalistic thinkers. The tone,
indeed, of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism, as well as its emphasis upon
accident and chaotic disorder, is not only more sophisticated than that
of Spencer’s, but abruptly contradictory of the Synthetic gentleman’s
grandiose fancy of one eternal, universal law infallibly working to
bring about perfection in all things earthly.
His dark emotional naturalism--and, it may be added, several of the
contradictions it has involved him in--bring Mr. Dreiser, as some of
his readers have perceived, close to Thomas Hardy, in proportion as
he is far from Spencer. He does not mention Hardy in the record of
his development which I have been following, but he is said to have
confessed to “an enchanted discovery” of that novelist in 1896, and his
delight is what was to be expected. As far as one can see, however, his
indebtedness to Hardy, though real, is not important.
II
This, in summary form, is the story of Mr. Dreiser’s preparation for
a novelist’s career. His first novel was published in 1900, and his
sixth in 1925. Though from an early time he has had warm friends
amongst the critics, still, even the most devoted of these have harshly
condemned some of his books; and, in general, critical opinion, when
not predominantly hostile, has been sharply divided. Nevertheless,
in the face of whatever difficulties, Mr. Dreiser has slowly won a
leading position in the world of fiction, for reasons which I began by
mentioning. And his sixth novel, _An American Tragedy_, was, upon its
appearance, widely proclaimed a masterpiece.
Certainly, moreover, _An American Tragedy_ is by all odds the best of
Mr. Dreiser’s novels, though perhaps not the most _interesting_. In
it his language is still faulty, as in his earlier books; the quality
of his style is mediocre, when not worse; his narrative is badly
proportioned;--but, nevertheless, the novel also has excellences which
its author had not previously achieved, and which are seldom to be
found save in works of a serious and mature artistry. It has a sombre
inevitableness, a self-contained adequacy, a restraint, dignity, and
detachment which bespeak not merely the experienced craftsman, but also
the workman’s sure grasp of his theme united with a deeply emotional
confidence in its truth and importance. A far higher intelligence is
exhibited in its execution than in Mr. Dreiser’s play, _The Hand of
the Potter_ (1918), whose theme is similar in several respects. If one
should name a single change indicative of the intelligent masterliness
of _An American Tragedy_, perhaps the most significant is the fact
that in this book, for the first time, Mr. Dreiser has permitted his
characters and events to speak entirely for themselves.
But though _An American Tragedy_ marks a really notable advance in
technique, and a heightened plausibility thus attained, partly through
restraint, still, it exhibits Mr. Dreiser’s thought and the essential
quality of his realism entirely unchanged. How Mr. Dreiser reached
a mechanistic naturalism has above been shown, and how he became
conscious of the fact. The appropriate result was that all his novels
became tales of human irresponsibility, constructed to illustrate
life’s contradiction of the hollow conventions of society, and life’s
obedience to blind laws which make the individual’s experience a
chaos with an end unrelated to desert. This is the theme of _An
American Tragedy_, as of the earlier novels. It is a tale of human
irresponsibility, supported by youthful prejudices never relinquished,
built up on false antitheses, and capped by a merely circumstantial
realism calculated to give the narrative a deceptive air of importance.
Youthful prejudice, for example, transparently dictates the important
part played by religion in this novel. Religion is represented as an
illusion capable of deceiving only those blind to life’s realities--the
hopelessly incompetent and unintelligent, those whose advocacy would
itself discredit any doctrine. Religion’s illusory nature is said to
be self-evident, indeed, since it has much to say of Providence, yet
manifestly bestows on the convert no worldly rewards, in satisfaction
of the real needs and desires with which he is endowed, not by his
own design or wish. Convention, too, is represented as a force which
sways only the stupid and lethargic, which makes no demands entitling
it to respect, and which the intelligent disregard deliberately, the
temperamental wilfully. Intelligence itself is pictured as merely an
instrument useful for devising methods of self-advancement;--in other
words, as the servant of inborn temperament. And temperament is the one
irresistible, compelling force in life, to which all else is ultimately
obedient. Hence no one is really responsible for anything;--save,
perhaps, the novelist who sees this important truth, at length, and by
careful selection of appropriate matter is able to picture it for us.
Not even Mr. Dreiser’s expert care and long practice, however, are
sufficient to enable him to evade a difficulty inherent in the nature
of his theme. For the predicament of Roberta Alden is infinitely sad,
and her creator narrates her history and murder with an exemplary
truthfulness which emphasises that sadness to the full. Nevertheless,
the reader’s sympathy is not invoked. The girl, on the contrary, is
presented as the inevitable resultant of inheritance, environment,
and sex, and she lives as an embodied energy rather than as a person.
Extraordinary pains are taken, with all the multitudinous details
of her story, to balance causes against effects, and she emerges a
plausible creature. There is nothing incredible in her being just
conventional enough and unwary enough and love-sick enough to suit
the story’s purpose; but, too, there is nothing in her nature or her
history to render either important. Indeed, her grievous distress,
leading up to her murder, takes on, under Mr. Dreiser’s hand, the
same significance as the squirming of an angleworm, impaled by some
mischievous boy--no less, but certainly no more.
“Chemic compulsion” draws Roberta Alden as it draws other substances.
“Chemic compulsion” epitomises the book. It “just happens”--and this is
all--that “chemic compulsion” entangles Roberta with the squid--Clyde
Griffiths, the defeated squid. For readers of Mr. Dreiser’s “epic”
tale, _The Financier_, who recall the apologue of the lobster and the
squid cannot fail to recognise Clyde Griffiths as the embodiment of
the latter--and his cousin Gilbert as the patient, triumphant lobster.
The squid, it need scarcely be said, commands no more sympathy than
Roberta;--indeed, most readers inevitably must sympathise with the
spirit of the “irate woodsman’s” brutal question during the trial. This
undefiled son of the forest asked: “Why don’t they kill the God-damned
bastard and be done with him?” But, just for this reason, it has to be
remembered that Mr. Dreiser exhausts every possible means so to account
for Clyde as to preserve him from all blame. The squid is the complete
plaything of “chemic compulsion,” the paragon of irresponsibility, the
perfect exemplar of the truth as the truth has been revealed to his
creator.
This being so, it is little less than a miracle that Mr. Dreiser has
contrived--through the infinite detail of a merely circumstantial
realism--to save Clyde Griffiths’ humanity sufficiently to maintain
the reader’s “suspension of disbelief” until the end of the book.
Undoubtedly he has done so, though he has not succeeded in making all
readers feel that patience has been adequately rewarded. They have
been impressed, as is fitting before so monumental a composition; they
have been troubled; they have not been recompensed. Eight hundred
and forty pages devoted to the unconscionable prolongation of a mere
sensational newspaper story! Remarks to this effect I have heard
more than once; and they roughly indicate the real difficulty--the
inevitably self-destroying effect of such an effort as Mr. Dreiser’s,
in proportion as it is successful.
This difficulty, however, does not actually lie in the plot of _An
American Tragedy_, as the remark just cited implies. The bare plot of
the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus might equally well form the basis of a
mere sensational newspaper story, and Clytemnestra in that play and
in the _Choephori_ makes for herself, not without seeming justice,
the plea that is made for Clyde Griffiths. Not she, but Destiny, she
says, through her its helpless instrument slew Agamemnon; and she also
pleads that she did not make herself, yet can only act out her inborn
nature. But it is not for his plots, nor because he was well acquainted
with Mr. Dreiser’s view of life, that Æschylus lives on still amongst
us. His dramas have a perennial and deep value for mankind because,
rejecting the plausible notion of “chemic compulsion,” he struggled
with profound conviction to convey a very different meaning through
their form, characters, and action. Without evading any of its
difficulty, he asserted his faith that Moral Law uncompromisingly
governs the life of man, making for an order which is divine, in
the face of a chaos intrinsically evil, and that men are fully, if
tragically, responsible for the consequences of their acts, whatever
their motives or compulsions, so that ignorance and self-conceit are
equally as criminal as violence.
This is not to say all, of course, but it may suffice to show how
Æschylus and, more clear-sightedly, Sophocles cut straight through to
the centre of the human problem and propounded a solution which, if
not the only one, nor by itself a complete one, is still, strictly
speaking, irrefutable, being founded directly upon facts of experience
which have not changed with the passing generations;--an unassailable
solution, moreover, which gives weight and meaning to every individual
and to all of his acts. And hence it is that the bloody and sensational
fables of Æschylus and Sophocles, triumphantly formed in full harmony
with their meaning, have an interest and value for men which time does
not exhaust.
Mr. Dreiser’s difficulty is not that he has different facts of
experience to interpret;--he has precisely the same facts concerning
an essentially unchanged human nature. His difficulty is that his
mechanistic naturalism compels him so to select and manipulate facts of
experience as to deny, through his narrative, that human life has any
meaning or value. The attempt is suicidal, and the more consistently
it is carried out the more completely is Mr. Dreiser forced to divest
his creatures and their actions of any distinctively human quality and
meaning. The more successful he is the more insignificant his work
becomes. _An American Tragedy_, as I have said, is more skilfully,
faithfully, and consistently executed on the naturalistic level than
any of its author’s earlier novels, and precisely for this reason it
contains no single element of tragedy in any legitimate sense of
the word, and it impresses thoughtful readers as a mere sensational
newspaper story long drawn out. In other words, in proportion as Mr.
Dreiser contrives to accomplish his self-imposed task he has nothing to
tell us except that there is nothing to tell about life until it can be
reduced even below the apparent level of animal existence, to the point
where it becomes a meaningless chaos of blind energies.
Whether or not any real sense of the self-destroying character of
this effort, to create a literature as valueless and insignificant
as possible, will ever strike Mr. Dreiser’s consciousness, I should
not venture to guess. But only an obstinate self-conceit, or an
invincible stupidity, one imagines, could have kept him from seeing the
absurdities into which he was forced, in the course of half-a-dozen
sentences, when he recently attempted to draw up a brief statement of
his present belief. He wrote: “I can make no comment on my work or my
life that holds either interest or import for me. Nor can I imagine
any explanation or interpretation of any life, my own included, that
would be either true--or important, if true. Life is to me too much a
welter and play of inscrutable forces to permit, in my case at least,
any significant comment. One may paint for one’s own entertainment,
and that of others--perhaps. As I see him the utterly infinitesimal
individual weaves among the mysteries a floss-like and wholly
meaningless course--if course it be. In short I catch no meaning from
all I have seen, and pass quite as I came, confused and dismayed.”[44]
To this point has Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism driven him. If the general
sense of this awkward yet mannered statement comprised the truth about
him and his work, he would, of course, never have been asked to make
it. He would, in all probability, have been confined long ago to an
asylum; and he would certainly never have written any of his books.
Those books, moreover, have manifestly not been written just for his
own entertainment. They have been written because he felt he had
something to say--because of his certainty that he had come to know the
truth, as men in general knew it not. And with singular faithfulness
of purpose and of industry, involving what for him must have been
almost superhuman effort, because of his defects of mind and training,
he has devoted himself to the struggle to express the truth as he
conceived it--that is, to reduce it to consistency and give it coherent
form. He has also neglected nothing, within his limits, to make it
impressive. He has thus lived a rationally purposive life, reducing at
least to symptoms of order the welter of his impressions and impulses,
controlling at least fitfully his rebellious temperament, and mastering
(or “sublimating”) at least partially his almost pathological obsession
by sex. For the sake of self-expression--or, as I shall presently
suggest, of self-justification--he has thus achieved an appreciably
disciplined life, and so has in his own person, against his own
literary aim, furnished a convincing refutation of his philosophy. He
has effectively proved that _An American Tragedy_ gives form to a view
of life as gratuitous as it is unmeaning.
Fortunately it is now realised by an increasing number of people that
naturalistic philosophies are merely speculative ventures, which derive
no valid support from “modern science.” And it has, besides, been
shown above how little “science” had to do with the formation of Mr.
Dreiser’s naturalistic prejudice. Mr. Dreiser, on his own showing, was
first awakened to a sense of life as a problem to be solved by his
discovery of the radical contrast between the ethical standards of his
father and his church (as he understood its teaching), and his own
spontaneous impulses and desires. His haphazard, undirected education
gave him an unexcelled opportunity to learn that there were many
others like himself, that they seemed to be the most vigorous members
of their communities, and that they never hesitated to transgress every
ethical standard, when they could get away with it, in their struggle
for self-advancement and self-gratification. He treasured every
impression which seemed to be on his side against ethical standards
by which he stood condemned. His self-esteem had been gravely shocked
by the discordance he had discovered, and he now found the means to
restore it and, indeed, to strengthen it, by appeal from home and
church to the larger world. Not he was in the wrong of it, but the
“senseless,” “impossible” theories which would have convicted him of
shameful tendencies. “In shame there is no comfort, but to be beyond
all bounds of shame,” says one of Sidney’s Arcadians, and this Mr.
Dreiser might thenceforth have taken for his motto.
Governed by this apolaustic prejudice, he has since continued his
transparent course of seeing only what he has desired to see, or
rather of admitting the reality of only what has suited him, while
setting down all else as either hypocrisy or delusion. And while it is
true that no one escapes the necessity of bringing only a selective
attention to bear upon the outer world, it by no means follows that we
are all alike cut off from “reality.” On the contrary, it does mean
that the basis of our selective attention, the interests and purposes
served by it, are of fundamental importance. And the disastrous effect
of Mr. Dreiser’s apolaustic prejudice is that it encouraged him in
slavery to mere temperament, in helpless surrender to the chaotic flow
of “natural” impulses, while it brought to his attention from the
outer world only what fed itself, the antics of complicated beasts
with strange illusions. The trouble with what he thus saw is not that
it was non-existent, some gross trick of the fevered imagination;--it
was there to be seen--it is there, in grievous plenty. No, the
trouble is that none of it has positive significance. The naturalism
which it fathers lights up the animal in man, but tells man nothing
of that which positively distinguishes him from the beast--more, it
vindictively denies that anything save hypocrisy and delusion does so
distinguish him. And while it seeks to dissolve our humanity, it ends,
as it ends in Mr. Dreiser, in a bottomless morass of misrepresentation
and despair. This is the American tragedy of our confused age which
constitutes the real import of Mr. Dreiser’s masterpiece.
Note--For permission to quote from the writings of Mr. Dreiser, I
am indebted both to him and to his publisher, Mr. Horace Liveright.
FOOTNOTES
[42] In that which follows I draw chiefly upon _A Book About Myself_
(1922), but also make use of _A Hoosier Holiday_ (1916), _Twelve Men_
(1919), and _Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub_ (1920). _A Traveler at Forty_ (1913) is
also a revealing book.
[43] I refer particularly to _Jennie Gerhardt_ and _The “Genius.”_
Limitations of space unfortunately prevent me from considering here any
save Mr. Dreiser’s latest novel, _An American Tragedy_.
[44] From the _Bookman_, September, 1928 (Vol. 68, p. 25).
_Pandora’s Box in American Fiction_
HARRY HAYDEN CLARK
America, Carlyle wrote Emerson, “is verily the Door of Hope to
distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into
blackness of darkness.”
The Door of Hope! It is perhaps time now to ask down what corridors
this door has led, to scrutinise the precise quality of American hope.
Is it a new hope, or a disguised form of the European hope which has
led “to blackness of darkness”? What, for example, have our fiction
writers, reflecting the American mind, past and present, reported
regarding the success of their quest for happiness? If they have
reported that certain sorts of hope have led to despair, what evidence
is there that other sorts lead to joy? For “the desire for happiness,”
says Arnold, “is the root and ground of man’s being. Tell him and show
him that he places his happiness wrong, that he seeks for delight where
delight will never really be found; then you illumine and further
him.” Let us sketch the quality, first, of the hope of a paradise of
supernal beauty; second, the hope of an American paradise of nature;
and finally, the hope of “A Paradise _within_ thee, happier far.”
I
If we consider the European background of the hope to escape to a
paradise of supernal beauty and bliss, we find that in the classical
legends of the Golden Age, in such Renaissance writers as Lyly,
Sidney, and Spenser, and in such later work as Thomson’s _Castle of
Indolence_, this idyllic Arcadianism was either frankly recreational
and non-philosophic or else a cloak for allegory. Not until the middle
of the eighteenth century was the idyllic dream taken seriously.
Revolting from earlier and contemporary restriction of the imagination,
Akenside advocated refusing to “restrain” one’s “soaring fancy,” Joseph
Warton glorified the “creative and glowing imagination,” and Edward
Young sought to escape “this pestilential earth” by the “creative
power” of the imagination to call forth paradisiacal beauties, “shadowy
beings and unknown worlds,” in the “vast void beyond real existence.”
He exalted a genius which was to “wander wild” in “the fairy land of
fancy,” “reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras,” and “sport
with its infinite objects uncontrolled.” Thus in _Vathek_ Beckford
created a sensuous and erotic paradise with its five palaces which he
destined “for the particular gratification of each of the five senses.”
“The light that never was, on sea or land,” enthralled the youthful
Wordsworth, but he soon questioned it as a “fond illusion.” Keats
sought to escape on “the viewless wings of Poesy” from the “weariness”
of actuality to the “charmed magic casements.” Shelley, the high priest
of this ceaseless and aimless quest for the unattainable, tells us
that only his “fearful and monstrous” story of _The Cenci_ is “a sad
reality”; otherwise he “dreams of what ought to be, or what may be.”
For him the Spirit of Beauty leaves “This dim vast vale of tears,
vacant and desolate.” His is a longing indeterminate, a
“devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.”
“I loved I know not what--but this low sphere,
And all that it contains, contains not thee.”
_Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_ are matchless records of his fruitless
quest for the phantom of desire. DeQuincey’s fantasies are “filled
with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of forgotten deliriums.” _The
Lady of Shalott_ and _The Palace of Art_ testify to Tennyson’s
reluctant renunciation of the life of illusion. Swinburne characterised
himself in _A Nympholept_, while his friend, the author of _The Earthly
Paradise_, strove to
“build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea.”
With this background in mind, let us see to what extent the American
story-tellers’ hope for a paradise of supernal beauty coincides with
the idyllic, indeterminate hope of the English romanticists. In _The
Author’s Account of Himself_, Irving, our first master of the short
story, states his Old World longing “to escape, in short, from the
common-place realities of the present,” to “the shadowy grandeurs
of the past,” the “earthly paradise” of “Bellissima Granada” and
the legend-haunted Alhambra. _The Legend of Prince Ahmed al Kamel_,
dealing with the quest for the phantom of desire, illustrates the
idyllic quality of his imagination. The Prince, called the “Perfect”
on account of his “super-excellence,” receives from a dove tidings
of a fair princess--“no flower of the field could compare with her
for loveliness.” In the Spanish spring-time the Prince, a “pilgrim of
love,” resolves to “seek this unknown princess throughout the world.”
Guided by a parrot and an owl, he eventually finds her in the court of
her hostile father. The lover produces his “silken carpet of the throne
of Solomon,” and after confessing his devotion, “the carpet rose in
the air, bearing off the prince and princess ... and then disappeared
in the blue vault of heaven.” Irving, however, sought “escape ... from
the common-place” not only in the picturesque fantasies of Old Spain
but also in the glamorous aspects of the American past, as illustrated
in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. In “a remote period of American
history,” among “some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson,”
Ichabod rides on a “fine autumnal day” through the “rich and golden
livery” of a natural paradise to win the “peerless,” “ripe and melting
and rosy-cheeked Katrina” and her “unimaginable luxury.” Introduced
by lines from _The Castle of Indolence_, _The Legend_ illustrates
Irving’s somewhat sentimental and humorous continuation of the merely
recreational Arcadianism of earlier days. And the ruse of the Headless
Horseman, in connection with the “twilight superstitions” of one who
was “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s _History of New England
Witchcraft_,” suggests the interesting tendency of the native Puritan
interest in things unearthly, with the waning of faith, to become a
subject for the æsthetic imagination as in the case of Hawthorne and
Poe.
Unlike Irving, Poe takes the idyllic dream seriously. He defines
the Poetic Principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal
Beauty,” manifested “in an elevating excitement of the Soul.” Of
course, as every one knows, his vigorous reason controlled the decadent
imagination and emotion of the earlier Gothic school and made him
perhaps our greatest master of the short story technique. But let us
illustrate and define the content of his “aspiration,” his “elevating
excitement of the Soul.” Where does he seek happiness? One thinks of
the “delirious bliss” of “the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass” in
_Eleanora_. We might better, however, turn to _The Domain of Arnheim_,
where Ellison, with “_a fortune of four hundred and fifty million
dollars_,” seeks to satisfy his passion for an exclusively “physical
loveliness,” his “four elementary conditions of bliss,” which are
“free exercise,” “the love of woman,” “contempt of ambition,” and “an
object of unceasing pursuit.” After a four year quest he finds in the
“luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands” “an elevated tableland of
wonderful fertility and beauty”; it was the “Paradise of Arnheim,”
combining everything rich and voluptuous. Ellison, however, sought to
gratify the “one passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty,” “above
all ... in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness
and love enveloped his existence in the pure atmosphere of Paradise.”
Thus the content of Poe’s aspiration, as well as his references here
to the “chimera of the perfectionists” “Turgot, Price, Priestley and
Condorcet,” to “Fonthill,” the birthplace of _Vathek_, and to the “rapt
day-dreams of De Staël,” suggest that his aspiration is essentially one
with that ceaseless and aimless sensuous longing already illustrated in
the English romanticists. Or take _The Island of the Fay_, which deals
with the contemplation of “the glory of God” in “natural scenery”--“all
within the Spirit Divine”--in a “rivulet and island,” “all one
radiant harem of garden beauties.” Shelley-like, he sees approach the
“enchanted” island a gentle Fay in a “fragile canoe” with a “phantom
of an oar.” This vision of loveliness, however, passed “disconsolately
with her boat into the region of the ebony flood,” and “darkness fell
over all things and I beheld her magical figure no more.” Thus, as
Professor Foerster has so finely said, Poe gives us only “shuddering
harmonies of the murky subconscious, and roseate harmonies of
sensuous longing posing as spirituality.... His vision oscillated not
between the earthly and the supernal, but between the infernal and
the Arcadian.” But what did Poe report regarding the success of his
aspiration for supernal beauty? “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s
heart,” he concludes, “is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped
volume of Despair.” Thinking of writing a book on his life, he said:
“No man will ever dare write it. No man could write it, even if he
dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery
pen.”
Perhaps the most vigorous and passionate Arcadian in American
literature is Herman Melville, mariner and mystic. Descended from Dutch
and New England parents proud and conservative, Melville was driven
to “the water world,” he tells us, by “sad disappointments ... united
with a naturally roving disposition.” He deserted his ship and found
in the valley of the Typees “perpetual hilarity. Surrounded by all the
luxurious provisions of nature,” the innocent natives enjoy the idyllic
bliss “that springs principally from that all-pervading sensation which
Rousseau told us he at one time experienced: the mere buoyant sense of
healthful, physical existence.” This was before the missionaries and
“the worst attendances of civilisation” drove “all peace and happiness
from the valley.” In _Mardi_, frankly idyllic and nympholeptic, devoted
to the savages “as they are not,” Melville’s nostalgic idealism and his
hatred of reality become intensified. Here he creates a dream-girl,
Yillah, “the earthly semblance of that sweet vision, that haunted my
earliest thought,” and the book is a record of the allegorical quest
for her through all the nations of the earth. It follows Unitarianism
and Transcendentalism, with their hope for the infinite perfectibility
of men; it is the quest of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_, the quest
of Novalis for the Blue Flower. “But fiery yearnings their own
phantom-future make, and deem it present. So, if after all these
fearful, fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not
gained;--yet, in bold quest thereof better to sink in boundless deeps
than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck,
if wreck I do.” If Melville fled, however, “not so much bound to any
haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern”--such as the “Babylonish
brick-kiln of New York,” “Commonness and Conventionalism,” “mines
and marts,” and Democracy, “the harlot on horseback”--his first-hand
experience with the reality of a sea red in tooth and claw as well as
“the mystery of iniquity” tended to clash with his dreams of Utopia.
_Moby-Dick_ was born of this clash between the hope of a paradise of
supernal beauty and the sight of a malignant reality from the deck of a
whaler. We have his own commentary on the final results of nympholeptic
longing:
“Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot.... The
truest of men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books
is Solomon’s, and the Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of
woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal,
Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men.... And your only Mardian
happiness is but exemption from great woes--no more.... Sadness
makes the silence throughout the realms of space; Sadness is
universal and eternal.”
Let us skip the realism of the later nineteenth century, most of which
is essentially arid, and approach such a figure as Floyd Dell. Born
of autobiographical revery, _Moon-Calf_ is the history of a “lonely,
unhappy, desperately desiring and bewildered child” in various Middle
Western towns as he sought refuge in dreams from “the mysterious and
troublesome real world which he feared and disliked.” The avenues of
escape are two: the “gorgeous fantasies which were unrolled for him in
the pages of books,” and the quest of the dream-girl. Lured by the hope
of “freedom, of happiness, of a world altogether new and beautiful,”
Felix becomes a Socialist, only to find later that “that garret
Utopia had somehow lost its savour.” He becomes a factory worker--in
the chaste language of his boss, “the messiest, absent-mindedest,
God-damn carelessest person he had ever seen around a factory.” And
then he tries newspaper work, and is again discharged. Then “he wanted,
with a kind of nostalgia, to write that novel.” Like Shelley, he
sought refuge from a world to which he refused to adjust himself by
turning “his gaze inward upon a world of ideas and dreams.” As Wheels
says, “The world itself is hideous. You can’t do anything with it.
But you can dream beautiful dreams.... There is no other beauty.”
An “incorrigible Utopian,” a member of the Agnostic Society, Felix
escaped to poetry--an “enchanted land”--loving the “drug-like beauty”
of “words, which were like a perfumed breeze out of nowhere, or out of
some strange life lived before, affecting him with a strange nostalgia.”
“Nay, I was sent a wanderer
On Beauty’s desperate quest--
To go forever seeking Her,
Nor, ere I find her, rest.”
And then there is the quest for the dream-girl. First there is Rose,
the gardener’s daughter, whom he meets in the attic and to whom he
reads Rousseau’s _Confessions_. One night they stay in the woods,
watching the stars, and “awakened chill and stiff, a little before
dawn.” In “the innermost caves of fantasy” she was the “Virgin Queen”
of Atlantis, and he her Harper.... “She was ... hope that turns to
despair.” And then there was Margaret, Helen Raymond, Daisy Fisher,
Emily, Mrs. Miller, Lucy, and finally Joyce, with whom he spent the
nights in the cabin. He explains to Joyce that he seeks “something
better than just ordinary, everyday happiness,” that he doesn’t believe
in private property, God, the home, or the support of one’s wife. He
wants a companionship “at once light and gracious, irresponsible and
sincere, generous and self-respecting!” Finally he felt “a discrepancy
between her and a not very distinct ideal of his imagination.” He
“clung to the memory of his shadow-land of ideas” in preference to the
“world of desperate reality,” and when his beloved Joyce tells him she
is to work out her human destiny with another the “world of his dreams
fell shattering about him.” Obviously, _Moon-Calf_ is the creation of
the sort of hope which robbed Shelley of “peace within.”
Let us turn to Willa Cather, whose main theme is the struggle for
æsthetic or emotional self-realisation amid the sordid environment
of either the frontier or an industrial society. In _O Pioneers!_
most piteous is the fate of the fair Marie Tovesky, murdered in the
arms of her lover. In _The Song of the Lark_ Thea Kronsburg develops
her rare voice in spite of a gossipy Colorado town. “There is only
one big thing--desire.” In _My Ántonia_ the heroine says, “That is
happiness--to be dissolved in something complete and great.” Her lust
for richness of experience leads to her becoming an unmarried mother
and finally the mother of a large family. In _Youth and the Bright
Medusa_ a typical story is that of Paul, whose longing for an æsthetic
paradise in a flatly stolid industrial town led him to robbery and
to suicide after a week’s fulfilment of his hopes. Most instructive,
perhaps, is _The Professor’s House_, based on the fruitless struggle of
the romantic spirit against materialism and convention. The Professor
does not “think much of science as a phase of human development”; he
resisted the new “commercialism” in education; he preferred his old
dingy study to the one in the pretentious house which his worldly
wife and daughters had planned; he loathes the petty quarrels of his
daughters over fashions; and his wife accuses him of “shutting yourself
away from everybody.” In place of materialism and convention, however,
he seeks to substitute not a central interest in what is most richly
and typically human but rather a refuge in the romantic past: in the
pomp of the Middle Ages when man was “a principal in a gorgeous drama
with God”; in the bygone glories of the Spanish adventurers; in
reliving in revery his youth, “the realest of his lives”; in the loving
study of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore; and in his
interest in his former student’s worship of the ancient Cliff-dwellers.
The seemingly irrelevant interpolation of Tom Outland’s story of his
inability to interest official Washington, “so petty, so slavish,”
in his “religious emotion” regarding his discovery of the relics of
the Cliff-dwellers is explained by its paralleling and under-scoring
the Professor’s own struggle--the romantic spirit struggling in vain
against materialism and convention. Finally, when the Professor’s
family departed for Europe, he “thought of eternal solitude with
gratefulness,” and “wanted to run away from everything he had intensely
cared for.” One night while he is resting in his old study a storm
blows out his gas stove and slams his window shut: he awakens to find
himself “nearly asphyxiated”; he wished to die. “He hadn’t lifted his
hand against himself--was he required to lift it for himself?” He
cannot bear the thought of his wife’s return and the continuation of
their way of life. Finally an old friend revives him, but he found that
“he had let something go--and it was gone: something very precious.”
He reflects that “his apathy” will not trouble a family “preoccupied
with their own affairs.” No, the merely romantic devotion to what is
picturesque in the storied past will never avail in the quest for peace
in a conventional and materialistic environment.
Like Poe, Joseph Hergesheimer strives to escape “the dreary and
impertinent duty of improving the world” in his worship of an
unattainable beauty. His friend Mr. Cabell finds “in all the
Hergesheimer novels” “men labouring toward the unattainable, and a
high questing foiled.” For example, in _Linda Condon_, based on this
theme, Peyton, a sculptor, seeks in vain to win the beautiful Linda,
who marries another. The sculptor endeavours to sublimate his passion
in the creation of a great statue, which is destroyed by a mob, and he
dies in forlorn desolation.
“Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire
beyond the body.... The endless service of beauty. Of course,
a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the
spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct
contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and
the sacred symbol of the dollar.... The old gesture toward the
stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape from the fatality of
the flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made incredibly lovely
in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won.”
This spiritualised beauty, however, is of course dependent upon
sensuousness, and Mr. Hergesheimer asserts that “the whole discharge
of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to
... put down the colours and scents and emotions of existence.” And,
like Keats, like all who found life on a merely sensuous beauty,
he is haunted by the dread of transience, by “that sharp sense of
beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high
pretensions, valours, maintained in the face of imminent destruction
... in the category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to
perish in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly.”
He tells us that he creates ideal beauty as a result of “the assault of
a persuasive discontent.” Nothing matters but an unattainable sensuous
beauty; and this merely impresses him with its evanescence. This
transient beauty can be arrested only by art, and he begins a later
essay on art with the words, “I am getting damned tired of art....”
Perhaps the endless and aimless longing for the unattainable has
received most elaborate treatment at the hands of Mr. Hergesheimer’s
friend, James Branch Cabell. In _Beyond Life_, a series of essays,
he outlines his literary creed, his hostility to realism. Holding
that “veracity is the one unpardonable sin,” he “perceives this race
... to be beyond all wording petty and ineffectual,” and he follows
the “instinct of any hurt animal to seek revenge ... in the field
of imagination” by retreating to Poictesme, “that fair country ...
which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and
the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of
course by the Hesperides.” Let us examine the quality and success
of Mr. Cabell’s aspiration as embodied in _The Cream of the Jest_.
Felix Kennaston, the hero, is actually a conventional novelist, a
conservative property-owner, a Presbyterian, and a good husband.
Inwardly, however, he is a dreamer who seeks to escape from the
thralldom of actuality in his quest of “Ettarre, who embodied all
Kennaston was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and
strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes of divinity,
in a word, such as his slender human faculties were competent to
understand.” “It is the cream of a vile jest,” he says, “that I am
forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you.” These magic
dreams of Ettarre are induced by a sigil--a broken disc which Felix
found on one of his walks. Finally, near his death, it is discovered
that this magic sigil is only “the metal top of a cold cream jar,”
and his dreams become a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
This is perhaps the blackest pessimism in American literature--the
conviction that reality is a “dragging nightmare,” and the discovery
that the illusion which alone makes life bearable is founded on nothing
more sacred than the broken “top of a cold cream jar.” And it should
be noted that, all Mr. Cabell’s books being parts of a “Biography,”
Felix is nothing less than a symbol of “humanity.” “His history was,
in essentials, the history of our race thus far. All I advanced for or
against him, was true of all men that have ever lived.”
_Jurgen_ may be said to deal mainly with the poignancy of the
realisation of the contrast between the veiled loveliness of youthful
illusions and a cold and ugly sensuous reality; relief is sought
through an escape from this reality in dreaming of these illusions now
shattered, or in dreaming of new illusions. In actuality, Jurgen is
only a dirty little pot-bellied pawn-broker of the Middle Ages married
to a shrewish, cowardly wife. Through magic, however, he is enabled to
pack into one year “the follies of a quarter of a century,” to seek
through a land of fabulous loveliness the phantom of desire. There he
meets Dorothy la Désirée, “in all things perfect,” as he had loved
her in the “garden between Dawn and Sunrise”; in reality she was a
“horrible lascivious woman.” And there in her robe of flaming silk is
the young Guenevere, “the fairest of mortal women”; there is the Queen
Sylvia Tereu of pallid charm who vanishes at dawn; there is Anaitis,
the personification of a nature myth, with her ecstatic rites and
sensual orgies; there is the plump Chloris, loveliest of Hamadryads;
there is Queen Helen, for whose fabulous beauty he hungered even in
childhood; there is the proud Dolores, “lovely as a hawk is lovely”;
there is Florimel who dwelt by the Sea of Blood; and there is Phyllis,
Satan’s wife, “the loveliest little slip of devilishness.” Of one and
all Jurgen tires. His remark that his “tender heart and tolerably keen
eyes” force him “to jeer out of season” to avoid “far more untimely
tears” reminds us of the Bohemian Byron who finally confesses with
infinite sadness:
“If I laugh at any mortal thing,
’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,
’Tis that our nature cannot always bring
Itself to apathy.”
And in the end we have Jurgen’s Shelley-like admission of the futility
and hopelessness of his aimless longing:
“Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it is that
I desire!... For I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what.... I have
gone romancing through the world, ... nowhere have I found what I
desired.... I am compact of weariness and apprehension, for I no
longer discern what thing is I, nor what is my desire, and I fear
that I am already dead.”
It is evident, then, that in the hope for a paradise of supernal
beauty Americans have been lured as by a Siren to an abyss of despair
of which the English romanticists, who experimented with this idyllic
hope, warned us over a century ago. The Edward Young who sported in
his paradisiacal “empire of chimeras” “cast the total” of his life as
“despair.” Keats reported that in the romantic “Temple of Delight”
“Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”
And Shelley of the iridescent dreams, who would
“Hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates,”
confessed in the end:
“Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around.”
Very beautiful are these rainbow visions--but they are conjured out of
night.
II
Let us turn to a second sort of hope--the hope of an American paradise
of nature. Although the paradise of nature appears in Vergil, in
Renaissance pastorals by Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, in Perdita’s
shepherd home and in the sylvan cave of Cymbeline’s sons, its use
was mainly either decorative or allegorical until the eighteenth
century. In 1711 Shaftesbury proclaimed the natural man benevolent,
compassionate, and altruistic; and as such he appears in _Ossian_. Pope
said, “The state of Nature was the reign of God.” Rousseau broadcast
the doctrine that civilisation had tended to corrupt the morals of
mankind, while he described the enchanting life of man in a natural
paradise. Cowper united literary simplicity, religious emotionalism,
and the naturalistic humanitarianism of Rousseau. Burns glorified the
simple peasant close to nature. And Coleridge and Southey dreamed
fondly of an American Pantisocracy--“A Dell of Peace and Equality”--on
the banks of the Susquehanna. In 1771, Philip Freneau, our first man
of letters, deriving his radical democracy and his devotion to the
indigenous scene from naturalism, envisaged “The Rising Glory of
America”:
“A new Jerusalem, sent down from heaven,
Shall grace our happy earth, ...
Thence called _Millennium_. Paradise anew
Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost ...
No tempting serpent to allure the soul
From native innocence.”
Indeed, it is interesting to speculate upon the extent to which
this English romantic faith in the “native innocence” of mankind,
transplanted to the inexhaustible resources of the American frontier,
has under these unique conditions furnished philosophic sanction
for an unbridled materialism which has become so characteristically
national. Frontier isolation tended to breed self-confidence, equality,
self-reliance, optimism, contempt for artificial distinctions and a
dependence upon the material world. Crèvecœur in 1782 defined “an
American” as a “new man who acts upon new principles.”
“We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are
the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is
free as he ought to be.”
Our first novelist who sought a paradise of American nature was James
Fenimore Cooper. Revolting against both the feudalism of aristocratic
Europe and the crude democracy of Jacksonian America, Cooper sought
refuge in projecting his ideals in the character of Leatherstocking
and also in such a Utopian paradise as in _The Crater_. Whatever one
may think of Cooper’s Indians, his “females,” his woodcraft, or his
rhetoric, Leatherstocking remains a great contribution to the fiction
of the world, “perhaps,” according to Professor Paine, “the greatest
embodiment of native character in American literature.” He is strangely
compounded of Cooper’s memories of his old hunter-friend Shipman, of
the heroic saga of the early frontiersman as synthesised in Daniel
Boone, of the Rousseauistic-Wordsworthian myth of the natural man
spiritualised by contact with forest and stream, and of the idealism of
American manhood. According to Cooper’s summary,
“... His feelings appeared to possess the freshness and nature of
the forest in which he passed so much of his time, and no casuist
could have made clearer decisions in matters relating to right and
wrong.... In short ... he was a fair example of what a just-minded
and pure man might be, while untempted by unruly or ambitious
desires, and left to follow the bias of his feelings, amid the
solitary grandeur and ennobling influences of a sublime nature.”
In 1828, however, we find Cooper disillusioned: “All attempts to blend
history and romance in America have been comparative failures....
The baldness of American life is in deadly hostility to scenic
representation.” And in _The Crater_ (1847) we find him creating a
Utopia in a fabulous mid-Pacific island in order to furnish a contrast
to the wretchedness of contemporary American life. This is a story
of how some folk, shipwrecked on a reef which is the crater of a
volcano, succeed in causing vegetation to grow, of how they create
a “settlement surrounded with a sort of earthly paradise” which is
finally “buried beneath the ocean.” The story, as Cooper conceives it,
is a parable: “Of such is the world and its much-coveted advantages.
For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect,
until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that
divine hand ...” Already, in _The Monikins_ (1835), born of bitter
disenchantment, Cooper the former idealist had presented the world as
a country ruled by a race of monkeys who laughed to scorn the Yahoo
race of mankind. The hope of an American paradise of nature ended for
Cooper in disillusionment; natural goodness, democracy, human ideals
are revealed here as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Professor
Pattee compares Cooper’s final pessimism with that of Mark Twain: “Both
began as border-minded individualists, parochial-minded, intoxicated
with American idealism; both by travel and by wide contacts with urban
pessimism were educated into blasé cosmopolitanism ... and both went
out at last in utter misanthropy.... It is an American evolution!”
The most significant history of our national quest for a material
happiness is perhaps embodied in the work of Mark Twain, whose
much-discussed pessimism may be explained mainly by the fact that,
as the spokesman of frontier America living exclusively “in the
present,” he served as the faithful mirror to a whole nation in which
an Industrial Revolution, philosophic mechanistic determinism, and
the collapse of illusions led to despair. His stories illustrate the
changing importance of the two planes of consciousness in the frontier
mind--the consciousness of a hopeful and radiant illusion, and the
consciousness of a hopeless and sordid reality. Take three stories,
representing three different periods. _The Jumping Frog_ (1865),
dealing with the winning of a bet by roguery, embodies in a humorous
way the reckless exuberance and joyousness of the dawning West after
the Gold Rush. To this type belong also the books which glorify the
“natural man” and the free-born American--_Roughing It_ (1873), _Tom
Sawyer_ (1876), _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883), and _Huck Finn_
(1884). In contrast, his first book, _Innocents Abroad_ (1869),
represents the frontiersman’s life-long contempt for European tradition
and Europe, “one vast museum of magnificence and misery,” groping “in
the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred years.” A
story of a second period, _The Million Pound Bank Note_ (1893) mirrors
a materialistic “gilded age” in which, lured on by a fabulous hope,
men bowed to the Golden Calf while the spectre of reality haunted
their thoughts. In this story the two planes of consciousness are in
equipoise until the end, when the plane of illusion prevails. It is
the tale, briefly, of how a poor tramp masquerades as the owner of a
million pound bank note; grim poverty stalks behind him, but every
one worships the illusion of his wealth, and he finally wins the girl
of his heart as well as the million pounds. The story is a parable of
the West: these were the days of illusory fortunes in transcontinental
railroads, in iron and steel, the days of the Morgans and Carnegies
and Fricks and Goulds. “I am,” said Mark Twain, “frightened at the
proportion of my prosperity ... Whatever I touch turns to gold.” In
1895 he was bankrupt. But take a story representative of the third
period--_The $30,000 Bequest_ (1907). A poor book-keeper and his wife,
learning of a promised fortune at the death of a relative, each night
“put the plodding world away, and lived in another and a fairer,
reading romances to each other, dreaming dreams, comrading with kings
and princes.” They increasingly neglect realities and scorn their
associates. “The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit--how it
grows! What a luxury it becomes; how we revel in them, steep our souls
in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies--oh, yes,
and how soon and how easily our dream life and our material life become
so immingled and so fused together that we can’t tell which is which,
any more.” Just as the Golden West was unable to keep its “dream life,”
its illusions, triumphant over its “material life,” its stark reality,
so with the brutal news that the “town had to bury” the deceitful
relative, the poverty-stricken book-keeper and his wife “lived yet two
years, in mental night, always brooding, steeped in vague regrets and
melancholy dreams”--like the modern realists!
What did Mark Twain report regarding his early hope for a material
paradise? In _The Mysterious Stranger_ (1916) he recorded his final
despair, his conviction that life is cruel and meaningless--a
“wandering forlorn among the empty eternities”--and in that nightmare
of the fancy cowardice, hypocrisy and slavery are all that man can hope
for. After the death of his daughter the master of comedy said, “My
life is a bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with
the most precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts
mean and poor--death.” His _What Is Man?_ and _To a Person Sitting in
Darkness_ express the same vein. “There is, of course, a Master Mind,
but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness ... As to the
hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any ...” To
him man became “a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived!”
Although Hamlin Garland came to believe that “truth was a higher
quality than beauty” and set himself down as “an unflinching realist,”
one must recall that he comes of a race of “potential poets, bards, and
dreamers,” that he traces in general the disillusionment resulting
from an idyllic hope based upon an idealistic quest for an American
paradise of nature. He records the “deep vein of poetry,” the illusion,
through which the pioneer viewed a sordid reality, “the place of the
rainbow, and the pot of gold.” “Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted
land of opportunity.”
“When we’ve wood and prairie land,
Won by our toil,
We’ll reign like kings in fairy land,
Lords of the soil!”
Here is Pater’s “Sangreal of an endless pilgrimage” transferred to
prairie-land. Later he confesses, “I had idealised all the figures and
scenes of my boyhood.” “This land of my childhood,” “its charm, its
strange dominion,” he has to admit, “did not in truth exist--it was a
magical world, born of the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of
music and the voice of moaning winds.” Like Wordsworth’s early “light
that never was, on sea or land,” Garland’s illusion “has all the
quality of a vision, something experienced in another world,” covered
with “a poetic glamour.”
However, if the Son of the Middle Border sought a pot of gold at the
foot of the rainbow which did not exist, if he is pursuing fancifully
a phantom of hope, he is honest enough to record the results of such a
quest. As he grew up he noted a “growing bitterness”--“disillusionment
had begun.” The Shelleyan rainbow of hope faded into the light of
common day. What had been the “marvel of a golden earth before a
crimson sky” became merely “Uncle Sam’s domain, bleak, semi-arid, and
wind-swept.” “I perceived little that was poetic, little that was
idyllic.”
“What purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years
with no increase in leisure, with no growth in mental grace?...
At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of
their existence.... The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most
human life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly
hardening embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did
not know that I had found my theme.... Now, suddenly I perceived
the futility of our quest....”
It is clear, also, that Garland is attempting a serious generalised
study of the outcome of frontier hope. The young orator, meeting his
father, is shocked at his sudden appearance of age and gloom: “He
had come a long way from the buoyant faith of ’66, and the change in
him was typical of the change in the West--in America.” “The almost
universal disappointment and suffering of the West was typical.”
“All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter
realities came back upon me in a flood ... Every house I visited had
its individual message of sordid struggle and half-hidden despair.”
Garland, then, has given us a cross-section of our national history; he
has faithfully recorded the “almost universal” despair which greets men
who would “reign like kings in fairyland.”
Rolvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_, “A Saga of the Prairie,” is
another impressive record of the Odyssey “Toward the Sunset” of the
frontiersman and the finding of despair instead of the pot of gold.
Per Hansa and his religious wife Beret, Norwegians, journey “straight
toward the west, straight toward the sky line,” “deeper and deeper
into a bluish-green infinity--on and on, ... for Sunset Land.”
Finally they halt and raise a sod hut in “the endless solitude,” the
“eternal, unbroken wilderness”; they plant crops, and winter sets
in; Beret has a child. Here again we meet the two planes of frontier
consciousness--idyllic hope built on illusion and the dread of a sordid
and terrifying reality.
“That summer Per Hansa was transported, was carried farther and
ever farther away on the wings of a wonderful fairy tale--a romance
in which he was both prince and king, the sole possessor of
countless treasures. In this, as in all other fairy tales, the
story grew ever more fascinating and dear to the heart, the farther
it advanced.... Ever more beautiful grew the tale; ever more
dazzlingly shone the sunlight over the fairy castle.”
On one side there is the “divine restlessness,” the “enchanting
joyousness” of Per Hansa, on the other, Beret’s poignant yearning for
human companionship and inner spiritual peace which her dread of the
stark reality cannot satisfy. “Bleak, grey, God-forsaken, the empty
desolation stretched on every hand ... How could one lift up one’s
voice against such silence!” As winter came on Beret saw only the snow,
and for her the day “died in a pitch-black night that weighed down the
heart.” Her reflections give the key to the book:
“The country did not at all come up to her expectations; here, too,
she saw enough of poverty and grinding toil. What did it avail,
that the rich soil lay in endless stretches? More than ever did she
realise that ‘man liveth not by bread alone.’... Even the bread was
none too plentiful at times....
“But no sooner had they reached America than the west-fever had
smitten the old settlements like a plague. Such a thing had never
happened before in the history of mankind; people were intoxicated
by bewildering visions; they spoke dazedly, as though under the
force of a spell.... ‘Go west!... Go west, folks!... The farther
west, the better the land!’ Men beheld in feverish dreams the
endless plains, teeming with fruitfulness, glowing, out there
where day sank into night--a Beulah Land of corn and wine!... Ever
westward led the course, to where the sun glowed in matchless glory
as it sank at night; people drifted about in a sort of delirium,
like birds in mating time; then they flew toward the sunset, in
small flocks and large--always toward Sunset Land.... Now she saw
it clearly: here on the trackless plains, the thousand-year-old
hunger of the poor after human happiness had been unloosed!”
As she expects to die in childbirth, she pleads with Per Hansa to take
the other children back to civilisation: “Human beings cannot exist
here!... They grow into beasts!” And the magic of a fairy tale turns
out to be simply nature red in tooth and claw. In the last section of
the book, entitled “The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men
and is Satisfied,” the story is told of how Per Hansa the faithful, the
hopeful, the loving husband and father, is frozen to death while going
for a doctor to help a neighbour.
“There was the Red Son of the Great Prairie, who hated the
Palefaces with a hot hatred; stealthily he swooped down upon them,
tore up and laid waste the little settlements. Great was the terror
he spread; bloody the saga concerning him.
“But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell
of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of some.
Many took their own lives; asylum after asylum was filled with
disordered beings who had once been human.... Then, too, there were
years of pestilence--toil and travail, famine and disease.”
The frontier is exhausted, but it should be carefully noted that the
quest for a physical, external paradise lives on in the American
machine-age, in the dream of an industrial Utopia. To take but one
illustration recorded in our fiction, Sherwood Anderson’s _Poor
White_--paralleling the frontier stories--traces the transition
from the optimism born of untapped resources to the despair of a
standardised industrialism. It is the tale of a stolid boy, Hugh McVey,
who manages to invent machines from which every one hopes great things;
it is supposed to be typical, to present a cross-section of American
life.
“In every mind the future was bright with promise. Throughout the
whole Mid-American country ... a hopeful spirit prevailed.... The
youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of
the hand of the giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into
the land.... The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in
towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron
regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward
into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry
crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night
towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the
people.... Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth....
Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor
and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich.”
But Hugh McVey, “the poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the
river,” finds mere money and the satisfaction of physical needs
insufficient. “He was unfilled by the life he led.” Conscious of
“some indefinable, inner struggle,” “he fought to accept himself, to
understand himself, to relate himself with the life about him.” For
the sanctity of the individual personality America had substituted the
worship of mass production, of material gain.
“It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and
learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in
their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy
and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a
new age.”
In place of the free workman, joyously expressing with his own hands
the dream of his own mind, came the factory-hand, blindly bitter from
the machine-standardisation which thwarted the self-expression which
even the farmer enjoyed. In the town of Bidwell, Jim Gibson exults
in selling machine-made harnesses and ruining Joe Wainsworth, the
old harness maker. Finally, in a fit of rage Wainsworth kills his
tormentor. Clara, the wife of Hugh McVey, points the moral:
“In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men
and women who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the
age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a
protesting figure against what her father had become and what she
thought her husband had become.... As a child she had gone often to
Wainsworth’s shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now
remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place.... Everything
worth while is very far away.... The machines men are so intent on
making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”
And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism:
“Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice
that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not
belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where
only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow
thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.”
Thus those who have sought an American paradise of nature, a physical
paradise, have reported finding only despair. In essentials this hope
is identical with the primitivistic and industrial hope which Europe
found inadequate over a century ago. Wordsworth, the high priest of
naturalism, confessed he had “too blindly reposed” his trust, and he
had the wisdom to seek the support of the classical and the Christian
traditions. And Ruskin and Carlyle exposed the criminal fallacies
involved in setting material gain above the sanctity of the individual
personality. But when this outworn, exploded philosophy, based upon
primitivism, faith in natural goodness, absolute liberty, _laissez
faire_, and reliance upon nature and material things, was transplanted
to the vast material resources of a frontier land, it was given a
new, hysterical lease of life. Now, a century and a quarter later, a
disenchanted America agrees with the English naturalist who testified
of his infinite “dejection” and his conviction that man
“may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”
III
If those who have entered the American Door of Hope in quest of
happiness have reported that it is to be found neither in the Land of
the Blue Flower nor in the Land of Sensuous Desire, let us inquire what
those have reported who have sought the happiness of self-perfection,
of an exalted personal life, of “A Paradise within thee, happier
far.” This quest involves a definitely focused aspiration toward,
and a disciplined imitation of what is most richly and deeply human,
of what is most balanced and poised and complete, of what has in the
past been reported to yield lasting contentment and peace. This sort
of quest is very old. To Plato and Aristotle, justice, the crown of
life, consisted of the ideal balance of all the desires. Behind the
Horatian doctrine of the golden mean--_auream mediocritatem_--and
Cicero’s praise of _mediocritatem illam quae est inter nimium et parum_
is the ideal of mediation and centrality. The Christian tradition,
according to Mr. G. K. Chesterton, is peculiar in its reconciling of
opposites, in its synthetic balance. At any rate, the worldly classical
and the other-worldly Christian traditions have united in upholding
the doctrines of imitation, restraint, of a dualistic conflict in
man between appetite and aspiration, and of a definitely focused
aspiration which culminates in inner peace. In the Middle Ages the
“law for measure” was allied to the theory of the four humours, the
balance of which caused health, the excess of any one of which caused
“one-sidedness” and disease. In the Renaissance the author of _Everyman
in His Humour_ used satire to render eccentricity ridiculous, and the
Hamlet who allowed all to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of
thought” recognised that “by the o’ergrowth of some complexion,” by
“one defect,” men “take corruption.” He honoured Horatio, his “soul’s
choice,” because in him “blood and judgment are so well commingl’d.”
The Elizabethans recognised that a great man, like a tall tower,
must be balanced at all points, or be drawn down to ruin by his own
strength. If space permitted, one might trace through the impetus given
scientific specialisation and material progress by Bacon and the Royal
Society, through such figures as Congreve and Pope and Edward Young
and Rousseau, the gradual evolution of the theory of humours into
the theory of the master-passion and the “original genius” of being
idiosyncratic. But let us remember that Milton, uniting the Renaissance
passion for sensuous delight and the Puritan passion for saintliness,
kept his sublime balance, his vision of centrality, his ideal of
self-mastery. His exhortation to Adam as he leaves the physical
paradise of Eden is his exhortation to us:
“Only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith;
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.”
Mindful of the dark impulses of the natural man, the great liberal
distinguished sharply between anarchy and the true liberty resulting
from the substitution of inner for outer control: “License they mean
when they cry Liberty,” he remarks of the Cavaliers, “For who loves
that must first be wise and good.” “He who reigns within himself ... is
more than a king.... Real and substantial liberty is rather from within
than from without.”
Americans may well be proud that this noble hope partially lives on
in Emerson, our greatest man of letters, who found Milton “foremost
of all men ... to inspire,” to communicate “the vibration of hope, of
self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty.” Out of materialistic
America has come this “friend and aider of those who would live in
the spirit,” who strove above all to celebrate “the Ideal and Holy
Life, the life within life, ... the spiritual powers in their infinite
contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this
time.” It is true, of course, that Emerson did not altogether escape
the contagion of his romantic age; that in his apparent praise of the
unique and the individual, in his most un-Miltonic faith in natural
goodness, in his belittling of logic, of tradition, and of the aid
which culture can give as a guide to conduct, Emerson has a certain
kinship with Rousseau. Let us grant it--and guard against it! One must
recall, however, that part of his dubious influence has resulted from
a superficial and piece-meal reading of Emerson, encouraged by his
characteristic oracular device of presenting two conflicting statements
rather than a balanced and qualified generalisation. If one reads
all of Emerson, however, in an endeavour to relate and define his
thought, it is apparent, as Professor Harrison and Professor Foerster
have found, that his stronger affinities are not with Rousseau but
with Plato and the humanists. His central doctrine of self-reliance
turns out to be a reliance on a self which is not unique but common to
all men, “a reliance upon man’s share of divinity,” upon his higher,
universal self. “We become divine,” he says, not by eccentricity, by
revolt, but by “obedience,” by conformity to “the common heart,” to
what is normally, typically, and nobly human. In fact he strictly
warns us against the “rudeness” of failing to “distinguish between
the private and the universal consciousness.” He perceived the
unity of man, the need of spiritual concentration; his occasional
assumption of good intentions is balanced by his own Spartan virtue
and his confession that “because the temptations are so manifold and
so subtle,” he agrees with Socrates and the Hindoos in denominating
the Supreme Being the “Internal Check.” In common with the Christian
tradition, he sharply severs the “law for man” from the “law for
thing.” He is aware of “the eternal distinction between the soul and
the world,” aware that too great a preoccupation with the outward,
sensuous, mundane life about us (the “work” rather than the “workman”)
at the expense of “the integrity of your own mind” and deeper spiritual
needs, breeds a dread of transience and hence “uneasiness” and
despair. Behind the fleeting scenes of daily life he perceived “that
which changes not,” permanent human elements common to every one, the
cultivation of which gave him that sweet serenity, that “cheerfulness
and courage” which Arnold pronounced the outcome of his philosophy,
“his abiding word for us.” “Happiness in labour, righteousness,
and veracity; in all the life of the spirit; happiness and eternal
hope;--that was Emerson’s gospel.”
Here, then, in our own native tradition is a sort of hope which led to
happiness. Can such a hope, however, be reconciled with the artist’s
devotion to beauty? To Emerson, as to the æsthetes, art is simply “the
creation of beauty,” “beauty is its own excuse for being,” and “the
Beautiful is the highest.” But, unlike the æsthetes, he proclaims the
unity and parity of beauty, truth, and goodness--“different faces of
the same All.” Beauty has “its source in perfect goodness”; it is “the
mark God sets upon virtue.” In other words, the rarest beauty is a
by-product of that perfect harmony by which a man realises his complete
humanity, his complete happiness. This ideal of beauty was given the
support of a literary creed by James Russell Lowell, who never feared
to expose the weakness of a romanticism whose ultimate fruit was a
“melancholy liver-complaint.” He urged the study and creation of a
literature which should be an ideal representation of life, “stripped
of all unessential particulars” by an imagination which found “the
true ideal” not by escape but by a purposeful selection of the real.
For Lowell as for Emerson the “first duty” of the artist “is to be
delightful.” He distinguishes, however, between a merely recreational
“literature as holiday” and a literature which, ideally “representing
life, ... teaches, like life, by indirection.” Such a literature,
ministering to all the higher needs of the mind and spirit, yields the
greatest delight and the greatest beauty.
Aspiration and art of this quality, however, are rare in American
fiction. We looked for them in vain in the seekers for a paradise of
supernal beauty, and in the seekers for an American paradise of nature.
Great as is Hawthorne as an artist, in my judgment he falls short of an
aspiration of the Emersonian quality on account of his penchant for the
eccentric, the fanciful, and the morbid. One seeks it in vain in the
realists’ transcripts from life, which lack the selection and focusing
that distinguish art from experience. There is evidence, nevertheless,
that the novel is no longer hostile to the specifically human destiny
of normal humanity, no longer oblivious to that rare beauty which is
the by-product of the struggle by which a noble character imposes order
on the chaos of natural desire and approaches the imaginative ideal of
a life richly varied, finely poised, and of exalted happiness.
I have space for but one example in modern fiction--Dorothy Canfield’s
_The Brimming Cup_. This deals with the “eternal triangle” in a
little Vermont town. Marise Chittenden, whose children have gradually
taken her interest from Neale, her husband, becomes lonely when her
children all go to school and she senses that “the days of her physical
flowering are numbered.” She is loved by Marsh, a wealthy man visiting
her elderly neighbour Mr. Wells; Marsh tries to convince her that
she is sacrificing “a world of impassioned living” for “an outworn
ideal” of “the traditional thing to do.” The characters, not always
vividly humanised, symbolise man’s universe. Marise, the “brimming
cup,” “filled with some emotion ... gushing up in a great flooding
rush,” typifies the surge of impulse. Marsh, a “swirly brook,” to
whom life is but a moment’s “blind sensual groping and grabbing”
before the “big final smash-up,” typifies unbridled lust and greed.
The “steady, visible light” of Neale’s life, Neale who had found
true freedom by conquering his “great, fierce, unguessed appetite,
the longing for wandering, lawless freedom,” typifies centrality.
Mr. Wells, who surrenders “the happiness that comes of living as
suits his nature” to help make the world more courteous to negroes,
typifies humanitarian sympathy. The much-travelled Eugenia typifies
“sophisticated cosmopolitanism,” æsthetic escape: to her “everything’s
so common-place”; she cultivates her fading beauty by “breathing in and
out through one nostril, and thinking of the Infinite!” Cousin Hetty
symbolises tradition; the Indian Touclé, mysticism. Marise sees her
conflict as one not between “routine, traditional, narrow domestic life
and the mightiness and richness of mature passion,” but as a conflict
between the lure of sensuousness and “what is deepest and most living
in you.” It is a psychological novel, a novel of introspection: it
is based on the quest, not for what is conventionally moral, but for
what in the end gives the richest human satisfaction. It presents a
struggle based on self-reliance and self-conquest. Neale “wanted her
to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted
her to attain her full stature.” “Nothing is your own, if you haven’t
made it so.” Marise wonders if her mother-love is what Marsh calls
“inverted sensuality”; Neale says, “Look into your own heart and see
for yourself.” He “longed for her sake to have her strike out into the
deep,” he knew that peace could only come from “Marise’s acting with
her own strength on her own decision.” He urges not outer but inner
control--“as few umpires as possible.” In her conflict Marise sought
“what was deepest and most living in her ...; that was what the voices
were trying to cry her down from finding.” She longed to be “one with
the great current”--Emerson’s “stream of power.” She discovers that she
is being lured by “the conventional pose of revolt,” that separation
from her children would not be true “growth and freedom, and generous
expansion of the soul.” Like Milton and Emerson, she finally becomes
free by discovering and obeying what is deepest within:
“She was a free woman, free from something in her heart that was
afraid. For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the
richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she
had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her
own heart, waiting for her!”
Joyous in her centrality, poise and freedom, she sees Marsh as an
“undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience
or conception of breadth and freedom.” “How narrow and cramped,”
and “blinded to the bigness and variety of life” seemed people who
thought that “a woman of beauty and intelligence” was wasting her
life “unless she was engaged in ... stimulating ... sexual desire.”
Marise had the serene joy of her home, her beloved children and her
understanding husband; she had the marvel of her music; and she had
the surpassing wisdom to seek her happiness not in the miraculous but
in the common--in the symbolic neighbourly gathering on the night of
the blooming of the Cereus, that rite of beauty; in the calm strength
of simple folk whom experience has made wise. And this woman, living
out her “heritage, alive and rooted deep,” with her “vivid charm like
an aureole of golden mist,” “felt slowly coming into her, like a tide
of a great ocean,” the ineffable peace which comes from self-mastery,
from the quest of what is most universally and nobly human. Calm and
free, she was lifted “high, high above the smallness of life, up to a
rich realm of security in joy.”
IV
What are we to conclude from this cursory sketch of the quality of
three different sorts of American hope represented in our fiction?
To the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty we owe much delicate
artistry of a high order; one may maintain, however, as Emerson and
Lowell did, that other things being equal, the truthful representation
of typical humanity alone produces that harmony which yields the
highest beauty. To this hope we owe much which, when read for
recreation, can give delight; one takes issue only with those, like
Poe and Cabell, who take Arcadianism seriously as a universal way of
life and would substitute it for a literary ideal which resolutely
confronts life and seeks to solve its meaning. To the hope for a
paradise of American nature, a physical paradise, we owe the imposing
of order upon the natural chaos of the wilderness; we owe the physical
“improvements,” the miracles of the machinery and science of a great
nation. Of what ultimate avail, however, are material resources,
physical comfort, time-saving machinery, and science unless the time
and energy conserved are used for higher intellectual or spiritual
ends, for the attainment of happiness? To those who have recorded this
hope in fiction we owe the faithful preservation of an important aspect
of the social history of America; but literature is greater than social
history: it aspires to embody the meaning of life in terms at once
timeless and universal and beautiful. Our frontier lands are exhausted,
and those who have sought the physical paradise of a standardized
industrialism have found nothing but boredom and despair. In place of
this dead level of repression and standardisation let us develop a new
respect for personality--for personality richly varied and healthily
individual. Let us re-direct the joy-giving passion for creation
through the matchless resources of the realm of the spirit. If both
the rarest happiness and the rarest beauty are the fruit only of the
hope of a paradise within, it would appear that American fiction would
in the future be wise in dealing not with escape or with externalities
but with the infinite variety and eternal mystery of the human soul’s
conflict between appetite and aspiration on its quest for an exalted
inward happiness. Before we can expect American fiction to do this,
however, the way must be prepared by the development of an adequate
social imagination. For great art has always been organic with and
supported by the life and vision of a whole people. Shakespeare was the
“Soul of the Age,” Dante the “voice of ten silent centuries.” A hope
must have throbbed in the breasts of a whole age before a writer can
body it forth with the concentration, the brooding intensity, and the
unerring congruency to human nature demanded of great art. Such a hope,
such a social imagination, such an agreement in aspiration, can be
developed best, perhaps, through education--through our interpreters of
literature in college and university. Mindful of the heritage of heroic
pioneers, we must embark upon our intellectual pioneering with the same
resolute courage, the same loyal devotion, the same consecration to a
high cause. Although our scholars are still being lured aside either to
the camp of the æsthetes or the camp of the philologists, America must
hereafter strive to develop the “middle-of-the-road” scholar who shall
be, as Emerson said, Man Thinking, the delegated mind of society, whose
major aim shall be the purposeful and discriminating interpretation of
the record man has left, in terms of beauty, regarding “the conduct of
life” and the path to peace. When such scholar-critics have developed
such a social imagination, such a popular unanimity of hope, we shall
be ready to receive the artist of genius who is to write for us the
great American novel.
Note--For copyrighted evidence used in the foregoing essay I am
indebted as follows: Sherwood Anderson, _Poor White_ (Modern
Library, N. Y., 1925); Dorothy Canfield Fisher, _The Brimming
Cup_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1921); James Branch Cabell,
_The Cream of the Jest_ (Modern Library, N. Y., 1922); _Jurgen_
(Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); _Beyond Life_ (Modern Library,
N. Y., 1919); _Straws and Prayerbooks_ (Robert M. McBride and
Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather, _The Professor’s House_ (Alfred
A. Knopf, N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell, _Moon-Calf_ (Alfred A. Knopf,
N. Y., 1921); R. W. Emerson, _Complete Works_ (Houghton Mifflin
Co., Boston, 1903); _Journals_ (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston,
1909-14); _The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle_ (Houghton
Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_
(Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin Garland, _A Son of
the Middle Border_ (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); Joseph
Hergesheimer, _Linda Condon_ (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark
Twain, _Complete Works_ (American Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903);
A. B. Paine, _Mark Twain, A Biography_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y.,
1912); F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper” (_American Mercury_,
Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction to _The
Deerslayer_ (Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag,
_Giants in the Earth_ (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1929).
_Dionysus in Dismay_
STANLEY P. CHASE
Twenty-five years ago, when my generation were beginning to find their
way around in the world of print and paint, a group of us used to
meet occasionally to share each other’s discoveries in contemporary
thought and literature. You may smile at the association of the date
1904 and contemporary literature, and confessedly some of the objects
of our attention were fantastic enough--Elbert Hubbard, Edward Howard
Griggs, and even “I, Mary MacLane.” The more daring among us were
delving in Haeckel and Henry George; our conservatives, according to
their bents, delighted in Kipling and Barrie, or a group of alluring
Celts, or became expert in discriminations between the earlier and the
later manner of Henry James. We all read, of course, William James and
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and Chesterton. In poetry, to be sure, we
had no such variegated menu as the contemporary road-house affords; I
should say that our diet was easily digestible and a little saccharine.
For the most part, as I recall, we followed along the vagabondia trail
after Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In that old college town near the
coast, we could still thrill to such verses as
Three of us without a care
In the red September
Tramping down the roads of Maine,
Making merry with the rain,
With the fellow winds a-fare
Where the winds remember.
Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come into our
world--much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous Huxley or Robinson
Jeffers. But we were not so entirely neglected by the contemporary
muse as you may suppose. We knew the early work of Yeats, and “The
Hound of Heaven” of Francis Thompson; we had discovered the sonnets
of Santayana; we could repeat a large part of _A Shropshire Lad_; and
of course for our more cosmic moods we had Walt Whitman. Hundreds of
other such groups must have existed, like ours callow, inexperienced,
bumptious, but very inquisitive, very receptive. Not against us did the
“new poetry” (no longer such) have to hurl its bolts.
And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds,
before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages in the _Outlook_, put
Edwin Arlington Robinson’s name into every one’s mouth, we knew the
poet of “Tilbury Town” (only thirty miles from our own). There was one
poem of his whose meaning used to be a great subject of dispute,--for
we were than naïve enough to think that a poem must be susceptible of
some rational explanation. It was entitled “Cortège,” and had appeared
in the _Captain Craig_ volume of 1902.[45]
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Fifteen hundred miles away:
So it goes, the crazy tune,
So it pounds and hums all day.
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Earth will hide them far away:
Best they go to go so soon,
Best for them the grave to-day.
Had she gone but half so soon,
Half the world had passed away.
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Best for them they go to-day.
Four o’clock this afternoon
Love will hide them deep, they say;
Love that made the grave so soon,
Fifteen hundred miles away.
Four o’clock this afternoon--
Ah, but they go slow to-day:
Slow to suit my crazy tune,
Past the need of all we say.
Best it came to come so soon,
Best for them they go to-day:
Four o’clock this afternoon,
Fifteen hundred miles away.
The half-benumbing, half-intensifying effect of the “crazy tune,” the
curious way in which a mere pattern of words can usurp the mind, now
stealing its attention from the very grief they point to, and now
flashing upon it a new aspect of that grief--something like that,
I suppose, accounts for the fascination the poem had for us. But a
number of us were dissatisfied with an explanation so simple. No, we
wanted to know, first, who and how many persons were being buried at
four o’clock to-day, and their relationship to the poet (was it, for
instance, a former sweetheart and her husband?), and whether “she” in
the third stanza was one of the deceased, and in what sense it could
be said that Love “made the grave so soon,” and what “half so soon”
meant--was it any different from “twice as soon”? We even calculated
that the burial must be taking place some fifteen hundred miles to the
_west_, since otherwise, all (Protestant) funerals being held commonly
at two o’clock, the poet’s time would be twelve noon instead of four
afternoon. All, of course, very silly and irrelevant questions.
Only a few years ago, in a poetry course, I was recalling these old
agitations of ours, as a warning, I feel sure, against such literalness
of interpretation. But, as will happen with class-room instruction, my
admonitions produced quite the opposite effect from that intended, for
one member of the class was so intrigued by the problem, even as we had
been twenty years before, that he evolved the staggering theory that
the poem was not about a funeral at all, but about a marriage. This
ingenious view having been communicated, in a circuitous way, to Mr.
Robinson, he settled the matter quite simply with the following note to
the inquirer:
“I have long given up attempting to interpret my own poetry, but
in this instance, would go so far as to suggest a funeral rather
than a marriage. I remember this poem chiefly as a more or less
reprehensible experiment in sound and feeling--a performance more
pardonable thirty years ago--perhaps--than it would be to-day.”
Of course, it was not Mr. Robinson’s performance, but ours, which was
reprehensible. We were treating an “experiment in sound and feeling”
as we might have treated a deposition in court or an application for
the payment of life-insurance; we were bringing to a poem an attitude
of mind alien to its character _as a poem_. It was as if one should
read Mr. Frost’s “The Thatch” and demand to know _why_ he “would not
go in till the light went out.” For “Cortège” in essential matters is
not cryptic in the least; it is only irrelevant, external details that
are left unexplained. And ultimately, I suppose, what we call a taste
for poetry, of any except a very elementary sort, depends upon the
possession of tact or intelligence to perceive just such a distinction.
I have used this personal recollection because much more frequently
to-day and to a greater degree a somewhat similar feeling of puzzlement
assails the reader of contemporary poetry. This simple instance of an
obscurity gratuitously created by readers may lead to the consideration
of a problem of poetic form more comprehensive than any question of
mere technique (though technical elements of poetry are involved in
it too), I mean the question of those necessities which are laid on
poetry from its being a form of communication between mind and mind.
For, I believe, from misapprehension and confusion in this matter,
on the part now of poets and now of their readers, springs, to some
extent, the unsatisfactory state of poetry at the present time. On
the one side, there is reported a feeling of exasperation, by readers
competent enough in other kinds of literature or in the older poetry,
who “can make nothing of this modernist stuff,” and on the other side
the modernists’ rejoinder that such readers are precisely in the
position of my group of twenty-five years ago--lacking the intelligence
to grasp what is essential and to disregard non-essentials. Surely a
consideration of the nature and limits of that community of mind which
must be assumed to subsist between the poet and his readers is not
foreign to the subject of this book.
I
At the outset we encounter the Crocean view of all art, including
poetry, as expression merely, and conversely of all expression
as art. But leaving the confusions of Signor Croce to be dealt
with by others,[46] we are warranted in assuming, I think, that,
generally and typically, the poet desires communication with other
persons,--conceivably only one other person, or persons of the
future, but at any rate communication and not merely self-expression.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t publish or circulate or read his poems, as
generally and typically poets do. The theory of Laura Riding and
Robert Graves[47] that the poet publishes (or “externalises”) only
out of consideration for the rights of the poem, which, like physical
offspring, has attained an independent status with a life of its own,
is a naïve and superfluous bit of mystification, sufficiently answered
by the query, “Why then sign one’s name?”--and I have not remarked any
unusually wide return to the practice of anonymity. And one is led
to wonder, as one turns the pages of our more advanced periodicals,
what possible readers some of these poets are addressing. After a
moderate success in comprehending, let us say, such diverse productions
as those of the mediæval mystics, the wits of the Roman Empire and
the Restoration, the English metaphysical poets, and the symbolist
group in France, and after a period of conscientious schooling in
the pronouncements of this newest movement, it is disconcerting to
find oneself completely balked by the innocent-appearing contents of
the latest anthology of verse. Among the ten possible but improbable
interpretations of some poem, it seems somehow less than a sporting
chance that the one you finally choose as the least implausible will be
what was intended.
Take, for instance, this poem of Mr. Wallace Stevens, which I select
not as an example of that writer’s often delightful connoisseurship in
verse, but as fairly representative of this decline in what has been
called “communicative efficacy.”
ANECDOTE OF THE JAR[48]
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was grey and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Now the elements of this experience--the jar, its shape, colour, and
quality, the hill in Tennessee where it is placed, the behaviour or
appearance of the wilderness, the bird, the bush--stand doubtless in
some kind of relation with each other in the poet’s mind, have possibly
certain symbolic values. Since we have no clues to these relationships
and values, our mind is free to do anything it pleases with the bare
grey jar, the hill, and the wilderness. This freedom, however, and any
pleasure we may take in the separate images, in the rhythms, or the
placing of the words, are not sufficient compensation for the state of
uncertainty and slight irritation in which we are left. Very likely
the little poem is meant to suggest nothing more than the superiority,
to an intensely civilised person, of the simplest bit of handicraft
over any extent of unregulated “nature,” but it has been seriously
interpreted to me, by devotees of recent poetry, as, respectively, an
_objet d’art_, a sex-symbol, and a burial-urn containing the remains of
a valued friend. And so it must remain, for me, not only like nothing
else in Tennessee but like nothing else in the universe.
Considerable damage was done to this shallow affectation of knowingness
of the last few years by Max Eastman’s witty article in the April
(1929) _Harper’s_. A young intellectual from one of our well-known
private schools told me that members of his group were observed to
discontinue their perusal of _transition_[49] upon the appearance
of Mr. Eastman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility.” But contemporary
poetry is still afflicted by an acute attack of that extreme of
Puritanism--separatism: it asserts the right not only of private
judgment, but of a private symbolism,--which is, æsthetically, of
much graver consequences. My point here, of course, has nothing to do
with the values or qualities of the experience which the writer is
presumably seeking to share. I am simply saying that, in the reading
of the slightest as of the most profound poem, a sense of singleness
or wholeness is the most essential part of the experience, and that
this totality of effect cannot be achieved if all clues to the way the
poem is organised are withheld or too casually indicated. The enigmatic
character of Dr. William Carlos Williams’s poems, we are told, is due
in part to his habit of jotting down free-verse impressions in the
intervals between his professional visits to patients. I can only hope
that in writing out his prescriptions he makes a greater allowance for
the mental capacity of the pharmacist than he seems to make for mine.
To speak bluntly, the difficulty of reading much “modernist” verse is
due less to the superior sophistication or cleverness of these writers
than to their essential lack of art.
By contrast, in the following lyric of Elinor Wylie, even though it is
a repudiation of something accustomed, beautiful, and comforting, there
is so clear and deft an employment of symbol, so perfect a fusion of
mood with image, that the effect of totality is achieved; the peace
denied to this orthodox landscape (or universe) is momentarily attained
in the very denial of it, and thus one of the functions of poetry is
discharged.
INNOCENT LANDSCAPE[50]
Here is no peace, although the air has fainted,
And footfalls die and are buried in deep grass,
And reverential trees are softly painted
Like saints upon an oriel of glass.
The pattern of the atmosphere is spherical,
A bubble in the silence of the sun,
Blown thinner by the very breath of miracle
Around a core of loud confusion.
Here is no virtue; here is nothing blessèd
Save this foredoomed suspension of the end;
Faith is the blossom, but the fruit is cursèd;
Go hence, for it is useless to pretend.
“The transport ... that the poet kindles in us,” observes Professor
De Selincourt in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, “springs from our
instinctive recognition that his form, a term that includes both rhythm
and diction, is an entirely faithful rendering of his experience,
so that we gain from it a sudden clear sense of fulfilment, such as
we can hardly hope to gain outside the ideal world of art.” That may
be a rather narrowly æsthetic interpretation of Longinus’s doctrine
of the poetic “transport,” but certainly “a sudden clear sense of
fulfilment” is an experience which it is easy to miss in the poetry of
our contemporaries.
In fact, this “sense of fulfilment” is precisely what the typical
modernist, experiencing nothing of the sort in life itself and
disdaining an “ideal world” thus cut off from reality, avoids giving
us. He would regard it as part of the old hocus-pocus of orthodoxy.
Life being to him fragmentary, inchoate, he would say that his poetry,
if it is to be “an entirely faithful rendering of his experience,” must
itself produce an effect of inchoateness, fragmentariness.
THE END OF THE WORLD[51]
Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb--
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing,--nothing at all.
Here Archibald MacLeish, who stands somewhere between the centre and
the extreme left wing in poetry, employs a traditional verse-form
in a poem the theme of which is the absurdity of the spectacle of
human antics in a cosmos without intelligibility or significance. He
guards against any specious effect of “fulfilment” by the unexpected
reiteration of the word _nothing_. Yet there remains the regrettable
necessity of rounding out the sestet and capping the rhyme; and, more
important, the method of presentation has imposed an adventitious
kind of order on a scene which, in the poet’s apprehension of it, is
an even wilder scramble and jumble of absurdities. And so the sonnet,
thoroughly “modern” in spirit, is quite conservative in technique.
The distinctiveness of this new poetry, indeed, is less a matter of
measures, whether new or old, than of the principle of association
by which it is governed. It aims at an organisation of images and a
succession of rhythms which spring more immediately from the poet’s
stream of consciousness.
In attempting to divert this stream through the reader’s mind, without
spilling over or filtering, some recent poets have adopted startling
innovations in typography, including punctuation, use of capitals and
small letters, spacing, and line-division. The fashion is prompted in
part by a spirit of mere impishness, but back of it also is a certain
amount of genuine experimentation in the resources and the graphical
representation of language, the object being to prod the reader out of
the lethargy and complacency which, it is alleged, are fostered by the
conventions of verse-form and page-arrangement. Undeniably, if one is
willing to play this game and doesn’t mind having the rules made up as
one goes along, some of the results are amusing. You will understand
most readily what it is all about if you first take one of these poems
down from some one’s dictation, then attempt to write it as you think
the poet would do to bring out the subtler shadings and nuances, and
finally compare your representation of the poem with his. Here, for
instance, are the words (written as ordinary prose) of a poem by E. E.
Cummings from a group called “Impressions.”
“I was considering how, within night’s loose sack, a star’s
nibbling infinitesimally devours darkness, the hungry star,
which will eventually jiggle the bait of dawn and be jerked into
eternity, when over my head a shooting-star burst into a stale
shriek like an alarm-clock.”[52]
On the chance that at this point the reader may wish to try the
experiment which has been suggested, I postpone to a later page Mr.
Cummings’s original arrangement of the words. If you will compare his
printing of the poem with that above, you will see how the tininess and
the quick little repeated nibbles of the mouse at the grain-sack are
suggested by the short, broken lines; how ingeniously the shooting-star
is made to interrupt the poet’s revery; how the effect of flare,
streaking, and slower fading is conveyed in the printing of “bursts”;
and how the new simile of the alarm-clock impinges upon the retinal
image of the meteor.[53] But--“the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon
exhausted.” After scrambling up a hundred or so of these typographical
escarpments, I found that there was seldom a view from the summit
commensurate with the discomforts of the climb, and my interest in
the new sport began to flag. It is hard to imagine a mature artist
interesting himself for long in this sort of preciosity.
Though each individual’s inner life is in a measure unique, the
mere attempt to convey some fraction of it to others by written or
printed words presupposes a certain shared and common ground of human
experience. Freshness, piquancy, gusto, can be properly savoured only
when they are delicately blended with “human nature’s daily food.” The
importance of a common understanding upon essentials is clear in the
sphere of our personal relationships, which become rich and satisfying
only with the mutual recognition of things that may be _taken for
granted_; oddities and varieties are most engaging in those with whom
we already own a fundamental bond. Now the forms and conventions of
poetry may be regarded as so many aids to the speedier establishment of
such understanding between reader and poet,--the indispensable means
by which an original experience is so shaped and clarified that it has
significance for others. No one of these conventions, naturally, is
absolutely fixed or static, and skilful manipulation of their elements
is constantly yielding new and unsuspected possibilities of æsthetic
pleasure, and even of social comprehension. For this reason we may look
with a tolerant and not unfriendly eye upon such experimentation by
some of our younger poets as I have described.[54] Nevertheless, it is
imperative that persons who wish to modify or to replace the accepted
vehicles of poetic expression should have a clear understanding of
what convention in literature or art is _for_. Adequate treatment of
this subject would require a separate book, and here I must content
myself with a mere statement of faith: that some set of assumptions as
to the experiences most valuable and important for mankind--in other
words, of universals in the Aristotelian sense--is as necessary in
the establishment or the maintenance of an æsthetic convention as in
any purely social or political activity. Indeed, the most promising
development in American poetry at the present time, I believe, is to
be found, not in these centrifugal and eccentric movements, but in the
considerable amount of genuine if less spectacular work which is being
done upon the lines of a firmly rooted literary tradition.[55]
II
In the last few paragraphs, though concerned primarily with the aspect
of communicability, I have been skirting the topic which lies at the
centre of all movements of thought and feeling in our day, and with
which I shall be concerned through the rest of this essay. I refer
to the prevalent spirit of disillusionment, a state of mind which in
America has made itself felt, acutely and widely, only within the last
three or four years.
Certainly the mood of the younger generation of poets (the men and
women now in their twenties or early thirties) is very different from
the poetic temper of fifteen years ago--those exciting, strained,
exalted, painful years that witnessed, among other things, the rise
of the “new poetry” in England and America and, somewhat later, the
beginning of the war. Any comprehensive view of the stream of poetry
warns us not to make too much of these twists and turns between one
decade and the next; yet there is some reason to think that we have now
reached or are approaching one of the major bends in the course. The
“poetic renascence” of 1912-1917 was, it is true, in reaction against
certain nineteenth-century attitudes,--against its Puritan code in
morals and its tradition of gentility in belles-lettres; as some one
has said, it delighted in hurling bricks at the silk hat of Hamilton
W. Mabie; but to the most characteristic force of nineteenth-century
thought and life--namely, an expansive philosophy of naturalism,
embraced with enthusiasm and glorified by a romantic imagination--it
merely gave a fresh impetus.
The serene and humble mould
Does in herself all selves enfold--
Kingdoms, destinies, and creeds,
Great dreams, and dauntless deeds,
Science that metes the firmament,
The high, inflexible intent
Of one for many sacrificed--
Plato’s brain, the heart of Christ;
* * * * *
Out of the earth the poem grows
Like the lily, or the rose;
And all man is, or yet may be,
Is but herself in agony
Toiling up the steep ascent
Toward the complete accomplishment
When all dust shall be, the whole
Universe, one conscious soul.[56]
These lines by John Hall Wheelock epitomise the thought that had been
the main inspiration of the nineteenth century. Despite their regular
metrical form, with its reminiscence of Emerson, we recognise in them
the ecstatic evolutionary naturalism of Walt Whitman.
Indeed, it was the spirit of Whitman, more than any other, that
presided over our “poetic renascence.” Not, of course, that all the
poets who made their appearance in those years were akin to him. Frost,
for instance, was hardly more like Whitman than he was like Pope;
consciously, in his living and in his poetry, he was facing and he has
continued to move in just the opposite direction. Nor perhaps in the
work of Masters or of Robinson[57] is the relation to Whitman at once
apparent, for superficially neither the _Spoon River Anthology_, that
sardonic record of stunted human growths, nor Robinson’s sombre studies
of the thwarted lives of his New Englanders suggest the tolerance,
the breadth and human warmth of the older poet’s sympathies. But the
analysis of these unfortunate victims of a repressive and unhumane
morality (for such is the way the poetry of both writers was commonly
described, and such, in one aspect, it is) was really in line with
Whitman’s gospel of emotional emancipation, as well as with the new
direction given to psychology by Freud and Jung. In the work of Lindsay
and Sandburg, and notably in that of the far less original Oppenheim
(whose disappearance from current collections is itself significant
of the change that has taken place), the influence of Whitman was
patent. All the spokesmen and contemporary critics of the movement,
from Amy Lowell (1917) to Bruce Weirick (1924), with varying degrees
of emphasis, stress Whitman’s primacy in American literature. He had
had his lovers and disciples before, but now for the first time a
group of American poets could give him whole-hearted welcome with no
inner abashment to overcome. Throughout the earlier productions of the
movement, even in the poems of the Imagists, whose theory and practice
of verse were so different from his own, is diffused the vibrant
spirit of Walt Whitman. It is experienced as a certain buoyancy and
expectancy of mood, and most characteristically as an underlying trust
in a life-force which is felt to be working here in America to high,
unforeseen ends.
It would be an over-simplification, but somewhere near the heart of the
matter, to say that the presence we are most aware of in the poetry of
to-day is not Walt Whitman, but Thomas Hardy--his desolating irony,
at least, if not his artistic and personal elevation. These younger
poets accept, but coldly and without enthusiasm, the account which
contemporary science offers of the universe and of the human make-up,
and they are as hostile to the glowing affirmations of the great
romantics as they are to the evasions and tepidity of the Victorians.
Perhaps this is but an inversion, a different guise, of that restless
and changeable temper which we call romanticism, but to me at least
its emergence seems to be more significant than were any of the varied
energies released by the last poetic movement. This new spirit is not
more characteristic of poetry, of course, than of other expressions
of the age. To some extent, though less here than abroad, it is an
after-effect of the war--the inability of nervous organisations
overstrained by the excitements of those years to respond to normal
stimuli. It may be briefly described as a despair of achieving any
reading of life in its totality which will be tolerable in the light
of all we know and feel. “In the course of a few centuries,” writes
Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in _The Modern Temper_, “[man’s] knowledge, and
hence the universe of which he finds himself an inhabitant, has been
completely revolutionised, but his instincts and his emotions have
remained, relatively at least, unchanged. He is still, as he always
was, adjusted to the orderly, purposeful, humanised world which all
peoples unburdened by experience have figured to themselves, but that
world no longer exists.” This modern sense of frustration differs
from states of disillusion or pessimism experienced in the past in
two respects. It is, for one thing, more widespread, producing a
considerable body of poetry of sheer negation, turning some writers
to mere elaboration of surfaces and appearances, and making itself
felt as an undercurrent, now cynical, now passionate, in much
writing which seems superficially to be almost free of philosophical
implications. And secondly, this spirit of denial is a more positive
and uncompromising thing than we have known in the past. Not only is it
unable to effect any synthesis of its intelligence and its emotional
promptings; it has come to believe that such a synthesis is in the
nature of things impossible. It grows “more and more likely,” continues
Mr. Krutch, “that [man] must remain an ethical animal in a universe
which contains no ethical element.” His dilemma is that he cannot
either feel as his intelligence bids him or think as his emotions would
have him. Even the highest of the personal emotions, love itself, which
had somehow eluded the cold touch of nineteenth-century science, has
not been able to withstand the psycho-analysis of the twentieth. “Have
you not heard,” asks the lady in _Cavender’s House_,
“Have you not heard yet, anywhere, death-bells ringing
For Love and poor Romance? Biologists
And bolshevists are ringing them like mad--
So loud that Love, we’re told, will soon be lost
With dodos, dinosaurs, and pterodactyls.”
Specifically, a feeling is abroad that poetry is at some kind of crisis
or turning-point, and there are even predictions that poetry of a sort
that the past would recognise as such cannot continue much longer to be
produced.
The poetry of T. S. Eliot has been praised for its seizing of just
this aspect of the modern situation, the sense of frustration, of
insignificance. “The passions which swept through the once major
poets,” writes Mr. Krutch, “no longer awaken any profound response,
and only in the bleak, tortuous complexities of a T. S. Eliot
does [the present age] find its moods given adequate expression.”
Love-making carried on with an accompanying sense of its futility
and ridiculousness, an acquaintance with art and poetry which serves
only to confirm misgivings as to their relevancy for us to-day, the
employment of religious symbols to arouse a poor mirthless mockery--in
such experiences our young intellectuals find mirrored the age and body
of their time. The cryptic character of the writing, the sometimes
arbitrary connection between one image and the next, the casual
allusions to one person’s recondite reading, are all indications of
the contemporary sense of the individual’s isolation. The broken
rhythms, the fragmentariness of the scenes or movements, the deliberate
foregoing of any rational principle of organisation, reflect the
feeling of the fragmentariness of life itself, the modern inability to
effect any kind of integration of experience. And this, we are told by
some, is the only kind of poetry which an honest and sensitive mind in
an age like ours can be expected to produce.
Mr. Eliot, though no longer belonging even nominally to American
literature, is worth attention because of his present high reputation
in intellectual circles. He has written literary criticism of a kind
especially needed at the present time, based as it is on a wide
knowledge of literature, informed by a delicate taste, and guided by
severe yet humane standards. And in his poetry he has shown himself
capable of finding a comedy of the mind in these hesitations and
inhibitions of modernity,--as in the early “Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.” By the haunting, individual rhythms of his poems alone,
we are apprised of an exceptional poetic endowment. Yet Mr. Eliot’s
literary output, poetry and prose, constitutes, to my mind, one of the
most arresting paradoxes of this paradoxical age: an advocate of the
sterner disciplines of the past (“classicist in literature, royalist in
politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”), who gives to these causes
all the organising power of a firm intelligence, and is content to let
his poetry express chiefly the states of confusion, doubt, faintness,
with which the positive principles of his thought have had to wrestle.
“We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men.”
In a recent essay Mr. Eliot has ventured the opinion that a great
event in the intellectual world would be the conversion of Professor
Irving Babbitt to Roman or Anglo-Catholicism, but, he concludes
regretfully, such a consummation, though devoutly to be wished, is
hardly likely, for Mr. Babbitt “knows too much.” Perhaps an even more
salutary conversion, in its immediate effects upon other poets, would
be Mr. Eliot’s compassing, in his creative work, of those genuinely
classical values of which, in his critical writing, he shows such fine
apprehension. For a transformation of that kind, one need not fear that
any man of letters knows too much. One may at least entertain the hope
that Mr. Eliot’s permanent reputation as a poet is not going to lie
in the fact that he has voiced, more completely than any one else in
verse, the confusion and disillusionment of this post-war generation.
The humanist is aware that poetry, like mythology, possesses no
power of conferring immediate revelation of truth; he knows that its
scenes and personages, its thoughts and passions, from the earthiest
to the most ethereal, belong to the world of unsubstantiality, of
illusion--of dreams, if you will. He will go further: this element of
illusion, this impassable gulf between reality and our comprehension
or representation of reality, is not confined to poetry and mythology;
it is part of all our conscious life; it baffles us even in our
attempt to comprehend that nearest thing of all--ourself. “... beneath
the surface of all we see and feel, beneath the very act of seeing
and feeling, lies the unredeemed chaos of desires and impressions,
unlimited, unmeaning, unfathomable, incalculable, formless, dark.
Life is but appearance, and this personality we call by our name is
but illusion within illusion.”[58] But working within the illusion is
also a power to control and order these impulses, to check them or to
bring them into a harmonious co-operation, yielding a serenity and a
sense of stability which, of all human experiences, seems freest of
illusion. It was the characteristic error of much nineteenth-century
poetry (of Browning’s in England, of Whitman’s in America) to limit
personality to the mere welter of desires and feelings, to find there
its central “urge” (the favourite word of romantic criticism), and
to erect upon such foundations a philosophy of the “ideal.” But the
hollowness of _this_ illusion (the philosophy which found an immediacy
of truth in natural instincts, impulses, and feelings) has to-day
become all too apparent; and when its former adherents ask where then
certainty can be found, they are bidden to direct their gaze to the
abstract world of the physicist and the mathematician. Here, in the
words of Mr. I. A. Richards, “intellectual certainty is, almost for
the first time, available, and on an unlimited scale.”[59] But even
if this were so,--and one hears of developments in these fields that
appear to make the certainty considerably less than absolute,--it would
still be a certainty about matters that have no particular relation to
the behaviour and feelings of human beings, and that give no support
for poetry. The beguiling mirage of an Absolute fostered by romantic
poetry has disappeared, only to be replaced by the mirage of another
Absolute, terrifying though incomprehensible. And so we have come to
the _impasse_ already described.
From the point of view of the humanist, what has so suddenly collapsed
is the towering structure of nineteenth-century romanticism, not any
dwelling necessary to the continued life of poetry. For he has long
recognised those metaphysical limitations with which contemporary
physics is so deeply entangled; and he has been unwilling to trust
metaphysics, any more completely than natural science, with the whole
determination of a philosophy of life. Instead of asserting that
intellectual certainty in the field of science is available now almost
for the first time on an unlimited scale, he would postulate a large
degree of what amounts to _practical_ certainty, in all that concerns
us most nearly as ethical beings, available now, as it has been for
centuries. This assurance is embodied, for him, in the dualism of the
great historic religions, in the teachings of Socrates and of Jesus,
and in the most persistent traditions of European literature. But
its final sanctions are not found in any “great tradition,” however
imposing; they are arrived at empirically and experimentally by any
one who, divesting his mind of shibboleths and catch-words, will
honestly examine his own impulses and springs of action. In his own
soul he will find the cleavage, the dualism, which runs through human
nature. This opposition of forces, by whatever names he calls them,
by whatever symbols he represents them, may never be resolved; but in
his mysterious power of intervention in their unending conflict lies,
for him, the ultimate reality within the illusion. To the reading of
poetry, then, he will bring the same habit of discrimination that
serves him in the conduct of life, mindful that it is still a world
communicating with ours by the gate of horn and the gate of ivory, and
that the phantasms which issue therefrom may light our way a few steps
nearer truth, or may deepen for us the shadows of the dark, chaotic
flux.
To the consciousness of intellectual defeat and spiritual dismay,
evidenced so widely in contemporary literature, it is not to be
expected that poetry will for the present make any very direct or
explicit answer. For we do not look to poetry for polemics, for the
formulation of ethical or metaphysical ideas; and when poetry tries
to assume a burden that belongs rather to criticism and philosophy,
the result may have literary interest and excellence, as does Pope’s
_Essay on Man_, but is more likely to be merely dull and forced, like
the later work of Wordsworth or Browning. In either case some fulness
of life belonging to poetry when confident in its own right is missing.
No, what we look for in the poet is some more pervasive or implicit
evidence of his scale of values, some intuitive, and for that reason
more certain, indication of the quality of his response to life, felt
as unmistakably in his imagery, his diction, and his rhythms as in
those more ponderable elements of style which the eighteenth century
called “fable” and “sentiments.” Thus, in two stanzas[60] of A. E.
Housman--
The year might age, and cloudy
The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
Breathed from beyond the snows,
And I had hope of those.
They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.
--something that belongs to his deepest intuition (his acceptance,
without evasion and without reconciliation, of life’s transitoriness)
is caught in the very movement of the lines and the simplicity of the
words:
They came and were and are not.
This pervasive sense of things chiefly valued and most deeply felt,
which every great poet’s work gives us, is surely not determined
altogether by forces external to him. The poet is something more than a
highly sensitised receiving-set for remote, scattered goings-on in the
world at large. What we prize in every poet we come to know intimately
is some irreducible, _given_ quality of the personality. We shall not
easily accept, therefore, the current argument that, in an age like
ours of dissolving faiths, the only genuine kind of poetry must be one
which has cut itself off from belief of any kind.[61] The history
of English literature is not lacking in instances of poets who have
withstood the pressure of their age: to recall only the greatest, the
poems of Milton, from _Lycidas_ to _Samson Agonistes_, are triumphant
testimonies against the idea that poetry need be so utterly subject to
contemporaneous disintegrating influences. But if we claim for poetry a
certain power of immunity from such forces, neither, by the same course
of reasoning, should we expect too much from the _direct_ effect upon
it of those forces which we think salutary, such as humanism.
I do not mean to suggest here the notion of poetry’s having a life of
its own in any transcendental sense, or to imply that poets possess
mysterious astral powers. My thought is simply that the new humanism,
before it is given any large imaginative expression in American poetry,
must expect to prove its worth by responding to broadly human, and
not alone specifically poetic needs. It will do this by its power
of bringing harmony into lives which are ordered in accordance with
its insight, of establishing in society “a current of fresh and true
ideas,” and of creating thus “a quickening and sustaining atmosphere”
which poetry can breathe. I feel no need of apologising for my use of
these well-worn phrases of Matthew Arnold; not only was he the best
representative of the spirit of humanism in nineteenth-century England
or America, but also, in his realisation of the hopeless disparity
between natural processes and human aims, he anticipated the very
pattern of our own dilemma. The paralysis which came over Arnold’s
poetic powers in later life is sometimes attributed to the steady
growth of his humanistic interests, requiring the ampler medium of
prose. However that may be, I believe it certain that his humanism--his
sense, that is, of the worth and fruitfulness of human powers when
wisely exercised and his acceptance of the limitations which such a
view imposes--gave to his poetry nearly all that power of invigoration
and refreshment for which we chiefly value it. A contemporary critic,
R. H. Hutton, observed how frequently Arnold closes a poem on the
burdensomeness of existence by some seemingly unconnected figure or
story, such as the simile of the Tyrian trader in “The Scholar Gipsy,”
instinct with the pride and buoyancy of old world enterprise. “‘The
problem is insoluble,’ he seems to say, ‘but insoluble or not, let
us recall the pristine strength of the human spirit, and not forget
that we have access to great resources still.’”[62] In such ways
to-day, indirectly and obliquely, humanism may make itself felt as one
influence among many upon contemporary poetry: by rendering accessible
and operative, for the poets as for the rest of us, some of these
moral energies from times of more robust faith and higher intellectual
vitality than our own.
FOOTNOTES
[45] Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.
[46] “If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories,
the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts to a hunt for pseudonyms
of the word ‘art,’ and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in
this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination =
fancy = lyricism = beauty. And you must be careful not to take these
words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or
scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different
series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same
thing.”--G. Papini, _Four and Twenty Minds_, quoted by I. A. Richards,
_The Principles of Literary Criticism_ (1924), p. 255, note 4.
Mr. Richards adds: “It is interesting to notice that Croce’s appeal has
been exclusively to those unfamiliar with the subject, to the man of
letters and the dilettante. He has been ignored by serious students of
the mind.... [Papini] has here rendered a notable service to those who
have been depressed by the vogue of ‘Expressionism.’”
_Cf._ also the following from Gilbert Murray’s _The Classical
Tradition in Poetry_ (1927), p. 243: “Everything that a man does is
self-expression. The way a man laces his boots, the way he writes,
the way he says, ‘Good-morning,’ is probably different from the way
followed by any other man, and is thus expressive of his personality.
But it need not be good art for that reason. Imagine a pompous and
egotistic man in a state of personal irritation, having to make an
after-dinner speech. It would probably express him only too well, but
it might not be a good speech.”
[47] _A Survey of Modernist Poetry_, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves,
1927, p. 125.
[48] From _Harmonium_, by Wallace Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with
permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
authorised publishers.
[49] For the sake of “communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind
me, I should explain that _transition_ is “an international quarterly
for creative experiment,” edited in Paris by a group of young Americans
and others.
[50] From _Trivial Breath_, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and
with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
authorised publishers.
[51] From _Streets in the Moon_, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926. Reprinted
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.
[52] From _Tulips and Chimneys_. Reprinted by permission of Alfred &
Charles Boni, Inc., Publishers.
[53] For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr. Cummings’s
poetry, see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, _A Survey of Modernist
Poetry_, Chapter I.
[54] E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously referred to, is printed by him
as follows (_Tulips and Chimneys_, New York, 1924, p. 78):
i was considering how
within night’s loose
sack a star’s
nibbling in-
fin
-i-
tes-
i
-mal-
ly devours
darkness the
hungry star
which
will e
-ven
tu-
al
-ly jiggle
the bait of
dawn and be jerked
into
eternity. when over my head a
shooting
star
Bur s
(t
into a stale shriek
like an alarm-clock)
[55] Such, for instance, as the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Donald
Davidson in the South, and of Wilbert Snow and Robert P. Tristram
Coffin in New England.
[56] From the poem “Earth,” in _Dust and Light_, 1919, published by
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[57] Mr. Robinson, of course, had been publishing poetry for nearly
twenty years before the new movement got under way, but his work was
regarded as belonging to it in temper and outlook.
[58] Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section LXXIII, in
_The Drift of Romanticism_ (1913), p. 291. The next section is almost
prophetic of what has happened in American poetry of the last few years:
“In some men, especially in an age of spiritual apathy, the sense of
disillusion may spring up without the corresponding assurance of faith.
To such men nothing is real; they walk in a place of shadows, and feel
that life is continually slipping away from them into a bottomless
abyss. All their labour is to re-create for themselves the illusion
which has been shattered, or, by ceaseless occupation, to escape the
dull horror of the void.”
[59] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, 1926, p. 60.
[60] From _Last Poems_, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt
and Company.
[61] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, Chapter VII.
[62] Richard Holt Hutton, _Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to
English Thought in Matters of Faith_, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p.
146.
_Our Critical Spokesmen_
GORHAM B. MUNSON
“Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my table, “aims
to _be_ something; while criticism aims first to clarify and then to
_value_ something. Criticism is talk _about_ something with a view to
passing judgment upon it. It is an aspect of man the valuer, weighing
the actions, impulses, passions, thoughts, and imaginings of his
fellow-men. Study the criticism of a period and it will show you the
state of the general intelligence and the kind of values professed and
in vogue, and above all it will enable you to divine the amount of
consciousness of life’s processes and meanings which is current in this
period.”
“So,” I remarked to the air, “the subject I have been thinking about
has some importance? It has to do with man in his most human rôle,
that of valuing, and it assists in indicating the range and depth and
intensity of his awareness of life.”
But there was no reply to this, and perceiving that I must dig with
my own mind, I scratched down what I had previously decided should be
my opening sentence. I had been dwelling on the subject of American
literary criticism from 1915 to the present. About 1915 a new phase in
our national letters began to be manifest. Europe was well drenched
in blood and the _Lusitania_ was torpedoed in 1915--events that were
vitally to affect us. Mr. Dreiser’s _The “Genius”_ came out, and the
next year, 1916, it was suppressed by its publishers out of deference
to the power of a narrow censoring body soon to be effectively
challenged. American liberals in the wake of Bull Moose Progressivism
had hopefully established the _New Republic_. Mr. P. E. More in the
year previous to 1915 had resigned from the editorship of the _Nation_.
Afterwards there came our participation in the war: the crushing
of liberalism: post-war disillusion. There came a ferment of new
magazines and new publishers, captivating the sons and leaving the
fathers cold. There came a tide of naturalistic novels, a foam of _vers
libre_, a roar of essays attacking the genteel tradition. Since 1915
the reputations have been made of Messrs. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood
Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank, H. L. Mencken, and Eugene
O’Neill--to name only enough to establish a contrast with the writers
of the preceding period. Inevitably it happened that some excitable
journalists in the midst of the uprising promptly called this decade
and a half an American literary renaissance.
To me, on reviewing these years, they seem more like a tragi-comedy,
almost a tragi-farce. So when I penned my premeditated first sentence I
spoke of the tragi-comedy of American criticism. But even if our recent
criticism has been very often foolish, we are to take it seriously for
reasons outside itself,--if my voice out of the air is to be believed.
I must now try to develop the line of thought that moves out from the
opening sentence I wrote down when my aerial counsellor deserted me.
I
There have been no villains in the recent tragi-comedy of American
literary criticism.
The leading critics of our nation have not been villains--that is,
amazing men of initiative, strength, and will bent on destruction--but
rather they make us think of well-intentioned bookish gentlemen
gyrating in the fields of certain hidden sociological magnets and
vociferating their reflexes to the magnetic attractions. On behalf of
a potential human greatness, there are perhaps great errors in the
present world of literary criticism to be opposed, but there are with
us no great men, no geniuses, to be overthrown. In other words, our
critics are not germinative but derivative.
I mean, of course, our professional critics. It is plain that I am
not setting out to praise them--not even by calling them villains,
for villains must, to satisfy my conception of the scale on which the
intellectual drama of the race has been played, possess a certain
epical character. There is another world of criticism, the academic
world, whose faults have often been exposed scornfully and truthfully.
Lying out of the eye of the reading public, it never bears any
relation, according to the professional critics, with what is being
currently written. Yet it has its virtues of course: there is a
laudatory paper for some one to write on recent advances in American
literary scholarship: within academic circles there has grown up
the only critical movement in our land now worthy of international
interest, and the leaders of this movement, Professors Irving Babbitt
and Paul Elmer More, are--I have several times committed myself to the
assertion--the best living critics America can show. It is not with the
academic world nor with humanism, however, that I am here dealing, but
with the critics of the past fifteen years who have enjoyed something
like popularity. First, let us follow the figure of the late Stuart P.
Sherman, once a successful university professor, as he flies away from
the campus into the full light of public attention beating upon the
world of professional criticism.
Stuart P. Sherman is of exceptional interest to us. He admired Matthew
Arnold: he wrote a popular exposition of Arnold, and a course of his
entirely devoted to Arnold is said to have been popular with the
students at the University of Illinois. Let us then, noting this
affinity, measure Sherman by Arnold. The difference in their prose is
the difference between distinction and mere competence. Sherman’s is
democratic: it is as if written in shirt-sleeves or talked with the
feet on the table, the writer or speaker deliberately putting on easy
manners. Note the “It’s-a-plain-man-speaking” effect in the following
typical passage at the beginning of Sherman’s essay, _Towards an
American Type_: “When I was in college, I used to poke around in the
library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the
shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience,
into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of
Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel
is, etc.”[63] Lucid writing, of course, but it is not charming: it has
none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness.
I am going to try to point out a fatal lack of austerity in Sherman,
a certain ultimate slackness of mind and purpose. The prose, so
lustreless beside Arnold’s, shows that Sherman failed to achieve any of
the rarer virtues of verbal deportment: just as clearly one realises
that not so superficially, so mushily, could Arnold have defined
religion as, in Sherman’s words, “that which binds us and holds us.
Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it
is.” Nor could Arnold, doughty wrestler with himself, so easily drop
his hard questions and substitute gentler ones. In the essay quoted
from above, Sherman went on to raise the question all great minds
have most seriously confronted: “Is life worth living, and for what
purpose?” But it did not take him long to say, “Assuming that life is
worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?”--a serious enough
question, but subtly veering the asker away from any tragic vision of
life and encouraging him to settle into a limited pattern of behaviour
that happens to appeal to his temperament rather than to go forth and
lead the great adventure of pursuing perfection.
In his growth Sherman was influenced by the books of three conservative
critics, Mr. Paul Elmer More, Mr. Irving Babbitt, and the late W. C.
Brownell; and here again his conduct was significant of some lack of
desperation in him or of some softening influence on the fibres of his
mind. For under the pressure of the ideas of Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt
he was a little impatient. They were too austere for his taste, whereas
he could not admire Brownell sufficiently. But of the three critics
Brownell dealt least in the primary ideas of life: he elaborated with a
great deal of fine sense secondary ideas about literature and society.
He had, it appears to me, a mind more localised in the nineteenth
century than the minds of his two colleagues. And nineteenth-century
minded, rather than classical minded, was Stuart P. Sherman: his
perennial enthusiasms were for Emerson, Whitman, and Stevenson.
Sherman conceived that he was a spokesman for the “average man,” and
the point is important in estimating him. It makes it fitting that his
style should be passably good but inconspicuous in any pageant of fine
styles, fitting that his thinking should constantly deflect from issues
that require an unusual severity of discipline for meeting them to
issues that are less agitating to the pulse, and most fitting that he
should seem not out of joint with his time, like a Forest Philosopher
discoursing with men who regard motor-cars as a convincing symbol of
progress, but that he should seem to be a contemporary with a touch
of conservatism, crying with other average men for Prohibition and
vituperating with them our one-time Teutonic enemies. My reader, are
you now chiding me for drawing an unsympathetic portrait? Recall then
one of the pieces in _Americans_ (1922) and then say, if you can,
that in respect to Sherman’s chief weakness I am wrong. The piece in
evidence is _An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More_, wherein,
after paying his respects to Mr. More’s gifts, Sherman complained: “But
he has done too little to meet his poor living fellow-countrymen.” In
fact, he said, and this is the self-incriminating statement, “Mr. More
has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by which a master
of popularity plays upon an unready public with his personality,
flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before his
substance arrives.”[64] It all depends! The genuine writer does seek to
reduce his reader by a species of white magic, he labours to compel him
to be his slave. But this is a more virile conception of the writer’s
rôle than Sherman’s ingratiator embodies. If one puts the emphasis on
ingratiation rather than on the skilful imposition of one’s values,
then as is well known something is likely to happen to one’s values.
Consider the following sad example: Said Sherman, would that Mr. More
had loved the aristocratic Plato less and Socrates more. “If,” he went
on, “Socrates were among us to-day, I am convinced that he would be
a leader of the Democrats in the House; but Plato, I suspect, would
be a member of the Senate from Massachusetts.” Quite apart from the
fact, apparently forgotten by Sherman, that Socrates at his trial spoke
of his brief experience in politics and explained scathingly why he
had thereafter abstained from politics, I say that what has occurred
here in Sherman’s illustration is the domestication of two men so
uncompromisingly at variance with ourselves, so deeply critical of
us that if we really felt their presence to-day, we would be, to put
it mildly, thoroughly uncomfortable. But Senators and Congressmen do
not abash us, and Plato and Socrates transformed into them take on an
undisturbing and familiar air. This, I say, is a vicious technique of
ingratiation. But there is more and worse: in the same paper Sherman
eulogises the average man and then lets himself go deep in the sin of
cant. “If ‘P. E. M.’ had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which
he is so distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than
anything else to-day keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism
is the _religion of democracy_, consisting of a little bundle of
general principles which make him respect himself and his neighbour; a
bundle of principles kindled in crucial times by an intense emotion, in
which his self-interest, his petty vices, and his envy are consumed as
with fire; etc.”[65]
In the lexicon of contemporary humanism there is a damning phrase,
“unselective sympathy.” I think it applies to what Sherman meant when
he said “religion of democracy,” else why does he base so much of his
message on the statistical average man? He could, like Mr. More, have
appealed to the latent common sense of man, which is not a visible
property of the average man to-day any more than it characterises his
leaders, or he could, like M. Charles Maurras, have tried to conceive
clearly of a perfect and normal man and argued for a closer approach to
normality in human affairs;[66] but no--there was working in Sherman
an element of “unselective sympathy” and it made his grasp relax on
enterprises of perfection. It was no divine average man he espoused.
When in 1924 he became literary editor of the New York _Herald
Tribune_, Sherman had his opportunity to establish what our milieu
sorely lacks, a vigorous _conservative_ literary review. But what he
organised was essentially not different from any intelligent liberal
review with romantic tendencies: many of his regular reviewers were,
for instance, already identified as reviewers for the _Nation_. We
have followed Sherman from the academic world to the professional
literary world, and it would seem to a superficial glance that Sherman
changed remarkably in his transit from one to the other. He had been an
assailant of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism: he was to praise _An American
Tragedy_. He had sneered, and not very well, at the “moderns”: he was
to become their friendly counsellor. He had learned, he said, that it
was a certain “vitality,” no matter under what guise, that he wanted in
letters, and this platform enabled him to do a great deal of explaining
away of his altered views. He became less provincial.
But underneath there was no change. He had not the stuff of leadership.
For what was this element of “unselective sympathy” in him which he
called a “religion of democracy”? It was a fear of distinction, a fear
of standing away from the mass, a fear of striving far enough ahead to
be a leader. Was Sherman, I wonder, one of those numerous professors
who are so anxious to be taken as in spirit “one of the boys” that they
will compromise the dignity of their learning, that they will feel
_defensive_ about the life of the mind? As a critic certainly he was on
the defensive in presenting his values to the average audience. Of no
marked force in himself, on him the registry of environment would be
speedily and plainly made. In an academic environment he had fought the
New York critics. He came as an editor to New York and the environment
quickly persuaded him to blend with it.[67]
When Sherman died, the professional literary world eulogised fulsomely
the _émigré_ from the academy. That already tells us a great deal about
this world. Let us see more distinctly what it was with which Sherman
assimilated.
II
It was a tragi-comedy begun in high spirits and closing now in
disillusion and pathos. Three representative players have been Mr. Joel
Elias Spingarn, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and Mr. H. L. Mencken: a study of
their rôles will instruct us in the mediocrity of contemporary American
criticism. The influence of the first of these is a most curious
phenomenon in our recent history.
In type Mr. J. E. Spingarn is the leisured gentleman and scholar who
adorns all too rarely our national society. His interests are wide: for
a number of years he was in politics and he has distinguished himself
by his generous efforts in behalf of the Negro: he has been an army
officer and has, one fancies, a spark of the old-time gallantry of the
military man. For us, however, he is the wealthy amateur of the arts
and philosophy; but what, one may still ask, are his claims to critical
leadership?
Like Sherman, Mr. Spingarn spent a number of years teaching in an
academic environment. He specialised in the history of literary
criticism, producing the three-volume compilation, _Critical Essays
of the Seventeenth Century_ (1909) and the volume, _Literary
Criticism in the Renaissance_ (1899), which pleased certain Italian
thinkers and began that friendship with them later to be cemented
by his championship of Croce. Neither of these works is more than
the usual competent product of academic industry and research: Mr.
Spingarn himself revolted against the type of sterile scholarship
they represent. In 1910 he delivered his famous lecture, _The New
Criticism_. He declaimed it at the climax of a spree, for he had
intoxicated himself with the æsthetic theory of Benedetto Croce: he
was in full cry against academic dry rot. Consequently his statements
at the time were more extreme than those he would probably make on the
same theme to-day.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of a record, we must write down such
pronunciamentos in this lecture, in the addenda to it in _Creative
Criticism_ (1917), in his article, _The Seven Arts and the Seven
Confusions_, and in his contribution to _Civilization in the United
States_ (1921) as bear on the following topics: the essence of art, the
function of the artist, the duty of the critic.
Literature, he said, pointing to the trend of nineteenth-century
criticism, “is an expression of something, of experience or emotion,
of the external or internal, of the man himself or something outside
the man; yet it is always conceived of as an art of expression.” As for
the artist, he bade him know that “madness and courage are the very
life of art.... For the madness of poets is nothing more or less than
unhampered freedom of self-expression.... To let one’s self go--that
is what art is always aiming at, and American art needs most of all.”
The duty of the critic? To ask and answer these questions: “What has
the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his intention? What is
he striving to express and how has he expressed it? What impression
does his work make on me, and how can I best express this impression?”
With the flourishes of a platform speaker who knows instinctively that
it is not straight hard thinking which sways an audience so much as
the verve with which possibly dubious generalities are pronounced, Mr.
Spingarn exclaimed vehemently that the new critics have done with the
whole question of standards, including genres, hierarchies, and moral
judgments.
This is, of course, an unsubtilised outright statement of romantic
æstheticism. Mr. Spingarn was positive that the critic’s essential
response to a work of art must be æsthetic, but he has always withheld
what exactly he means by the æsthetic emotion or response or judgment.
(It _is_ hard to make concrete statements about the so-called æsthetic
emotion.) But that did not in the least militate against the “æsthetic
response” being used as a campaign catchword. For Mr. Spingarn had
written the proclamations for a new generation of American writers.
This is the curious phenomenon I spoke of. One is astonished not just
at the slight quantity of Mr. Spingarn’s writing in proportion to his
reputation, but more astonished at the complete lack of originality
in the documents of this apostle for originality. He added nothing
to the Crocean doctrine: he clarified nothing or modified nothing
in it. He did not even apply it, abstaining, then and since, from
concrete criticism of individual works. He merely proclaimed it. And a
widespread revolt against standards followed in American criticism. So
hearty, and eventually so wilful and silly, was the revolt that in 1922
its opponents were entertained by the issuance from Mr. Spingarn of a
restraining manifesto entitled _The Younger Generation_. This time,
recoiling from the destructiveness of the young men, Mr. Spingarn would
herd them back into an idealistic fold, back to “discipline, character,
morals, imagination, beauty, freedom.” Very often before, romantic
expansiveness has run its course into disillusion: it is a soberer
Crocean who said, “I, who once called upon young men for rebellion and
doubt, now call upon them for thought and faith.”
It is not Mr. J. E. Spingarn, enthusiastic amateur of letters, trained
scholar, man of feeling, who can detain us, for there is literally
nothing in his writing for the mind to work on: as a thinker, he is
thoroughly derivative and weak on definitions. But what Mr. Spingarn
stands for, the theory of self-expression, still needs a scotching.
“Self-expression” is simply a magical catchword of the black variety.
It is a good catchword in that it emphasises the self, but it is
pernicious to the best interests of the self. For to express one’s
self means no more than just to manifest oneself, and if we say
self-manifestation instead of self-expression, we see at once how
paralysing the latter term has been. It has placed the emphasis, one
sees, on the artist _as he is_ and not on his possibilities of growth:
thus it has a static effect. Think now: impulses, people say, arise in
them or occur to them; no one claims to create his own impulses, to
self-induce his inclinations; in a manner of speaking, our impulses
come to us from the outside. Therefore, advice to be spontaneous, to
let oneself go without check, to follow one’s impulses is necessarily
advice--to do what?--_to live as unconsciously and mechanically as
possible_. The romantic may just as well hand himself over to the
Behaviourist psychologist, saying, “Here am I, a creature of whim
and impulse, the living proof of your thesis of automatism.” But the
romantic is not sternly logical. He has been proof against the question
as to the value of the self that is being expressed, and not only proof
against it: self-expression as a theory has encouraged his conceit and
sometimes fostered megalomania, thus pitching him deeper into bondage
to _external_ conditions, for conceit makes one exaggeratedly sensitive
to the environment.
To identify one’s self with the mechanical temperamental flux of
one’s existence and call that freedom is surely strange, and it is no
wonder that it is a strange “science” which has risen to support this
identification. I am of course referring to psycho-analysis, spoken
of respectfully by Mr. Spingarn, utilised as a probing instrument in
biography by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and championed by Mr. Mencken. It
does not seem necessary here to make a serious attempt to discredit
psycho-analysis, for that is being done rapidly enough by such
critics of it as Dr. Trigant Burrow, by the Behaviourists, by the
academic psychologists themselves. The facts have never been other
than these: that psycho-analysis is admittedly experimental (and
therefore speculative in its procedures, unsure of itself), that its
central conception, the unconscious, not to speak of its many little
metaphors like the “censor,” has never been objectively established,
and that it has no ideal of psychological health toward which to guide
its adherents (in lieu of such an ideal, the analyst has either gone
in for an excessive relativity or he has taken the “reality” of the
statistical average to be the norm). These are the undeniable facts
and one who would like to take pride in the sturdy commonsense of
the literary profession must regret that they were not kept in mind.
Literary men to-day, one must conclude, are no less gullible than any
other group. Naively, they welcomed the psycho-analytical dramatising
of inhibitions as the causes of ills, they agreed at once that thought
was a sublimation of sex energy and somehow not quite a legitimate
function of man, they wiseacred in jargon about that bastard soul,
the unconscious. Ah, my highly suggestible writers, it is easy come,
easy go with your ideas: within a decade you will be sneering at
psycho-analysis as now you sneer at Christian Science.
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his social studies and biographical
interpretations came to use psycho-analysis with tact: he is not the
sort of critic whose errors will be glaring. A sensitive man but shy
of æsthetic ideas: a sociological critic of letters in control of a
persuasive and considerate prose style: a sentimental naturalist, to
use the terminology of Mr. Irving Babbitt, but far from extreme in his
humanitarian socialism and, despite his psycho-analytic superstitions,
temperate in his faith in emotional expansiveness.
Who would dispute Mr. Brooks’s central idea, namely, that an
acquisitive society provides unfavourable conditions for the
development of the artistic life? Of course it does. It badly
nourishes its men of genius, and Mr. Brooks became almost obsessed
with literary failure or what he conceived to be literary failure,
as witness his books on Symonds, Mark Twain, and Henry James. He was
continually calling the attention of the new writers to the conditions
in the history of America which had hampered and throttled their
predecessors: he showed how frontier life had made the machinery
of existence, the actual getting of a living, paramount and from
this necessity had originated the contempt for the arts of enjoying
existence, and how this split had perpetuated itself in the divorce
between the world of practice (“lowbrow”) and the world of theory
(“highbrow”): but he failed at the very crux of his pleading. For
struggling and unappreciated writers are too ready to believe that
the hostile environment is responsible for their shortcomings. They
are likely to wilt into self-pity and to feel victimised. That is
precisely the effect that Mr. Brooks’s writings produced, even though
he casually said: “If our literature is to grow it can only be through
the development of a sense of ‘free will’ on the part of our writers
themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a ‘victim’ is in itself not to be
an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world
of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause,
the world of his own creation.” But Mr. Brooks has not grown eloquent
on this theme. He seems rather to have the sweet wistfulness and
yearning of one pledged to a lost cause. This mood of wistfulness and
yearning, this image of oneself as an outcast, lonely and eager, has
not revived and will never, it seems to me, revive the spirit of the
American writer.
Was it fortuitous, as in the example of Mr. Spingarn, that Mr. Van Wyck
Brooks should have held a certain leadership, should have put far more
than most of his generation his impress upon American taste and thought
in literary matters? It would seem that he has been a leader _faute de
mieux_, for although a charming minor critic, he has never managed to
awake an indomitable desire among his followers to master the odds. He
voiced the sentiments of a wistfully rebellious generation but shed no
light on the object of their rebellion, the achievement in a democracy
of real individuality.
That is the problem Mr. H. L. Mencken has at least perceived, and
his bold tone better fits a leader in our present straits than Mr.
Brooks’s gentle accents, but alas! He “solved” the problem of being
an individual in a “democratic” nation simply by striking an attitude
of swagger, and like Midas he is cursed with a touch that changes all
objects into some one thing else. It is easy--and this is the secret
of his influence--to adopt Mr. Mencken’s attitude toward the current
affairs of men. Let me quote his _Catechism_ and you will have it
in one simple lesson. “_Q._ If you find so much that is unworthy of
reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? _A._ Why
do men go to zoos?” But let us observe the man in the zoo, traipsing
open-mouthed and superciliously from cage to cage, grinning in silly
patronage at the imprisoned beasts who at least are true to the laws of
their being, and shall we not mock at man’s cheap sense of superiority
based not on what he (poor lunatic!) has done for himself but only
on what Nature has made of him? No, no, it is not by contempt for
the inferior that man will grow but by dissatisfaction with himself.
The net effect of Mr. Mencken’s writings, however, is to produce
self-satisfaction and a feeling of false superiority, and this
naturally enough makes for personal passivity.
As for the Mencken touch! It turns everything to horse sense (not to be
confused with the hard-won virtue of commonsense) and it is admirable
when it is applied to current cant, as this: “Law Enforcement becomes
the new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can
hornswoggle B, C, D, E and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying,
by bluff and bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound
to yield it respect--nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To
question it is to sin against the Holy Ghost.”
But shrewdness is not enough when one is trying to cope with
master-ideas, and in their realm Mr. Mencken is, as he might say,
a clodhopper. One of the master-ideas in æsthetics and psychology,
one that has engaged great minds and been pondered upon each century
since the _Poetics_ was introduced into European thought, is the
Aristotelian conception of _katharsis_. Hear Mr. Mencken after the
sages and the learned have spoken. He is saying that capital punishment
affords _katharsis_ to modern societies. “_Katharsis_, so used, means
a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A
schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical
chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is _katharsis_. A
bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a counterfeit
$10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on Sunday,
is arrested and jailed. This is also _katharsis_. A subscriber to a
newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of a
lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not
buy Liberty bonds. This again is _katharsis_.”[68] And this again is
cheap intellectual vaudeville or--it is clodhopperism. Something like
this always happens when Mr. Mencken fingers the diamond ideas of the
world; the process of degrading intellectual grandeur to horse sense
began when he grossly misunderstood Nietzsche years ago.
By way of a last word on this idol of the emancipated Rotarian, do
not forget that Mr. Mencken, destructive critic that he is, is also
given to fulsome and extravagant praise of certain transient artists.
Mr. Edgar Lee Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_, he says, is “the most
eloquent, the most profound and the most thoroughly national volume of
poetry published in America since _Leaves of Grass_.” Conceivably, it
may be the third, but is it eloquent, is it profound? Such judgments
are not uncommon when Mr. Mencken feels a praising mood come on.
III
Into the critical pond presided over by Messrs. Spingarn, Brooks, and
Mencken leapt Sherman. His academic values were in deliquescence, and
he was greeted with cheers when he began to revise his former estimates
and with eulogies when he died untimely. Much may be said for the
three critics I have taken as big frogs in this puddle: do not forget
the gusto of Mr. Spingarn’s temperament, the historical consciousness
and fine humanity of Mr. Brooks, the valuable scavenger-work of Mr.
Mencken. But after all is said there is no seed, no fertility in the
viewpoint of each. We must stress their failures: the failure of Mr.
Spingarn to offer for application and development æsthetic ideas, the
failure of Mr. Brooks to give the new American writers an image of
themselves that would effectively inspire them against the crushing
forces of their environment, the failure of Mr. Mencken to escape
sophisticated superstitions as he escaped gross superstitions. Look
at their disciples and behold clearly the limitations of the pond’s
masters.
Mr. Mencken has bred a score of little Menckens, men who imitate his
style, who spend their time demonstrating, as Mr. Kenneth Burke said
of Mr. Mencken, the stupidity of many a stupidity and invariably
showing that it is stupid: they have no more capacity for realising
great central ideas than Mr. Mencken. Mr. Brooks has inspired Mr.
Lewis Mumford, who is a pleasing writer on architecture, a literary
critic who seizes on the romantic elements of Emerson, Thoreau, and
Whitman and repeats with spirit what his predecessor has said, a
thinker whose general terms are vague, and who is impractical because
of his credulity as to what modern letters can actually effect in
modern society. His distinguishing trait, like Mr. Brooks’s, is a
certain fine, sensitive, generous humanity, but beware here! Without
a corresponding growth of intellectual power, a corresponding stress
on deeds, this fervour may degenerate into mere emotional bluff.
And the followers of Mr. Spingarn? Are there any now? There is an
æsthetic school of young critics, but they derive rather from Mr. Ezra
Pound and the T. S. Eliot who wrote _The Sacred Wood_. For after all
Mr. Spingarn only winded a horn and left the startled and delighted
self-expressionists to hunt for themselves.
We have, it would seem, come to the end of a decade and a half of
exuberance. Enter mournfully Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch to confess the
disillusioned after-thoughts of the modern romanticist. It is a
supine admission he makes, without blushes be it added, when he
says in beginning his account of the modern temper or mood: “I have
been compelled to make references to many facts or supposed facts
in biology, psychology, and anthropology. Obviously no person is
qualified to assert them all with authority and obviously I am much
less qualified than many others, but when I state them I do so not as
facts, but simply as commonplaces which we have been taught to believe.
My subject is not any series of objective facts, but a state of mind,
and in the effort to describe and account for it I am responsible not
for Truth, but for the convictions, scientific or otherwise, which
I and my contemporaries have been led to hold ... if the tenets of
Freudianism or the hypotheses of the Darwinian theory are false, they
have at least been so accepted as to influence the modern temper quite
as unmistakably as if they were true ... these supposed facts have an
emotional significance. That is as far as it is necessary to go if
they are to be used as I use them, only in the effort to account for a
mood.”[69]
Shades of the heroes of the mind! Here is a critic who can entertain
the possibility that much of our contemporary “knowledge” is untrue,
and then merely wring his hands elegantly in the melancholy produced
by _assuming_ that it is true. In _The Modern Temper_ (1929) romantic
criticism in America culminates in weak despair.
As we should expect, there have been departures lately. There is Mr.
Walter Lippmann,[70] as able a cartographer of the Kingdom of Whirl as
Mr. Krutch. He sees clearly that the bell-tent of civilisation is in
collapse because society has no common human aim, no hold, that is,
on a center-pole capable of raising the whole structure. “The effect
of modernity, then,” he says in _A Preface to Morals_ (1929), “is to
specialise and to intensify our separated activities. Once all things
were phases of a single destiny: the church, the state, the family,
the school were means to the same end; the rights and duties of the
individual in society, the rules of morality, the themes of art,
and the teachings of science were all of them ways of revealing, of
celebrating, of applying the laws laid down in the divine constitution
of the universe. In the modern world institutions are more or less
independent, each serving its own proximate purpose, and our culture
is really a collection of separate interests each sovereign within its
own realm.”[71] And the remedy he proposes, who can quarrel with it?
The “good life,” he says, is an _acquired_ disposition,--surely an
advance over the implication of the other critics we have mentioned
that somehow the “good life” would _naturally_ come to pass, if one
could only eliminate puritanic inhibitions and flow with one’s desires.
No, says Mr. Lippmann, we must develop “detachment, understanding, and
disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.” We must enter
into a new asceticism--who would have anticipated five years ago such
a phrase from our new critics?--defined as “an effort to overcome
immaturity.”
This is excellent in that it perceives the problem and the goal of the
clear-insighted modern man, but does not Mr. Lippmann underestimate
the enormous psychological difficulties that block the passage from
unregenerate to regenerate man? One has the feeling that his is a paper
solution, and one is appalled to read of his hopes for psycho-analysis
as a technique for achieving the re-education of desire. The aim of
psycho-analysis is adjustment to reality, and Mr. Lippmann adopts
the dangerous phrase. It is dangerous: for what does “adjustment”
in practice mean but taking the position of maximum comfort, the
following of the path of least resistance? Continual adjustments
by beings to an environment progressively unfavourable mean the
progressive deterioration of a species: ultimately adjustment means
extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs can give us a lesson in the fallacy
of adjustment. It is farcical for this critic to patronise Pythagoras,
for instance, who “could not have known any tested method either of
equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything besides a
crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline,” as long as we can
contrast the ancient perception of the human necessity of surmounting
the environment with the contemporary belief in the value of adjusting
(merely reacting) to it.
Nevertheless Mr. Lippmann among others has articulated what will
probably be the fundamental position of American criticism in the
next decade, namely, the conviction that we are thinking and acting
chaotically and senselessly, and the deep surmise that man can “learn
to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” The brilliant but
eccentric Mr. Waldo Frank has dwelt for some time on the dissolution
of the Mediæval Synthesis of Europe. America he announces is the grave
of Europe and he hopes for a kind of miracle: a generation within
the grave of a mystical revival. He too has had his thoughts turned
to the all-important question of a method of realising Wholeness in
fact as well as in concept. You will find his method outlined at
the close of _The Re-discovery of America_ (1929). It is, I fear,
hastily constructed, and more than smacks of amateurishness and of
the armchair. One wishes that he had not rushed in where sages fear
to tread, but he has at least thrown the question of a method for the
development of human potentialities into open discussion.[72]
The most impressive of the contemporary critics who offer us “a way
out” is Mr. T. S. Eliot, but before examining him, it is proper to
repeat here that I am excluding from this paper any consideration of
the formidable opposition party to all that has been described thus
far, the new humanists whom the romanticists have found raised up
against them. In passing, I may say that I have before this dipped
my freelance pen to the humanists in salutations of great respect
mingled with a few misgivings, and I have not the least hesitation in
volunteering to defend them against the oblique attack of Mr. T. S.
Eliot.
This painstaking critic owes much to Professor Babbitt, far more than
does Mr. Lippmann. There is in fact much overlapping between his views
and modern humanism. Yet there is an issue between the new humanists
and Mr. T. S. Eliot: it resolves itself into the question of Authority.
Let us trace out the evolution of Mr. Eliot’s ideas and we shall see
the latent weakness of his position, and those who wish may compare
it with the new humanists’ position. In _The Sacred Wood_ (1921) he
began as an acute æsthetic critic, basing the exercise of criticism
upon sensibility and intellect. He professed to be a classicist.
Opposed to romantic excesses he was, in spite of an admiration for
certain decadent poets, but was he a classicist? If so, what about the
essay on _Tradition and the Individual Talent_, in which the idea of
“creative imitation” is pushed to an extreme that makes one suspicious?
Matters became explicit a few years later when he debated with Mr.
J. Middleton Murry. In this debate Mr. Eliot admitted that such were
the instabilities and insufficiencies of private judgment and private
experience that a man should discipline himself in allegiance to some
outside Authority, and for the literary critic this meant loyalty to
the classical literary tradition. Something was here given away: the
strict corroboration by personal experiment of classical wisdom was
left out. Mr. Eliot was revealed as by disposition a neo-classicist
(with some romantic elements) thoroughly dependent upon literary
authority.
The next step for him, as a man too intelligent and too serious to
evade the problems of social and moral chaos, was to acknowledge that
criticism in our age could not be so limited as it was conceived to be
in _The Sacred Wood_. On the contrary, the critic he saw must become
philosophic: he must be a creator of values. But here again he was
neo-classical, for he searched for external Authority in politics and
in religion. In the former he is Royalist, in the latter Anglo-Catholic.
Turn to his essays on style and order entitled _For Lancelot
Andrewes_. They are the work of a fine judicial temperament, but not,
not at all, the work of a general in the warfare of the mind. The
distinction is worth making much of. I have elsewhere[73] analysed the
structure and procedures of Mr. Eliot’s prose to show its thoroughly
judicial characteristics: its calmness and gravity, its balance and
discriminatory powers among precedents, its fulfilment in a final
elucidation arrived at by comparisons and analyses. It is not a
full-bodied prose, the weight of the whole man concentrated on the pen,
but the prose of a judge conscious of the weight of authority _behind_,
not in, him. Now observe that in _For Lancelot Andrewes_ Mr. Eliot,
like a learned judge and with an air of profundity, is continually
pointing to the tradition of a Church, set up as an authority external
to himself. He is at his best when he presents comparatively narrow
ideas, ideas about literary style for the most part, as in his
exposition of the relevant intensity of Andrewes’ prose. At his most
disappointing, he ventures upon a safe common-place generality, as
when he remarks, “The greatest tragedies are occupied with great and
permanent moral conflicts.” The last is true enough, but Mr. Eliot
never talks very much or directly about this occupation, about the
stuff itself of moral conflicts.
Likewise Mr. Eliot, apologist for religion, does not write about
religion: he points to _a_ Church and the intellectual riches of its
history. “For us,” he declares, “religion is of course Christianity;
and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of a Church.” And
again, “And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life”--but
we need both the letter and the spirit! Stress on the letter gives
us legalism in religious thinking, and on the spirit gives us what
Mr. Eliot calls “_Ersatz_-religion”: the two, spirit and letter,
must correspond. There we are! the last critical “leader” in this
examination turns out to be merely sitting on a judge’s bench and
therefore necessarily inactive: he points out where Authority may be
found, but one may doubt from the evidence of his writing whether
Authority resides in him.
IV
Following the course of Sherman, we entered the professional literary
world and explored its criticism, coming finally to Mr. T. S. Eliot,
whose latest departure turns our eyes outwards again to the academic
world, to Professor Babbitt and humanism, or to the worlds of religion
or philosophy. It appears to me that our purely literary critics have
at one point or another all failed fundamentally: they are all leaders
by default only and not by essence. Either they are bound to move
towards the position of Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, who realises that “all
the bases upon which modern despair rests were laid joyously by people
who were quite sure that they were serving humanity, and all the chains
by which we are now bound so much more firmly to earth than we want
to be were forged amidst shouts of triumph,” or they are spying some
loophole which on inspection seems not to exist. But in either case,
and this is a hopeful sign, they are all converging toward a common
realisation that King Whirl must, if possible, be deposed. The goal is
seen: the reconstructed human spirit. But without adequate leadership
how may we start to approach it?
Well, it is easy to exaggerate the power of literary criticism. If
certain things in our culture have gone dead, criticism cannot revive
them. The essential “about-ness” of the critical activity limits it
to the guidance, stimulation, and judging of things in which there
is still some life. But assuming that a funeral ceremony such as Mr.
Krutch has conducted is still premature,--and it is premature so long
as any doubt exists of final decay,--we may then try to conceive of
what a genuine leader in critical thought would be like, and by this
ideal measure ourselves.
Objectivity in judgment would be one of the principal marks of the
leader. That requires a sufficient scale of values to stand outside
not only the frame of one’s century but outside the frames of all
centuries. It means the ascertainment of _primary_ laws in our field,
which may be possible as it has been possible in physics to say that a
few laws are true regardless of what frame of time and space one may
be in. Objectively considered, literature may be found to have been
in decline, not just for a century and a half or just for six hundred
years but almost from its classical sources and from the Scriptures of
ancient lands. Is this depressing? It is not depressing to contemplate
a magnificent mountain from its base.
On the contrary, a real view of the heights of Parnassus and Olympus
may inspire an uncommon elevation of aim--a second mark of the critical
leader; it seems to me unnecessary to argue that the critics we have
looked at do not realise how high man has ascended in the past or can
conceivably ascend now. Their ideas of human greatness are small.
Really, _are_ we practitioners of literary criticism distinguished by
any grandeur in breadth and elevation of thought? No one can believe it.
Nor can I believe that we approximate the ideal critic in passion, in
a burning unquenchable indomitable love of perfect things. This is
the spirit that giveth life to standards that otherwise would seem
too skeletal, too non-human to be glamorous and magical in their
remoteness: this is the spirit that killeth despair and compromise.
Infused with it, our imagined critic becomes single-minded and proof
against deviations and resting-places.
Finally, he would, I conceive, be distinguished by an immense capacity
for relating deeds to words. His interest would not cease with a
beautiful formulation, but would continue until the formulation was
embodied in experience. Not words alone, not deeds alone, but words
_and_ actions would be his great desideratum.
Of whom am I thinking? It is dangerous in calling attention to concepts
or principles to cite examples until the concept or principle or, in
our case, ideal has been thoroughly understood, and I dare not hope
for that within the space of this paper. But with a caution not to
debate the achievements of him but only to study his framework, I take
the risk of nominating Matthew Arnold as having the build of a great
critic. We need in our national letters a critic of the stamp and
dimensions of Arnold.
V
I append _The Prayer of a Young Critic_.
But we have heard rumour of the Mistral.
It is a cold wind that blows from the heights,
Day after day it sweeps steadily down,
Cold and from above, changing the air
In the lowlands.
We are dwellers in lowlands
And our air has been breathed before. It is
A sultry air: men talk to each other
In haze and their words are close and fevered.
A warm breeze crosses our little hillocks,
And then the dust settles down again.
Not near the Alps do we live.
Great Genius,
Grant us an electric climate! Touch us
With snowy fire, send the Mistral to sweep
Bare our plain and proclaim the gaiety
Of altitudes, the glory of clear stars,
The exaltation of the sun burning
The rare air. Great Genius, send the Mistral!
FOOTNOTES
[63] From _Points of View_, 1924, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.
[64] From _Americans_, 1922, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.
[65] The rest of the sentence is “and he sees the common weal as the
mighty rock in the shadow of which his little life and personality are
to be surrendered, if need be, as things negligible and transitory.”
[66] Also he could have mastered the philosophy of Mr. John Dewey and
made his “religion of democracy” more respectable.
[67] A perusal of the _Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman_,
published after this essay was written, increases my confidence in the
diagnosis above of Sherman’s weaknesses. Mr. P. E. More wondered many
years ago whether his young reviewer did not have “an inclination to
avoid the central problem.” Later, he warned Sherman: “I do not like to
see a man of your ability and insight deliberately taking up the job of
whitewasher” for democracy. And finally Mr. More said: “Yours is but a
sickly sort of democracy at bottom, and needs a doctor.”
[68] From _Prejudices: Fourth Series_, Alfred A. Knopf, publisher.
[69] From _The Modern Temper_, Harcourt, Brace & Co., publisher.
[70] Mr. Lippmann is not a literary critic but his views are pertinent
to this discussion.
[71] The Macmillan Company, publisher.
[72] Even in a footnote I mention Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn with some
reluctance, and only because there are so few critics among us who have
any interest in trying to plot a direction for the future. Pauline
Christianity (grossly libelled by him as akin to the degenerate
puritanism of our day) must be destroyed, he preaches. Salvation lies
in a fusion of Hellenism (Science) and Judaism (which he interprets
selectively and sentimentally). He is a suggestive writer: he is also a
prig, a special pleader, and embarrassing in his frequent intervals of
self-pity and in his intrusions of hearth-side intimacies (proper for
telling only to his closest friends) into the public medium of print.
One cannot take this muddled romanticist seriously.
[73] In _Style and Form in American Prose_ (1929).
_Behaviour and Continuity_
BERNARD BANDLER II
I
Until humanism and psychology are more suitably defined than they are
at present the task of establishing their relations is hazardous.
Psychology is still in a primitive state: its basic problems and
principles are disputed, its relation to the other sciences is
undetermined, and its method is loose and unsystematic. That it may be
a science, however, is indubitable. The constitution of human nature
is open to analysis: human behaviour no less than the stars and plants
may be observed and hypothesis may be employed to order its seeming
irregularities. But the common scientific ground of purpose which
underlies the differences of psychological theories does not unite the
humanists, and the problem of stating the nature and scope of humanism
is correspondingly difficult. The absence of a common scientific
ground, of an accepted subject matter and a technique, enables any
man interested in human activities to call himself a humanist and to
maintain his contention, whereas no man, unless technically trained,
will consider himself a psychologist. He may observe society and
deliver himself of apothegms and epigrams that characterise people
truly--like the French moralists, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and
Joubert. He may trace the influence of ideas on conduct, as Mr. Babbitt
has done. But that is ethics and philosophy, not psychology. Psychology
limits itself to studying how human beings behave and to reducing their
most complex actions to primitive elements. Ethics evaluates their
activities and judges them. So, however confusing the positions of
contemporary psychologists and humanists, if we keep in mind the formal
aspects of psychology and ethics, a study of the relations of the two
may be instructive.
Upon psychology as a science, as upon physics and chemistry, humanism
can have nothing to say. It may examine the logic of psychology and
criticise its presuppositions, although that is properly the task of
the cosmologist, like Mr. Whitehead. But towards the conclusion of
psychology, the “laws” it may formulate, humanism’s only possible
attitude is one of interested acceptance. An ethics should not
prescribe the limits of science, nor dictate the nature of its results.
And if the science deals successfully with human actions, ethics,
instead of criticising, should respect its results, that ideals may not
be founded on ignorance and fancy but rather on knowledge.
Unfortunately, the amount of psychology which is scientific and
relevant to human nature is small. Much of it reduces to physiology.
The chemistry of the glands and blood, the nature of sensation,
feeling, emotion, and of the thinking processes, and those
predispositions of the body which we call instincts are ultimately
problems of physiology and await the development of that science for
their solution. What distinguishes psychology from physiology is the
study of behaviour in society: the transmutation of the instincts and
temperament into habits and sentiments. Of psychology proper we have,
so far, elaborate programmes, a bewildering variety of theories,--part
epistemology, part logic, part metaphysics, and part mythology,--a
vast accumulation of data, some classifications, and hardly any
science. Yet the studies of “types,” “personality,” “culture forms,”
and particularly the researches of psychiatrists contain many accurate
descriptions of human behaviour. Their endeavour to explain the most
sublimated actions, by reference to the constitution of the organism
and to the determining factors of its environment, approaches sound
science.
But “behaviour in society” and “the determining factors of environment”
are vague phrases. If there is to be a science of behaviour and society
two conditions are necessary: first, that the organisms in spite of
individual variations should be essentially the same; and second, that
the environment to which they react should be stable and limited. For
if each organism were essentially unique there would be no basis for
the science of psychology, and if the environment were constantly
changing there would be no conditions and no control for studying
the organism. But human environment, the totality of forces which
affect us and help satisfy our needs, is not stable and limited. It is
plastic and relative. Tradition and convention are added to the forces
composing an animal’s environment. These multiply the possibilities of
behaviour indefinitely. In proportion as a man frees himself from a
blind adherence to custom, the more personal his environment will be.
To know such a man’s environment is to become acquainted with a unique
world. It is to know not only his ancestry, his history, his habits,
his occupation, and his social milieu, but also his purposes, the ends
which he consciously seeks and which are the meaning of his actions to
him. It is to know his mind. But a mind, being unique, can never be
absolutely known. Even if it were completely revealed in behaviour,
conversation, and writing, and if all the occasions that have served to
form it were discovered, one could never be certain to capture a man’s
understanding of his words, or his interpretation of his attitude and
actions.
Behaviourists are therefore right in excluding consciousness, purpose,
and mind from psychology. These are inaccessible to science: first,
because they can never be precisely seized; and second, because they
introduce an indefinite number of objects which preclude a limited and
stable environment. Mind can reflect upon all objects of experience,
and these in turn can become objectives of action. So soon as this
happens the exact control which experimental science demands is
prevented and the progress of psychology is blocked. It thus seems
impossible for psychology to deal with the most interesting aspect
of human behaviour, those where action is guided and dominated by
thought and is not blindly reflexive. To avoid this limitation of
psychology certain behaviourists, in the name of what they conceive
to be mechanism, have denied the efficacy of purpose and mind
altogether. According to the argument, consciousness, purpose, and
mind are waste products, attendant upon natural processes, like sparks
from a locomotive. Or they are like the decorations on illuminated
manuscripts, illustrating the text, and quite superfluous. Otherwise
they would be forces, inexplicably interfering with natural processes.
These arguments fail by misconstruing the notion of purpose, which is
not a force but an end. Purpose does not direct action but _is_ the
direction which action takes. It is the rational explication of the
objects of our desires and wishes. The end has no initial power, but,
once thought has discerned it as the true object of our desires and
they have attached themselves to it, as a lover to his mistress, so
that satisfaction cannot be found elsewhere, then the end acquires a
deputed power which it may never surrender. Since purpose defines the
objects of desire which thereby become objectives of action, it is a
determining factor of human behaviour, and the so-called mechanistic
arguments against it are invalid. Yet, since science deals with
material and efficient causes only, psychologists are compelled to
disregard formal and final causes, purposes, and ends.
II
The goal of ethics, on the other hand, is to discover the most
organised system of ends, of goods, which a rational life can realise.
This goal of ethics can never be fully achieved, for so long as man
acts and reflects he may pursue and conceive novel ends. But though
the most elaborate system of ethics is in origin an expression of
personal preferences, it is not therefore arbitrary and unjustifiable
by reason. My values have their roots in my nature. I can exhibit
them, demonstrate that they are mutually consistent and do not defeat
the interests which underlie them. Furthermore I can declare that if
any one honestly questioned his heart he might find that my values
represented it. It is not to psychology, then, that one must turn for
knowledge of human goods. For psychology, although it may analyse the
efficient causes of desire, cannot estimate the value of its objects,
of the ideal form of a rational life. If psychologists talk of a normal
organism, they mean one whose desires are adjusted to its environment,
the one most likely to survive. If they speak of superior organisms
and civilisation, they mean increased ability for adjustment to a more
complex environment. Thus though psychologists speak of normal and
civilised they are unable either to define or to evaluate them.
Knowledge of human goods is furnished by philosophers, when they
are frank and speak for themselves; by the founders of religions,
the saints, and the mystics; by the poets, and chiefly, as Socrates
knew, by knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge, though it may first
look back upon the behaviour studied by psychology, moves in the
opposite direction toward the objects sought. These it endeavours to
comprehend, to purge of contradictions, to regard intently _sub specie
mortalitatis_. From the vantage point of death one becomes a spectator
of human life. Thought acquires the prestige of impersonality, without
the sacrifice of its warm interest in life. The point of view of death
differs from seeing things _sub specie æternitatis_ both in essence
and in purpose. It does not abolish time or elevate mind to the
contemplation of a necessary order, which is the function of seeing
things _sub specie æternitatis_, although consideration of death (as in
the Phædo) may do this. It enables one to regard life in its totality
and, without projecting it against the background of nature, to
estimate each partial aim in the perspective of all others, and thus to
distinguish the objects one truly desires.
The effort to detach oneself from the present and to incorporate it
with the past and future in a satisfactory whole, which psychology
does not attempt, is what makes action ethical. In the unique self the
past exists in memory, which is one’s personal tradition. Thus memory,
besides being the mother of the muses, is the mother of ethics and
of rational action. It enables us to confront our present condition,
its projects, hopes, and fears, with the past, and by comparison
to evaluate the present action. It enables us to utilise the whole
of our experience in the active organisation of our life and thus
to attain a continuity of being. Consequently a succession of full
moments does not, as Pater thought, constitute a full life. For each
of those separate selves which a past moment represented and which
the subsequent one renounced lives in memory to advance its claim to
existence against the present; and only similar circumstances are
needed, a chance odour, or gesture, or phrase, to revive it, and make
one feel the desolation of its loss. These intermittances of the heart,
as Proust calls them, are dependent on the infinite passive occasions
of sensation, and since they never represented an ideal actively
striven for, no analysis is able to penetrate to an underlying unity.
On the other hand the consequence of dispossessing oneself of the past
in order to live in the moment is a reduction of the personality to
indecision and apathy. Besides, the past preserved in memory and the
future that we anticipate enrich the present and give it its fulness
of being, as a musical phrase has more significance in a symphony than
when played in isolation.
As one interrogates the present, with its What shall I do? What shall
I be? it expands to absorb the relevant testimony that relates it to
the past and to the future. Ordinarily the present includes a fairly
definite content, some concrete situation and prospect, often trivial,
as a dinner to be ordered. Choice when it is not automatic can easily
review the relevant factors; one’s favourite dishes, the season of
the year; possible illness on the morrow. At other times the relevant
relations are endless, particularly when an irrevocable choice forces
us to discriminate among all the elements of our being: love, honour,
country, and religion each claiming our allegiance. The infinite
variety of situations that may arise and the impossibility of relating
them to a definite past and a definite future are responsible for the
differences of ethical systems. A philosopher’s conception of the
typical situation will define his problems and dictate the general
terms of his solution. Buddha saw sorrow and suffering as the main
portion of human existence. His endeavour, therefore, was to emancipate
mankind from them. Aristotle started with man’s desire for happiness.
Therefore he analysed the actions of men, the pursuit of wealth, of
honour, and of knowledge to see which conformed most with the essential
nature of man. Amiel’s situation was intensely personal, but he stated
his problem in universal terms. Amiel recognised from his youth the
necessity of an organising purpose and a continuous effort. His culture
and sympathies, however, extended to all human actions; to limit his
life to one of the manifold beings he felt contained within himself
seemed a violation of the ideal.
Now what is the context, the appropriate situation and problem, from
which ethics should start? Is it some general aspect of life common
to all people, like sorrow or suffering, or the generic nature of
man, or the attempt to discover an organising purpose? Or is it our
immediate context, the world to which our traditions, conduct, desires,
and ambitions have engaged us? It is this world that confronts us
daily. Our actions in it are the theme of the novel, the drama, and
the epic, which are an almost inexhaustible field for ethical study.
Each work is a representation of an action, and in proportion as the
writer concentrates his imagination on the situation before him, on his
_donnée_, and reveals its possibilities, the action will illustrate
some ideal. Literature always retains the concrete immediacy of life,
the movement of an action never being from a situation to a principle.
But all the comprehensiveness of a principle, the innumerable
unsuspected relations which it opens when once intuition has leapt the
gap between a formula and the fact it covers is implied by an action
at its close. The characters are still flesh and blood, but as they
finally define themselves their situation includes all their relevant
past and all that is significant in their future, so that they become
transparent, and the whole moral world which they represent shines
clearly through them. Hence it is possible that a profound ethics and a
great work of art may introduce us to the same moral world, so that the
orientation of our being, emotional and intellectual, after reading the
_Ethics_ of Spinoza and _The Wings of the Dove_ say, will be identical.
If ethics is to be persuasive and reasonable it must be founded on the
most complete experience possible. The context from which it arises,
as in life and literature, should be rich and concrete. The defect of
most ethical systems is that they quit life too abruptly. Instead
of studying the complex conditions which underlie any achieved good,
as psychology is contented to do, philosophers ignore them, except
in their generality, and so attain a factitious unity. Consequently
rationalistic philosophers invert the proper procedure of thought.
They start from the typical, the general, and the rational, whereas
these are the ultimate fruits of reflection. When an ethics, however,
repudiates the purpose of rationalism as well as its method, it severs
itself from all connection with the good. If it speaks of goods and
ideals, it speaks of them only provisionally and instrumentally. Its
excessive preoccupation with the conditions marks the return of ethics
to that immersion in the present from which it initially arose.
Humanism differs from other ethical systems by its data and by its
method. Its data are each individual in his context; his inherited
values, his body, his capabilities, and the relations formed by them.
It is the task of each individual to preserve himself in the world,
and to establish a continuity of being. The essence of humanism is the
refusal to allow any sudden break of development, any shift of basis
that arbitrarily repudiates one’s past, such as breaking one’s word.
Its method is to survey life in the light of death. By this means one’s
personal situation can be enlarged by history, and by the contemplation
of the ideals which men pursue. The more vivid the conception of
an ideal society and a rational life within it, so long as it does
not weaken one’s personal reality, the more likely is life to yield
happiness.
Psychology and ethics deal with the same subject matter, human
behaviour, but they regard it from opposite points of view. Psychology
regards it externally as a physical phenomenon having already taken
place in time. Like any other science psychology tries to correlate
its diverse data and to reduce them to the simplest elements possible.
But since psychology requires that the organisms which it studies
should be essentially the same and that the environment to which they
react should be stable and limited, it cannot deal with the behaviour
dominated by mind. For mind is unique and its possible objects are
infinite. Its language is that of meaning, purpose, end. The effort of
a moral individual is to know what he wants, to know his mind. Hence
ethics regards human behaviour internally and as directed towards the
future. The goal of ethics is the satisfactory synthesis of the unique
perspectives of different minds. It approximates this synthesis by
studying the dialectic of desire, the logical implications of each
purpose in relation to all other objects. In this way ethics will
describe ideally how an individual may harmonise with himself and with
society, which psychology can never do, and thus point the way to
happiness.
_The Well of Discipline_
SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS
The lapidary precedes the historian, and the sound of the mallet is
heard in the land chipping _Hic Jacet_ on the monuments which humanism
has erected, with an epitaph which runs blithely thus:
“Humanism enjoyed four hundred years of prosperity in the later
world and then gave way to Modernism. From Mid-Fifteenth to
Mid-Nineteenth Century, Humanism traced the patterns of the
Occident. Then, with a dramatic flourish comparable to that of the
Renaissance, a new pattern was superimposed on the palimpsest of
the West, based on the concepts and methods of Natural Science.”
Meantime, while the historian waits for a deeper perspective, I am
writing in the belief that there is more vitality in humanism than
the lapidaries have given it credit for. Humanity, at all events, is
perennial, and men are not likely to forget for long that science is
not ineluctable nature itself, but only human knowledge, and that all
knowledge, even knowledge of nature, is pursued at will for whatever
it is worth to them in their own esteem--that behind the pursuit of
natural science lies the authority of the evaluating mind.
The human worth of the sciences, I ardently echo, is beyond compare.
They have, it is true, played a sardonic trick on their pursuers,
and have seemed for the moment honestly to nullify any significant
worth in human existence. But men may still recollect that it is they
themselves who have made the nullifying discovery. They are worth at
least what that discovery implies--an intelligence, a power to think
and judge, and an impulse to act selectively on the basis of a sense
of values--or why have they pursued the sciences at all? With these
resources to start with, and science in their scrip, they may also have
the humour to see that there remains to them, as of old, the eternal
task of making the best of it--the very task to which science itself is
a contribution. When this perception shall have grown lively enough,
humanism will again come into its own.
Granted a will to return to humanism, however, the return itself will
not be simple. Something, we shall find, has been lost in the meantime.
Value and significance are not handed to us on a platter; they are
themselves products of thought. If life, then, has seemed to be emptied
of them by the findings of natural science, it is equally possible
to suppose that this bathos is due to a diluted capacity for thought
in precisely the field of thought where value and significance are
conceived.
This is the possibility that I have set out to examine. The broad
hint of it lies on the surface. If discipline of the mind has any
virtue--and modernism itself with its austere regimen is its current
champion--that virtue has been lifted from the field of thought where
human values are explicitly involved, to a field of thought from which
they are explicitly banned. By every calculation, therefore, the minds
thus affected should have lost something of their capacity to think in
the undisciplined area, and should have lost something of their powers
to conceive or discover the values that, under happier auspices, give
life its significance.
I
In imagination we dramatise the Renaissance as a sweeping revolution.
Whether humanists or modernists, we look upon it as a beginning,
or a resumption, at all events as the turning-point from which we
are the continuators in a straight line. Historians of philosophy,
of letters, of politics, of science all concur. More impressively
still the men of the Renaissance themselves were quite conscious of
the change--Bessarion, Aldus, Erasmus, da Vinci, Galileo, Bruno, to
take names at random. The shift of curiosity from the divine to the
secular, and the responsive shift of discipline from scholasticism to
humanism opened out new vistas to the voyaging mind. It would be hard
to exaggerate the almost theatric reversals which the times witnessed
and welcomed.
Sweeping as it was, however, the revolution of the Renaissance was
less radical than that of the second half of the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the latter the changes wrought by the Renaissance were
on the level of explicit ideas. The essential stuff of thought was
unchanged. New ideas were astir, but the elements of which they were
built were the old elements. Theology gave way to humanism; God as
the centre gave way to man as the centre. But after all, God had been
conceived as a father and man as a child of God, and, God or man,
their psychology was the same. The very literature which had laid the
premisses of mediæval thought--the Bible--permeated the consciousness
of the humanistic period yet more deeply.
The shift of discipline from sacred to profane letters, as a
consequence, made no profound break in the consciousness itself.
The major impulses of the two periods blended easily and naturally.
The religious impulse of the Middle Ages lent itself triumphantly
to literary expression; there was the _Divine Comedy_. The literary
impulse of the Renaissance lent itself no less triumphantly to
religious themes; there was _Paradise Lost_. Natural science, indeed,
began its modern course under the impulse of the Renaissance. Still,
from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the common
discipline of the West was humanistic, natural science did not
profoundly alter the minds of men. It was an incident, a special play
of curiosity and thought on the part of men whose minds were formed and
informed in the medium of humane letters. Even Doctor Johnson had his
chemical apparatus.
Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century did the common
discipline of letters begin to give way. Up to that time, therefore,
there had been a basic continuity in the cultivated consciousness of
the West, not only from the Middle Ages but from high antiquity itself.
For the Renaissance was avowedly a resumption of the broken threads
of ancient thought. And its humanism, however loosely it spliced the
break, was evidence that here too the essential elements of its reason
were the same. What so intoxicated the Renaissance mind was the very
spontaneity of its grasp of ancient ideas. And this affinity has been
the mark of humanism ever since.
Now continuity is not necessarily a virtue. Nothing, alas, is so
persistent as error and evil. One aspect of the shift to modernism,
however, seems to me itself an evil, promising persistence--a rupture
at the basis of reason. Modernism, indeed, also had its dramatic
confrontations, its moments of intense self-consciousness. New
conceptions came into tragic conflict with old, yielding many a Robert
Elsmere, and many a family cleavage like that between the elder and the
younger Gosse. Such conflicts are disconcerting and painful, and for a
generation or two terribly impressive. It is not to such overt changes,
however, that I refer. They belong to the normal life of the mind.
It is the very function of intellect to incur and mediate them. One
is inclined to bid the intellect be a man and face the frank hazards
of the life of reason. I refer rather to a change, not in ideas, but
prior to ideas, among the ultimate premisses of thought, in the
discipline by which the powers of the mind and the fortunes of ideas
are themselves in a large measure disposed. And this change, it seems
to me, has proved a scotching of the goose that lays the golden egg.
II
Where is the bottom of the well into which discipline--vaunted so
highly by both humanist and modernist--is poured? Discipline, as
distinguished from any guise of propaganda, is a delicate affair. Its
concern is not for the specific ideas with which perforce it must do
its deed, and which it pours into the depths in an unremitting stream.
Its subtle task is to enrich and enhance the powers of thought and yet
leave them free--free to think, and free to judge even the ideas by
which they are enriched.
The bottom lies deeper, therefore, than the level at which the Huxleys,
the Spencers, the Eliots placed the controversy--the relative merits
of two sorts of knowledge, of Homer and Sophocles, of Plato’s Ideas
and Cæsar’s battles, of _Jerusalem Recovered_ and _Paradise Lost_,
as against the constitution of matter and the laws of nature. These
relative merits are themselves matters of judgment, as the controversy
witnesses. And it is precisely the quality of such judgment that is
momentously at stake.
Of course the Hellenist must know his Greek and the astronomer his
physics. They are specialists, and the question is not of them.
It is a question of that common humanity of which Hellenist and
astronomer, poet and chemist, man of leisure and man of affairs are
alike responsible members. As between humanist and modernist a sort of
official decision has already been rendered, and the common discipline,
together with the faith that animates it, has gone over to the
sciences. Is it ill-humoured to point out that the decision itself has
been arrived at and progressively confirmed in that field of judgment
from which discipline has been progressively withdrawn? At all events,
it is toward that deeper level that I am delving, to get at the roots
of that common humanity.
The Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man is a biological way
of dealing with a reflection old in the tradition of humanism.
From Plato down, curiosity has toyed with theories of the origin
of language. Language is patently artificial, a device, a product
of human ingenuity. That a child is born without speech might mean
nothing, since there are instincts that emerge only in the course of
development. But language differs from language; every term in every
language is arbitrary; the child, whatever his blood, picks up the
speech of his community; individuals differ in the extent and character
of their deliberate acquisition. All these considerations point to its
artificiality. One speaks, indeed, before one’s mind is mature enough
to reflect upon the accomplishment. But that is the very point, as will
appear in a moment.
Whatever the theory, the origin of speech implies ancestors before
speech. And those ancestors--is it fantastic to identify them, in
a slightly modified version of our evolutionary history, with the
prehuman race of the Darwinian rendering? We should not, I think, have
called them men. For bound up with language is all that we think of
as human--the power of communication, the fixation and tradition of
thought, the comparison and criticism of ideas, co-operation on the
basis of common principles, all history and philosophy, all literature
and science, the very process of reason itself prior to its expression.
I say reason, not intelligence. Intelligence itself--a primary
mystery--is scarcely the monopoly of men. The cat here on the hearth
has a share of it, and the mouse of which she is apparently dreaming.
It is not intelligence that distinguishes the human species sweepingly
from the brute, but a particular deployment of it, a way of using it or
managing it, that we call _reason_.
To linger in imagination over this moment of evolution is to linger
over a transition from the dumb fluidity of animal consciousness to
its articulation by the use of language. Sheer animal consciousness
may alight, perhaps, upon any imaginable concept. Its rational defect
is its inability to return after departure to the same spot. Who by
taking pains could return again to precisely the number 91 but for the
articulating, identifying, stabilising symbol? The rational use of the
native intelligence thus hangs upon an ability to identify particles of
consciousness arbitrarily shaped, to quit them, and then to return. And
speech serves this end; so far as it is carried it precipitates fluid
consciousness into stable, negotiable blocks for the architectural
structures of thought.
Now it is true that what is original, what is new, what is invented or
discovered by the thinking mind itself emerges, not in the articulate
particles--they are perforce old stuff--but in the perception by the
intelligence of relations between them. This spontaneous perception
of relationships is the play of reason; thought is a sort of creative
miracle.
On the other hand--and this is the point I am driving at--just because
thought is the perception of relationships between particles of old
stuff, the particles themselves condition these perceptions. I see only
such relationships as hold between the particles I happen to possess;
certainly I can see none between such as I do not possess. And those I
have are none of my own creation. They are handed down to me. In this
sense the power of thought the “faculty” of reason, is a _tradition_.
In fancy I may picture a Romulus--abandoned on a hillside and suckled
by a wolf--inventing for himself a system of symbols with which to
articulate his own fluid consciousness, conning them into spontaneity,
and building them into thought. But in reality he would not--he could
not. The actual articulations with which one thinks are not native to
the consciousness. Who of us can count more than a stray one or two of
his own invention, even with the hint and model of a whole armory of
them already in possession? They are, on the contrary, a heritage. And
what one can think is conditioned by that heritage--such items of it as
through hap or care one has previously acquired.
All that I, for instance, can think in the field of chemistry is
sharply limited to what I can construe with the articulate particles in
that area of my consciousness. In my actual experience that area has
been poorly endowed. All that I can think there I could say in a bad
quarter of an hour. And what I can think there is cabined and cribbed
by the special particles I happen to possess.
This analysis, so obviously valid in any special field of thought in
which one is aware of one’s ignorance, holds no less, it seems to me,
for that universal ignorance in which all of us are born. If it does
hold there, it may stand as one version of the hypothesis of human
evolution--rational mind out of animal consciousness, man out of brute.
The change that effected this evolution was not accomplished, however,
once for all in some remote past. The outer device was transmissible,
and hence became a racial characteristic. But the change itself
must still be re-enacted in every growing child. Something of it is
re-enacted in the emergence of every idea in the rational mind. How far
it is carried and how complete the evolution depends upon deliberate
cultivation.
Intelligence is pure gift, the prior condition and animating agent
of all thought. Whether intelligence itself may be increased by
exercise is a matter of faith or doubt, as one chooses. In face of a
primary mystery one can only be humble and dumb. But of that ingenious
artifice, the arbitrary articulation of the consciousness into stable
particles, there can be no doubt. It is a human invention in human
hands. What can be done with these particles by way of thought depends
in a given mind upon their range, the richness of their substance,
their stability, and their clarity. And they can, with care, be
extended, enriched, stabilised, clarified.
That there are larger units, whole structures of thought, with which
discipline may be occupied goes without saying. Not all the heritage
of the civilised mind is deposited in these particles. But the larger
units are themselves built of the smaller, and what any mind makes of
them hangs on its prior possession of the elements of which they are
built, and the quality of those elements. In childhood one may have
read, say, _Gulliver_, or _Through the Looking Glass_, with delight,
and in maturity may still read them with delight. The outer symbols are
the same now as then, but the responsive thoughts are not. In response
to each symbol now there rises richer substance than the mind then
possessed, grounds for relationships which then escaped detection.
The two, indeed--particle and structure--are inseparable in practice.
It is in use that the particles have accumulated their substance
and quality; it is by finding them in use that the mind identifies
and enriches and clarifies them for itself. But it is they, I
think--the ultimate premisses of all thought and the basis of all
understanding--that lie at the bottom of the well into which discipline
is poured.
For in the first place they lie at the deepest level to which
discipline can go. That is something. But by a happy fortuity there,
at the very node between animal consciousness and rational thought,
they occupy a strategic position. Through them the fluid streams of
consciousness, rising from below, are articulated for thought--and
one thinks what he can with the shapes thus formed. And through these
same shapes come the chief enrichments of the consciousness from above.
For in reality what I apprehend of the thoughts of others is not
their thoughts but my own. It is what I build in my own mind with the
particles of my own consciousness called up by the symbols they have
used. They are the determinants, coming and going, and a discipline
that thickens and deepens and clarifies them enhances at one stroke
both the give and the take of the mind, its power to think and its
power to learn.
They lie at a strategic point, moreover, in another and no less
momentous transaction. They not only articulate the individual mind
for thinking; coming from a common tradition they tend, in the measure
in which that tradition is mastered, to articulate disparate minds
alike. Only so can two minds think the same thought. It is here that
mind comes together with mind--or forever fails to come together.
And situated between two realms of freedom--the wild realm of animal
consciousness and the cultivated realm of reason--they alone are
amenable to coercion. Arbitrary agreements, sheer conventions,
subsequent to all native idiosyncrasies and prior to all conflict of
prejudice or opinion, they are open to utter community. And since in
relation to all thinking they are the ultimate premisses, they afford
the unquestioned common grounds imperative for mutual understanding and
community of idea.
Discipline can thus bring its pressures to bear upon them with a clear
conscience, assured that here it can do its essential task without
violating its own principles--cultivate the individual judgment without
infringing upon its freedom, and bring mind into community with mind
without the weakness of assumption or the affront of dogmatism.
Assured, too, that in a sort of beneficent circle community itself
breeds both mind and further community. For given a broad community in
these particles, the common legacy comes the purer to its inheritors;
recurrence of each particle confirms and enriches and clarifies it in
the experience of each mind. In a community without community, on the
other hand, occurrence and recurrence tend rather to lead it astray and
confuse it; and though men talk in common symbols, they build them into
tacit obliquities of mutual incomprehension.
Is it too much to suggest, in passing, that the phenomenon of the
brilliant period, the curious clustering of great names in the
bead-roll of history, may be explained as a moment when by a community
of mind with mind, here at the basis of all thought, a fine individual
clarity and a lively spontaneity of mutual understanding have lifted
the current of ideas to a high level? At all events, by such community
the capacity of the mind both to think and to learn is heightened and
the ardour of thought is stimulated, expression meeting comprehension,
and comprehension quickening the impulse to think.
III
I have gone a long way about and brought up with a conclusion that
on its own showing should be as valid for modernism as for humanism.
That, indeed, is my own sense of it--that here is the organic economy
of thought in whatever field. And in fact, as I have intimated, its
application is likely to be most obvious in the sciences, which we
come upon after the mind is in some measure formed. Each science has a
special articulation and nomenclature outside our normal experience,
without which we can think but meagrely and vaguely in that area. The
part they play there is evident. To these articulate particles it gives
precise definition, at once for the sake of accuracy of calculation
and for the sake of mutual understanding and wide co-operation among
those who pursue it. Incidentally by its technology it escapes the
loose corruptions with which lay usage always threatens a vernacular.
The extraordinary results of the discipline which establishes these
articulations, these precisions, and these communities need no bush.
It is perhaps less obvious that discipline is even more imperative
in that other area which the casual, voluble experience of living
begins to articulate before we are aware, laying the premisses of that
common mind which we tend to take for granted as a native gift. Though
it is not a native gift, no man feels deficient in it, as Descartes
pointed out. What it yields him is life as he knows it; it is his
apprehension of reality. In one sense this trust is his intellectual
virtue. It marks his faith in the judgments of reason--the best reason
he knows. He may be aware of his ignorance in this or that field of
knowledge--know that he knows nothing of astronomy, of Homer, of
plumbing, of torts. But no one knows everything; these ignorances are
comparable to those of other men; by turning his mind to them he could
master them.
By turning his mind! This contrast between _mind_, on the one hand, and
on the other hand specific knowledge to which a _mind_ may be turned,
is the very heart of the conflict between humanist and modernist. To
the modernist, justifiably proud of his special methods, that mind
which comes to him unaware is a casual and amateur affair. As a process
of reason it is the way fools think, and asses, and the cohorts of
stupidity. Well, it is.
To the humanist, however, this liability is precisely its momentous
importance. Here is mind itself by which man becomes human out of
brute, mind in symmetry as it develops by confronting life and carrying
on the adventure. According to its competence it apprehends the scene,
the play, and the players, conceives the significance of the plot,
exercises its judgment, lays its guiding principles, and conducts
its affairs in wisdom or unwisdom, justice or injustice, harmony or
inharmony. That it may be the mind of a fool is always its tragic
possibility.
In shifting the basic common discipline from humane letters to natural
science, then, modernism has, in so far, _abandoned the mind_. I say
this in conscious enjoyment of hyperbole. There remains just so much
of mind as develops in casual experience--that corrupting casual
experience which science so sedulously avoids in its technology. But
the point at issue is one of discipline, the conscious extension of
mental competence beyond the limits of casual experience. Plainly the
discipline of natural science neglects much of the mind as irrelevant.
For natural science is an attempt to picture and understand the
material universe as it still would be if the knower were not in
it--things and their relations to each other. The virtue sought by the
man of science is the ability to ignore what he, by the accident of
his conscious existence, thrusts into the situation. Obviously this
discipline will articulate the consciousness for thought only here
within this field of knowledge--among things and their relations, to
the rigid exclusion of the knower and his affairs.
Humane letters, on the other hand, make no such exclusion. They too
deal with things and their relations. But they include what natural
science ignores--the knower and his responsive evaluation of what
he knows. Literature looks out from the common centre at which the
experience of life itself places us. It is an imaginative, reflective
extension of that experience. And it does directly what experience
itself does only indirectly if at all, for being articulate or
nothing--symbol and meaning forever hand in glove--it specifically
articulates the reader’s mind, enriching and clarifying the premisses
of consciousness with which in turn that mind thinks in the field of
common human responsibility. Here is the telling difference between the
literate and the empiric mind--not in intelligence, not in specific
knowledge, but in the substance and quality of the premisses of thought.
Literature uses the unprecise vernacular, it is true; but that is its
virtue. For the vernacular, in contrast with any and all technologies,
is the idiom of the mind itself, its fundamental humanising tradition.
It is the essential historic feat of any civilisation, not so much
perhaps to have conceived its guiding ideas--ideas change--as, in
conceiving them, to have slowly evolved the articulate elements by
which its heritors may conceive their own. Nature cares nothing for
them or for what is made of them. They are none of hers. We come by
them only through familiar contact with the tradition which has shaped
and accumulated them.
Here, then, is the great human task--now for the first time in the
history of the West abandoned to the mercies of casual experience. Man
is a social being in more than his habits and his institutions. His
humanity itself hangs on his sociability. Deprive him of his social
legacy of articulations and he is once again the sub-human animal.
It was the essence of humanism as a discipline that it attempted,
not to inculcate a doctrine, but to carry on and on this ultimate
humanising process. And in this it served three ends, distinct but
interdependent--mind, community, and the tradition on which both mind
and community depend.
IV
From Plato to Irving Babbitt humanists have been occupied with
the idea of leadership, since men are social beings, unhappy and
self-destructive in mutual hostility, happiest and greatest when
co-operating in community in the wisest available ideas. Whose ideas?
Plato proposed the leadership of philosophers. But he himself did all
that a philosopher can do. He was of the greatest; in one of the high
masterpieces of human thought he proposed a scheme for the salvation
of Greece--and while he wrote and Athens read, Greek civilisation
declined. Something had departed that but an age before had made of
Athens the supreme exemplar of what human existence may come to at its
best, in zest of life and ardour of co-operation, in brilliance and
profundity of thought, something that had created a society more lovely
than any other in recorded history, and produced a literature and a
full free current of ideas that are still the model and despair of all
our aspirations.
May this loss have been loss of disciplined community at the basis of
all thought? Each man thinks not what he will but what he can with
the articulate particles of his consciousness. Only by community here
can one mind think the same thoughts as another. In such community
minds will hold their common ideas with heightened ardour, as in
friendship a common thought rises to new vitality by being shared in
utter comprehension. It was not an accident that friendship played so
profound a part in Greek life, not an accident that thought and letters
so flourished. For expression had met understanding, and understanding
had enriched the common premisses of thought. One among them, at all
events, made the association.
“Not long afterwards,” says Thucydides, “nearly the whole Hellenic
world was in commotion. When trouble had once begun in the cities,
those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and
further.... _The meanings of words had no longer the same relations to
things_....” And he goes on to detail wherein the confused meanings
of terms unsettled the mutual comprehension upon which the harmony of
civilised life depends.
As for us, we are in something of a like predicament. The most striking
aspect of contemporary life is the contrast between the fruitfulness
of the scientific world, its vitality, its harmony, its world-wide
co-operation, and our frankly acknowledged moral bankruptcy--vigour
and fecundity in the area to which discipline has been shifted,
and futility and chaos in the area from which discipline has been
withdrawn. It is not that men have ceased to be concerned with moral
choice. So long as they pursue on reflection what seems to be good, so
long are they exercising their moral nature. Never, I dare say, has
there been a wilder play of reflection on what seems to be good.
If we are suffering a moral chaos it is not from the abandonment of
morals but from a helpless discrepancy, an incapacity to think the same
thoughts. Given another Plato, our only chance of accord under his
leadership would be such community with him and with each other in the
articulate elements of his utterance as would evoke the same living
thoughts in our various minds.
The task of creating such community is a subtle one, immeasurably more
difficult than the corresponding task of modernism. The particles of
consciousness with which we think here are quick with feeling--with
sentiment, impulse, passion, and desire, drawn in each individual from
his own native depths. They are neither such sheer conventions as the
units of measure that make up the syntax of scientific thought, nor
objective and tangible like the data of nature with which science
deals. They are the dynamic forces of life itself, spontaneous and
imperious, and they impel us whether or no. Whether they are to drive
us in anarchy or in harmony, however, depends upon our ability so to
channelise them, so to articulate and identify them for thought, as to
bring us into mutual understanding of those ideas in which they play a
part. The first service of the humanistic discipline was that it put
the individual mind into intimate contact with the tradition of humane
letters in which were embodied and shaped the articulate elements
of such ideas. It was the second and no less significant service of
this discipline that in clinging sedulously to the great tradition
of that literature it tended to give to all minds thus imbued _the
same_ elements filled with _the same_ substance, and so put mind into
community with mind. In abandoning the common discipline of this area
of the consciousness modernism has not only done something to dilute
our powers of thought there, but has left us, mind and mind, out of
community and in a moral confusion that lies, not in the open conflict
of ideas, but in tacit disparities of idea that never meet.
Modernism reaches its ultimate goal in a knowledge of nature. But
nature has no need of our knowledge. It is _we_ who need it, for our
own ends. In the measure in which, for the conception of those ends, we
lose our powers of thought, so precariously wrought in the long travail
of the past, and so dependent upon unremitting reconquest, we shall in
fact have killed the goose that lays the golden egg.
_Courage and Education_[74]
RICHARD LINDLEY BROWN
Diverse and variegated as the texture of our contemporary life and
literature is, a great part of it may be shown to have a fundamental
unity. That unity lies in a certain fear and hopelessness,--occasioned
by a mechanistic philosophy and ultimately owing, I think, to the
misapplied and ill-digested implications of a popular scientific
education. One meets everywhere some attempt to analyse and explain
the life and destiny of man solely on the basis of his physique or
environment, or on some other basis equally uncoloured by human
imagination and idealisation. This attitude is not universal with us,
nor is it even general, but it contains almost all that is original
with us, and if we consider what is original as also characteristic, we
can only postulate that the characteristic feature in our contemporary
literature is the interpretation of life as a phase of merely
animalistic existence.
Now, this admission that man in no way transcends the limits of purely
physical life is an act of cowardice to which no previous generation
has ever so thoroughly committed itself. This admission is directly
contrary to the general spirit of Ancient philosophy, impossible to
the serenity of the Middle Ages, repugnant to the exuberance of the
Renaissance, unnatural to the Romanticism, however defined, of the
early nineteenth century. And even during the faltering generations
just preceding our own, there were still eloquent humanists able to
show that whatever man’s circumstances may be, and whatever his origin
may have been, man was yet able to form for himself an intellectual
and spiritual life and destiny independent of origin and circumstance.
This courage of the past--this self-confidence of the past by which it
was enabled to broaden the scope of its life and pass on to us a social
and imaginative heritage by which every situation and relationship of
our lives is rendered more beautiful--was not the result of accident.
It was the result of long and untiring efforts in self-cultivation, and
the records of these efforts are to be found in the great literatures
which not only recorded, but inspired and motivated them. In those
times the staple of education was the study of literature; and, for my
present purposes, the important features of this study were, that it
was thorough and exact, that it neglected no labour which might aid in
the central purpose, and that, in requiring a certain common background
in all students, it was eminently a social and even international thing.
To attain the same degree of courage and self-confidence, it would
be necessary to us to make the same effort of self-cultivation. The
quality of contemporary literature suggests that we are not exerting
that effort; manners and excesses and failures in contemporary life
equally suggest that we are not. And if we examine the habitual methods
of contemporary teachers of literature, we find so many differences
between these methods and those of the past that it is plain that our
educators have all but lost sight of their central objects.
As early as 1882, in _Literature and Science_, Matthew Arnold set
forth a rather singular prophecy, describing with great exactness much
of our present situation. “As with Greek,” he said, “so with letters
generally: they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more
rationally, but they will not lose their place. What will happen
will rather be that there will be crowded into education other
matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period of
unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but letters will not in
the end lose their leading place.”
It is essential to consider how far this prophecy has been realised,
for it penetrates the very heart of our problem; it suggests the entire
lack of a central emphasis which characterises even the literary
education of our day. American education might very well be said to
be passing through a period of unsettlement and confusion and false
tendency, but by no manner of means might it be said that in American
education letters had obtained or regained their leading place.
Although the colleges swarm with students of literature, the greater
part of these students have a more accurate knowledge of the problems
of the natural sciences or of economics than they have of the problems
and methods of literary study. As a plain matter of fact, a great many
undergraduates choose to specialise in literature, and particularly
in English literature, because they believe it a study easier than
any other. And through a smattering of all the ologies which has been
their education from early childhood, they interpret and condemn great
masterpieces of which they have never learned the true significance,
since they have never confronted soberly the old traditions that
illuminate and sustain those masterpieces. It is largely because our
education deals seriously with almost every subject except literature,
that literature has lost its leading place; and it is because
literature has lost its leading place that education has lost much
of its inspiring power, and our contemporary literary innovators are
characterised to such a degree by fear and hopelessness.
It is not unnatural, however, that popular opinion, which to-day
influences even the teaching of literature, should consider scientific
education so important, for the public sees its leaders in every
field profoundly influenced by science. The leader of our political
organisation, like most of our leaders, happens to be a scientist; most
of our philosophers are scientists, and our magazines deal monthly
with the concessions that our religious leaders are making to the new
implications of science. It is not unnatural that science should be
popularly considered an important study and the study of literature
the recreation of an idle day. And it follows just as naturally that
swarms of undergraduate students should have imposed upon the teaching
of literature much of the dilettantism which this popular view suggests
is inherent in it. The typical student of literature--of English
literature, for example--may be known by four characteristics,--a
fear of Spenser, a dislike of Milton, a hatred of Wordsworth, and
a suppressed desire to write a musical comedy. This is the type of
student that must be taught, and it easily follows that the teaching
of him should come to lack the thoroughness and exactness, the desire
to master ancillary subjects, and the common background, which I have
enumerated above as having once been the ideals of literary study.
The place of these ideals is taken by a dilettantism which displays
itself in two forms,--in individualism and in sciolism. The first,
a shallow type of individualism, is directed by the theory that a
student’s peculiar tastes are the ultimate criteria by which he
should make his judgments, and that he must be seduced into a liking
for literature by the application of whatever literary candy pleases
his palate. The thought that a man should be somewhat adapted to his
reading, and not his reading to him, is altogether alien to this
theory, and the existence of common social ideals, which, if they are
not present in the student, should be developed, is not suspected by
its propounders.
It is to the adoption of this principle by many secondary-school
teachers that we owe the presence in our colleges of the campus
radicals who curse their fates and the restraints prohibiting them
from living their own lives. The ordinary progress of students guided
by such principles is to begin easily with something on the level,
say, of Kipling, and gradually to work up to the high seriousness of
the poetry of Oscar Wilde. The popularity and influence of the sort
of contemporary literature which I have mentioned may be very well
explained, I think, by the existence of this view in the minds of many
of our educators.
The sciolism which is the second form of our literary dilettantism,--a
shallowness which investigates only the superficialities of things,
which delights in accepted definitions and phrases,--is largely
involved in the manner in which our times have forsaken the study of
the classics, as well as of the other literatures and other subjects
without which the study of no one literature can be complete. No
teacher of science would admit to his classes students unversed in
mathematics; he would say that science without some mathematical
knowledge was an impossibility. Now, a knowledge of the literature and
customs of classical antiquity is just as necessary to the student of
a modern literature as a mathematical knowledge is to the student of
science. The teacher of literature, however, who demanded from his
students this indispensable knowledge, would soon lecture to empty
halls. Popular opinion, as reflected by those who are to be taught, is
altogether on the side of those “other matters, far too many,” which
have been crowded into education.
The teacher of literature may well turn out, in the end, to be the sole
means by which society and literature can be raised from their present
depression, and then only provided his influence be stricter and more
humane. For a materialistic epoch such as ours, the only refuge and
the only basis for further progress is in the idealistic humanity of
the past; but the search of the past must not be such a frail and
self-indulgent one as condemns before it understands. Whether we have
outworn the ideals of history or whether they were projected into a
realm of life beyond our present power of realisation, in either case
they reflect the tendency directing all human achievement,--a tendency
to rise to a plane uncircumscribed by the limits of physical existence.
Accordingly, the teacher of any branch of our cultural heritage has
within his hands the reins of destiny; slackly and half-heartedly he
may lose them from his grasp, or by firmly holding them he may guide
the future toward a new triumph of the human spirit. There is no sound
where there are no ears, nor without the development of the inner
mind and segregated human life, of which our literature has been both
the motivation and the record, could there again be true community or
beauty in the world.
FOOTNOTES
[74] A Senior paper read at Bowdoin College, Commencement,
1929.--Editor.
_A List of Books Published Since 1900_
Note--The following list contains most of the recent books that are
humanistic in a strict sense, together with a few books humanistic
in a sense more general and indefinite. Magazine articles have been
excluded; but illuminating articles dealing with various aspects of
humanism may be found in the 1928 and 1929 volumes of _The Forum_, _The
Bookman_, _The Hound and Horn_, _The Criterion_, and _The Nineteenth
Century and After_. Helpful recent critiques of the work of Irving
Babbitt and Paul Elmer More are those by a young English critic, Philip
S. Richards, in _The Nineteenth Century and After_ for April, 1928,
May, 1928, and April, 1929, and an article on “Mr. More and the Gentle
Reader” by G. R. Elliott in _The Bookman_ for April, 1929.
Santayana, George. Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. 1900.
Brownell, W. C. French Art, Revised ed. 1901.
---- Victorian Prose Masters. 1901.
More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, First Series. 1904.
Chesterton, G. K. Heretics. 1905.
Cox, Kenyon. Old Masters and New. 1905.
More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, Second Series. 1905.
---- Shelburne Essays, Third Series. 1905.
Woodberry, George Edward. The Torch: Eight Lectures on Race Power in
Literature. 1905.
More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, Fourth Series. 1906.
Cox, Kenyon. Painters and Sculptors. 1907.
Lasserre, Pierre. Le Romantisme français. 1907.
Babbitt, Irving. Literature and the American College: Essays in Defence
of the Humanities. 1908.
Frye, P. H. Literary Reviews and Criticisms. 1908.
More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, Fifth Series. 1908.
Seillière, E. Le Mal romantique. 1908.
Brownell, W. C. American Prose Masters. 1909.
Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. 1909.
More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, Sixth Series. 1909.
Babbitt, Irving. The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the
Arts. 1910.
More, Paul Elmer. Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series. 1910.
Cox, Kenyon. The Classic Point of View: Six Lectures on Painting. 1911.
Babbitt, Irving. The Masters of Modern French Criticism. 1912.
More, Paul Elmer. The Drift of Romanticism (Shelburne Essays, Eighth
Series). 1913.
Brownell, W. C. Criticism. 1914.
Cox, Kenyon. Artist and Public. 1914.
More, Louis Trenchard. The Limitations of Science. 1915.
More, Paul Elmer. Aristocracy and Justice (Shelburne Essays, Ninth
Series). 1915.
Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. Estimates in Art. 1916.
Brownell, W. C. Standards. 1917.
More, Paul Elmer. Platonism (The Greek Tradition, Introduction). 1917,
1927.
Sherman, Stuart P. Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him. 1917.
---- On Contemporary Literature. 1917.
Shorey, Paul. The Assault on Humanism. 1917.
Adams, George Plimpton. Idealism and the Modern Age. 1919.
Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and Romanticism. 1919.
Gass, Sherlock Bronson. A Lover of the Chair. 1919.
More, Paul Elmer. With the Wits (Shelburne Essays, Tenth Series). 1919.
Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920,
1928.
Inge, W. R. The Idea of Progress. 1920.
Patrick, G. T. W. The Psychology of Social Reconstruction. 1920.
Lasserre, Pierre. Cinquante Ans de Pensée française. 1921.
More, Paul Elmer. A New England Group and Others (Shelburne Essays,
Eleventh Series). 1921.
---- The Religion of Plato (The Greek Tradition, Vol. I). 1921.
Canby, Henry S. Definitions. 1922.
Frye, P. H. Romance and Tragedy. 1922.
Shafer, Robert. Progress and Science: Essays in Criticism. 1922.
Foerster, Norman. Nature in American Literature: Studies in the Modern
View of Nature. 1923.
Houston, Percy H. Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth Century
Humanism. 1923.
Massis, Henri. Jugements I. 1923.
Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. A History of Italian Painting. 1923.
More, Paul Elmer. Hellenistic Philosophies (The Greek Tradition, Vol.
II). 1923.
Waterhouse, Francis A. Random Studies in the Romantic Chaos. 1923.
Babbitt, Irving. Democracy and Leadership. 1924.
Brownell, W. C. The Genius of Style. 1924.
Canby, Henry S. Definitions, Second Series. 1924.
Criticism in America. (Essays by Irving Babbitt and others, ed. by J.
E. Spingarn.) 1924.
Eliot, T. S. Homage to John Dryden. 1924.
Hulme, T. E. Speculations (ed. by Herbert Read). 1924.
Massis, Henri. Jugements II. 1924.
More, Paul Elmer. The Christ of the New Testament (The Greek Tradition,
Vol. III). 1924.
Seillière, E. J.-J. Rousseau. 1924.
Gass, Sherlock Bronson. Criers of the Shops. 1925.
More, Louis Trenchard. The Dogma of Evolution. 1925.
Cerf, Barry. Anatole France: The Degeneration of a Great Artist. 1926.
Ferrero, Guglielmo. Words to the Deaf. 1926.
Giese, W. F. Victor Hugo, The Man and the Poet. 1926.
Shafer, Robert. Christianity and Naturalism: Essays in Criticism,
Second Series. 1926.
Brownell, W. C. Democratic Distinction in America. 1927.
Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. The American Spirit in Art (The Pageant of
America, Vol. XII). 1927.
---- Modern Painting. 1927.
More, Paul Elmer. Christ the Word (The Greek Tradition, Vol. IV). 1927.
Munson, Gorham B. Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense.
1927.
Von Hügel, Baron Friedrich. Selected Letters, 1896-1924. 1927.
Babbitt, Irving. French Literature (A. L. A. booklet). 1928.
Benda, Julien. La Trahison des Clercs. 1928. (Trans., The Treason of
the Intellectuals. 1928.)
Eliot, T. S. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. 1928.
Elliott, W. Y. The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. 1928.
Foerster, Norman. American Criticism: A Study in Literary Theory from
Poe to the Present. 1928.
Maritain, Jacques. Three Reformers: Luther--Descartes--Rousseau. 1928.
Mercier, Louis J. A. Le Mouvement humaniste aux États-Unis. 1928.
More, Paul Elmer. The Demon of the Absolute (New Shelburne Essays, Vol.
I). 1928.
Munson, Gorham B. Destinations: A Canvass of American Literature Since
1900. 1928.
Rand, E. K. Founders of the Middle Ages. 1928.
Sherman, Stuart P. Shaping Men and Women: Essays on Literature and
Life. 1928.
Benda, Julien. Belphégor (Trans., Introduction by Irving Babbitt). 1929.
Canby, Henry S. American Estimates. 1929.
Chesterton, G. K. Generally Speaking. 1929.
---- The Thing. 1929.
Elliott, G. R. The Cycle of Modern Poetry: A Series of Essays toward
Clearing our Present Poetic Dilemma. 1929.
Foerster, Norman. The American Scholar: A Study in Litteræ
Inhumaniores. 1929.
Frye, P. H. Visions and Chimeras. 1929.
Munson, Gorham B. Style and Form in American Prose. 1929.
Warren, Austin. Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist. 1929.
Wickham, Harvey. The Impuritans. 1929.
Zeitlin, Jacob, and Woodbridge, Homer. Life and Letters of Stuart P.
Sherman. 2 vols. 1929.
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