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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/78119-0.txt b/78119-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1991f96 --- /dev/null +++ b/78119-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9733 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78119 *** + + + + + 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. + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78119 *** diff --git a/78119-h/78119-h.htm b/78119-h/78119-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4b18b09 --- /dev/null +++ b/78119-h/78119-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,11655 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> + <meta charset="UTF-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no,date=no,address=no,email=no,url=no"> + <title> + Humanism and America | Project Gutenberg + </title> + <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <style> + +body { + margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + +h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { + text-align: center; + clear: both; + margin:1em; +} + +p { + text-indent: 1.5em; + margin-top: .5em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .5em; +} + +p.noindent, .footnote p { + text-indent: 0; +} + +blockquote.hang p { + padding-left: 2em; + text-indent: -2em; +} + +ins { + border-bottom: dotted 1px; text-decoration: none; +} + +hr { + width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: 33.5%; + margin-right: 33.5%; + clear: both; +} + +hr.chap {width: 30%; margin-left: 35%; margin-right: 35%;} + +hr.chap {width: 50%; margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;} +@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} } + +hr.tbpoetry {width: 10%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 90%;} + +div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} +h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} + +table { + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; +} + +table td { padding: 0.25em; } + +.tdl {text-align: left;} +.tdr {text-align: right;} + +.pagenum { + position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: small; + text-align: right; + font-style: normal; + font-weight: normal; + font-variant: normal; + text-indent: 0; +} /* page numbers */ + +blockquote { + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + margin-left: 5%; + margin-right: 5%; +} + +.largeheading {font-size: xx-large;} +.center {text-align: center; text-indent: 0;} + +.right {text-align: right;} + +.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + +.allsmcap {font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;} + +/* Footnotes */ + +.footnote {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;} + +.footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;} + +.fnanchor { + vertical-align: super; + font-size: .8em; + text-decoration: none; +} + +/* Poetry */ +/* uncomment the next line for centered poetry */ +/* .poetry-container {display: flex; justify-content: center;} */ +.poetry-container {text-align: center;} +.poetry {text-align: left; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;} +.poetry .stanza {margin: 1em auto;} +.poetry .verse {text-indent: -3em; padding-left: 3em;} + +/* Poetry indents */ +.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3.0em;} +.poetry .indent2 {text-indent: -2.0em;} +.poetry .indent4 {text-indent: -1.0em;} +.poetry .indent8 {text-indent: 1.0em;} +.poetry .indent10 {text-indent: 2.0em;} +.poetry .indent12 {text-indent: 3.0em;} +.poetry .indent13 {text-indent: 3.5em;} +.poetry .indent14 {text-indent: 4.0em;} +.poetry .indent23 {text-indent: 6.5em;} +.poetry .indent28 {text-indent: 10.0em;} + + </style> +</head> +<body> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78119 ***</div> + + +<h1> +HUMANISM<br> +AND<br> +AMERICA +</h1> + +<p class="center"> +ESSAYS<br> +ON THE OUTLOOK<br> +OF MODERN CIVILISATION<br> +<br> +<br> +<i>Edited by</i><br> +<span style="font-size:x-large">NORMAN FOERSTER</span><br> +<br> +<br> +FARRAR AND RINEHART<br> +INCORPORATED<br> +PUBLISHERS NEW YORK +</p> + +<hr> +<p class="center"> +COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY FARRAR AND RINEHART<br> +PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA<br> +ALL RIGHTS RESERVED +</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[v]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Preface"> + <i class="largeheading">Preface</i> + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>“Life’s a long headache in a noisy street,” sang the poet +Masefield in <i>The Widow in the Bye Street</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[vi]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[vii]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> and in 1908 included in his +book on <i>Literature and the American College</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>Paul Elmer More, after a brief experience as teacher of +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[viii]</span>Sanskrit and Classical literature, entered criticism through +the avenue of journalism, becoming literary editor of the +<i>Independent</i> and the New York <i>Evening Post</i> and editor of +the <i>Nation</i>. Through his relation with contributors to the +<i>Nation</i>, 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 <i>Shelburne +Essays</i>, 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 <i>Masters +of Modern French Criticism</i> and the “Definitions of Dualism” +at the close of the eighth series of <i>Shelburne Essays</i>, +or the introduction to <i>Democracy and Leadership</i> and the +first essay in the <i>New Shelburne Essays</i>, 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 <i>The Greek Tradition</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>In a book recently crowned by the French Academy, <i>Le +Mouvement humaniste aux États-Unis</i>, Louis J. A. Mercier, +professor of French at Harvard, restricts his account to Irving +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[ix]</span>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 <i>French +Traits</i> 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 <i>Nation</i> 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 <i>On +Contemporary Literature</i> 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 <i>Forum</i> and the <i>Bookman</i> +in America, the <i>Criterion</i> (edited by T. S. Eliot) and the +<i>Nineteenth Century and After</i> in England. Whether the +movement will continue to develop, whether it will succumb +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[x]</span>to disunion and vagueness, or be submerged by a narrow +conventionalism of one sort or other, it would be idle to +predict.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xi">[xi]</span>naturistic opponents. Romantics, realists, and sceptics are +daily attacking on four fronts: humanists, it is held, are +academic, un-American, reactionary, and Puritanic.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Humanists are said to be un-American. According to +those who cultivate the nationalist conception, a valid new +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xii">[xii]</span>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 <em>real</em> +American culture could ever spring from our own experience; +it is certain that it could be <em>caused</em> to spring from our +own experience by a happy use of foreign culture.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</span>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 <em>intensity</em> 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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Child’s Garden</i>, 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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xv">[xv]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>America’s Coming-of-Age</i>, +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 <i lang="de">an sich</i> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xvi">[xvi]</span></p> + +<p>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 <i>Forum</i> +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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xvii">[xvii]</span>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</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Scorch’d by a flaming speech on moderation.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>ism</i> 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.</p> + +<p class="right"> + <span class="smcap">Norman Foerster.</span> +</p> + +<p><i>January, 1930.</i></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xviii"></a><a id="Page_xix"></a>[xix]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Contents"> + <i class="largeheading">Contents</i> + </h2> +</div> + +<table> +<tr><td colspan="2" class="tdr" style="font-size:x-small">PAGE</td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">PREFACE</span>: <i>Norman Foerster</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">THE PRETENSIONS OF SCIENCE</span>: <i>Louis Trenchard More</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">HUMANISM: AN ESSAY AT DEFINITION</span>: <i>Irving Babbitt</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">THE HUMILITY OF COMMON SENSE</span>: <i>Paul Elmer More</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">THE PRIDE OF MODERNITY</span>: <i>G. R. Elliott</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">RELIGION WITHOUT HUMANISM</span>: <i>T. S. Eliot</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">THE PLIGHT OF OUR ARTS</span>: <i>Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_113">113</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">THE DILEMMA OF MODERN TRAGEDY</span>: <i>Alan Reynolds Thompson</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY</span>: <i>Robert Shafer</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">PANDORA’S BOX IN AMERICAN FICTION</span>: <i>Harry Hayden Clark</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_170">170</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">DIONYSUS IN DISMAY</span>: <i>Stanley P. Chase</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">OUR CRITICAL SPOKESMEN</span>: <i>Gorham B. Munson</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">BEHAVIOUR AND CONTINUITY</span>: <i>Bernard Bandler II</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">THE WELL OF DISCIPLINE</span>: <i>Sherlock Bronson Gass</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_268">268</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">COURAGE AND EDUCATION</span>: <i>Richard Lindley Brown</i></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td></tr> + <tr><td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">A LIST OF BOOKS</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td></tr> +</table> + + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xx"></a><a id="Page_xxi"></a>[xxi]</span></p> + +<blockquote> +<p><i>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.</i></p> + +<p class="right">—STUART P. SHERMAN: “ON CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p> +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="center" style="font-size:xx-large"> +HUMANISM<br> +AND<br> +AMERICA +</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2"></a><a id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span></p> +<div class="chapter"> + <h2 class="nobreak" id="The_Pretensions_of_Science"> + <i class="largeheading">The Pretensions of Science</i> + <br> + LOUIS TRENCHARD MORE + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I">I</h3> + +<p>Since the time when the Whigs of England fastened the +specific title of <i>Pretender</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>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—<em>he +then defined science as merely organised common sense</em>. +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Exact science, then, is first of all based on the naïve belief +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>fiat</i>, 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Alice Through the +Looking Glass</i> 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.</p> + + +<h3 id="II"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>astrologer to convince him of the futility of identifying mind +and matter.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>Système du Monde</i>, 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 <em>thought and +consciousness</em>.</p> + +<p>The cosmogony of Descartes has long since crumbled to +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="III"> + III +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>modus +operandi</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>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?</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>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 <i>quanta</i>, +or atoms, of energy. Already there have arisen four insuperable +difficulties.</p> + +<p>The hypothesis affirms action without specifying something +to act, unless the word <i>energy</i> is given all the physical +attributes of matter. In which case a <i>quantum</i> 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 <i>quantum</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>by</em> 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 <i>non-sequitur</i> that objects exist only <em>in</em> 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.</p> + +<p>Einstein also began with a critique of Newtonian dynamics +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>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 <em>events</em>. 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span></p> + +<p>A note of uncertainty is beginning to show itself, however, +for thoughtful physicists are seeing the <i>impasse</i> 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 +<em>bound</em> 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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_1_1" href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> The answer to this naïve confession is +simple enough: there never was a <em>bottom</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_1_1" href="#FNanchor_1_1" class="label">[1]</a> “The New Vision of Science,” by Professor P. W. Bridgman, <i>Harper’s +Magazine</i>, 1929.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Humanism_An_Essay_at_Definition"> + <i class="largeheading">Humanism: An Essay at Definition</i> + <br> + IRVING BABBITT + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I_1">I</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>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 <em>only</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_2_2" href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> An important task, indeed, that awaits some properly +qualified scholar, preferably a Chinese, is a comparison +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>of Confucian humanism with occidental humanism as it appears, +for example, in the <i>Ethics</i> 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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_3_3" href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> 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 +(<i>li</i>) 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.</p> + +<p>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_4_4" href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>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,”⁠<a id="FNanchor_5_5" href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> 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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_6_6" href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_7_7" href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> 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.”</p> + + +<h3 id="II_1"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_8_8" href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Buddha, it +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>is true, had his humanistic side: he recommended that one +follow a <i>via media</i> 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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_9_9" href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_10_10" href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p> + +<p>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_11_11" href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>A Preface to +Morals</i>, 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>Religion Worth Having</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>It does not seem possible to supply from the sentimental +or Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement the elements +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_12_12" href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> 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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>affords an avenue of escape from the analogous situation +that confronts the world to-day.</p> + + +<h3 id="III_1"> + III +</h3> + +<p>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_13_13" href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>the free-thinkers (“libertines”) who were hostile to every +form of belief in the supernatural.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent10">“Presume not God to scan;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The proper study of mankind is man”?</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>range of human experience that is subject primarily to the +law of measure.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>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” (<i>Omnia +exeunt in mysterium</i>). 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.</p> + +<p>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 (<i>frein vital</i>). +Failure to exercise this control is the spiritual indolence that +is for both Christian and Buddhist a chief source, if not the +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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,⁠<a id="FNanchor_14_14" href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> 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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>which is actually a living intuition, as a metaphysical abstraction.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="IV"> + IV +</h3> + +<p>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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>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 <em>as far as it goes</em>. 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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,⁠<a id="FNanchor_15_15" href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> 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 <i lang="fr">mélange des +genres</i> that has appeared even in the present age of confusion.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_16_16" href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> 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 +<i>Imitation</i> 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 <i>Imitation</i> is at one here not only with Christ but with +Buddha, the chief source of sanctity in the Far East.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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). +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>Any one who thinks of the series of Goethe’s love affairs +prolonged into the seventies, is scarcely likely to maintain +that his <i lang="de">Entsagung</i> 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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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,⁠<a id="FNanchor_17_17" href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> 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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>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.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p><span class="smcap">Note.</span>—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 <i>Forum</i>, January, 1929, or to his book on <i>Literature and +the American College: Essays in Defence of the Humanities</i> (Houghton +Mifflin Co., 1908). See also Norman Foerster’s recent book, <i>The American +Scholar: A Study in Litteræ Inhumaniores</i> (University of North Carolina +Press, 1929).—Editor.</p> +</blockquote> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_1"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_2_2" href="#FNanchor_2_2" class="label">[2]</a> For an outline of Chinese humanism, see the article by Chang Hsin-Hai +in the <i>Hibbert Journal</i> for April, 1928 (“The Essentials of Confucian +Wisdom”).</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_3_3" href="#FNanchor_3_3" class="label">[3]</a> See <i>The Conduct of Life</i>, translation of the <i>Tsung Yung</i> by Ku Hung +Ming (Wisdom of the East series), p. 55.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_4_4" href="#FNanchor_4_4" class="label">[4]</a> “Unum hoc animal sentit quid sit ordo, quid sit quod deceat, in factis +dictisque qui modus.” <i>De Officiis</i>, Lib. I.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_5_5" href="#FNanchor_5_5" class="label">[5]</a> See <i>Analects</i> (Wisdom of the East series), p. 109.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_6_6" href="#FNanchor_6_6" class="label">[6]</a> “Conclusion” to his volume <i>The Renaissance</i>.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_7_7" href="#FNanchor_7_7" class="label">[7]</a> For Pater’s definition of humanism see the end of his essay on Pico +della Mirandola (<i>The Renaissance</i>).</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_8_8" href="#FNanchor_8_8" class="label">[8]</a> See <i>L’Inde el le Monde</i>, pp. 32, 165.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_9_9" href="#FNanchor_9_9" class="label">[9]</a> See, for example, the symposium entitled <i>Humanist Sermons</i> 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 <i>Literature and the American College</i> (1908).</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_10_10" href="#FNanchor_10_10" class="label">[10]</a> See my book <i>Democracy and Leadership</i>, p. 25.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_11_11" href="#FNanchor_11_11" class="label">[11]</a> For the different meanings that this maxim may have see the last chapter +of my book <i>The Masters of Modern French Criticism</i>.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_12_12" href="#FNanchor_12_12" class="label">[12]</a> See “The Mucker Pose” by James Truslow Adams, <i>Harper’s Magazine</i>, +November, 1928; reprinted in <i>Our Business Civilisation</i> (1929).</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_13_13" href="#FNanchor_13_13" class="label">[13]</a> 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 <i>Founders of the Middle Ages</i>, <i>passim</i>. <i>Cf.</i> also P. E. More’s “Paradox +of Oxford” (<i>Shelburne Essays</i>, Vol. IX).</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_14_14" href="#FNanchor_14_14" class="label">[14]</a> See Ch. V of <i>Democracy and Leadership</i> (“Europe and Asia”); also +Appendix A (“Theories of the Will”).</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_15_15" href="#FNanchor_15_15" class="label">[15]</a> <i>The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin</i> (Bampton Lectures for 1924). +See p. 331.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_16_16" href="#FNanchor_16_16" class="label">[16]</a> “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.”</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_17_17" href="#FNanchor_17_17" class="label">[17]</a> Confucianism is of course primarily humanistic.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="The_Humility_of_Common_Sense18"> + <i class="largeheading">The Humility of Common Sense</i><a id="FNanchor_18_18" href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> + <br> + PAUL ELMER MORE + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I_2">I</h3> + +<p>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 <i>Æsthetic</i>⁠<a id="FNanchor_19_19" href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>as</em> pleasure, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>or <em>as</em> morals, or <em>as</em> 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 <em>depends</em> on morals or pleasure or philosophy <em>is</em> +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 <em>is</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>It may be a question, as I have said, whether the great +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>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 +<em>is</em>—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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Dehumanization +of Art</i>.⁠<a id="FNanchor_20_20" href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> Unless I mistake his language, Señor +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>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 <i lang="es">jóvenes</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_21_21" href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>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 (<i lang="es">completamente distintos</i>).” +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="es">jóvenes</i>. 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 <i>Crotchet Castle</i>: “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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>far the depredations of the Demon have extended into the +realm of common sense.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Æneid</i> +is richer in poetical joy than <i>Kubla Khan</i> (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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_22_22" href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_23_23" href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> 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; +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>it certainly was not purged of its attempt to evoke passions +which on a lower plane are <i lang="de">menschlich allzu menschlich</i>.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>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 +<i lang="fr">surréalistes</i>, 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 <i>transition</i>, 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:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +</blockquote> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span></p> + +<p>And so M. Aragon, concluding “that only the syllables of +reality are artistically usable,” exemplifies the new style:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0"><i>Ité ité la réa</i></div> + <div class="verse indent0"><i>Ité ité la réalité</i></div> + <div class="verse indent0"><i>La réa la réa</i></div> + <div class="verse indent0"><i>Té té La réa</i></div> + <div class="verse indent0"><i>Li</i></div> + <div class="verse indent0"><i>Té La réalité</i></div> + <div class="verse indent0"><i>Il y avait une fois LA RÉALITÉ.</i></div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>(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.)</p> + + +<h3 id="II_22"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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 <em>brain-power is no guarantee +for rightness of thinking</em>, 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 +<i lang="la">intellectus sibi permissus</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Religion in +the Making</i> 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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Hibbert Journal</i> for July 1927:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>All being does this [<i>i.e.</i>, “comes to a focus in each thing”] because +it is its nature so to do. <em>This inherent nature of all being is +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>God.</em> 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.</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>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”).⁠<a id="FNanchor_24_24" href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></p> + +<p>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 <i>Science and the +Modern World</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>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?</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>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.’”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>organic mechanism</em>.” 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”?</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>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!</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>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 <i>débâcle</i>—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.</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">There are two laws discrete</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Not reconciled,—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Law for man, and law for thing;</div> +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span> <div class="verse indent0">The last builds town and fleet,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">But it runs wild,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And doth the man unking.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p>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!</p> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_2"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_18_18" href="#FNanchor_18_18" class="label">[18]</a> Sections IV and V of the title essay in <i>The Demon of the Absolute</i> (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.”</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_19_19" href="#FNanchor_19_19" class="label">[19]</a> <i>Nuovi Saggi di Estetica</i>, 1920.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_20_20" href="#FNanchor_20_20" class="label">[20]</a> <i>La Deshumanización del Arte</i>, Madrid, 1925.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_21_21" href="#FNanchor_21_21" class="label">[21]</a> <i>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.</i></p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_22_22" href="#FNanchor_22_22" class="label">[22]</a> <i>Masterpieces of Chikamatsu, the Japanese Shakespeare</i>, translated by +Asataro Miyamori, p. 48.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_23_23" href="#FNanchor_23_23" class="label">[23]</a> <i>Modern Painting</i>, by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., p. 375.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_24_24" href="#FNanchor_24_24" class="label">[24]</a> 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 <i>Dublin Review</i> 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.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="The_Pride_of_Modernity"> + <i class="largeheading">The Pride of Modernity</i> + <br> + G. R. ELLIOTT + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I_3">I</h3> + +<p>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 <i>hubris</i> 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 +<i>hubris</i>, the Pride that led the seven deadly sins in mediæval +pageantry, and doomed the heroes of humane tragedy in +the Renaissance.</p> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>ruler of this world, good and evil pride alike, has modernly +been deposed: it is a thing of the past.</p> + +<p>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 <em>facts</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>amazingly</em> 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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>un</em>dramatic lair in old +human nature. Discovery is the essence of drama. Life is +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>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 <em>seems</em> +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.</p> + + +<h3 id="II_3"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>pride of quick and direct solutions, the pride of immediacy.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>locale</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span><em>displayed</em> 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.”</p> + +<p>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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_25_25" href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>permanent</em> root of +human ills, they were speaking only for an age and not +for all time, at any rate not for our time.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>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.</p> + +<p>The gnawing pride of religious individualism cloaks itself +in the assumption that the individual has transferred his +reverence <em>entire</em> 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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_26_26" href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> 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 <em>their own</em> fullest development. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>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,”⁠<a id="FNanchor_27_27" href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>But Emerson did not. He only partly faced it, and he +very considerably succumbed to it.⁠<a id="FNanchor_28_28" href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_29_29" href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>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<a id="FNanchor_30_30" href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>solidly</em> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>modern outlook is now confused and unhappy, one reason is +that the chief modern sage was confused and at the same +time spiritually proud.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i>hubris</i>,—until one perceives therein the swarming shapes and +conflicts of the modern tragedy.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>catastrophic speed. In religion it has meant more and more +a blind emphasis upon the <em>immediacy</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>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 <em>definite</em> moral +precepts of the ages, as trite and rather forbidding antiquities, +while advocating an <em>indefinite</em> 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 <em>unadulterable</em> factor of positive morals and, in the +end, the most positive provision against positive unhappiness.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_31_31" href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p> + +<p>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 <em>think</em> 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 <em>thinks</em>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_32_32" href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p> + +<p>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 <em>heart</em>. +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 <em>heart</em> has become “too proud to +fight.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span></p> + + +<h3 id="III_2"> + III +</h3> + +<p>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_33_33" href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p> + +<p>So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has +not produced the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a +good many earlier ages. “My <em>ideas</em> of life have become so +rotten,” thus a Pragmatised and Behaviourised youngster +confessed to me, “that I wonder my <em>life</em> 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 <em>ideas</em>. 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 <em>full</em> 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 +<em>inward</em> relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>“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 <em>inward</em> region of cause and effect that we, with +all our self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated.</p> + +<p>We may find again the inward and yet superhuman rigour +of the Laws. We may learn that they are supernatural without +being ever <em>un</em>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“I steadier step</div> + <div class="verse indent0">When I recall</div> + <div class="verse indent0">That though I slip</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Thou dost not fall.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p>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 +<em>especially</em>) when these two approaches are equally employed +by one person.</p> + +<p>Religion is normally theistic, and therewith mediatorial +and sacramental. Otherwise she is not catholic and, <em>in the +long run</em>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>non</em>-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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>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 <em>uncomplicated</em> 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 <em>metaphorical</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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,”⁠<a id="FNanchor_34_34" href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> a rather +ghostly ally of practical morals. Each is somewhat swayed +by the modern desire for immediate measures.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>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 <em>divinely ordained</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>less naïve</em> 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 <em>opposition</em> 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.</p> + +<p>This humane <em>dualism</em> strikes at the very heart of modern +pride, the pride of spiritual <em>monism</em>. 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_35_35" href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a></p> + +<p>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 +<em>basic</em> religious ideas have been “<em>genuinely</em> outlived” and that +we, having read Darwin, conceive of ourselves “much more +<em>humbly</em> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>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 <em>real</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_3"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_25_25" href="#FNanchor_25_25" class="label">[25]</a> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_26_26" href="#FNanchor_26_26" class="label">[26]</a> Luke IV, 9–13.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_27_27" href="#FNanchor_27_27" class="label">[27]</a> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_28_28" href="#FNanchor_28_28" class="label">[28]</a> 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 +<i>New England Quarterly</i>, Vol. II, No. 1, 1929.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_29_29" href="#FNanchor_29_29" class="label">[29]</a> See the essays on Newman, Arnold, and Huxley in Robert Shafer’s +<i>Christianity and Naturalism</i>, 1926.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_30_30" href="#FNanchor_30_30" class="label">[30]</a> See the chapter on him in Norman Foerster’s <i>American Criticism</i>, 1928.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_31_31" href="#FNanchor_31_31" class="label">[31]</a> An interesting critique bearing on this subject is “The Modern Distemper” +by Professor Ralph Barton Perry in the <i>Saturday Review of Literature</i>, +June 1, 1929.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_32_32" href="#FNanchor_32_32" class="label">[32]</a> Spenser’s <i>Faerie Queene</i>, 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_33_33" href="#FNanchor_33_33" class="label">[33]</a> From <i>Parochial and Plain Sermons</i>, 1880, Vol. II, No. <span class="allsmcap">XXXI</span>.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_34_34" href="#FNanchor_34_34" class="label">[34]</a> <i>A Preface to Morals</i>, p. 326.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_35_35" href="#FNanchor_35_35" class="label">[35]</a> From a review of my book <i>The Cycle of Modern Poetry</i> in the <i>Times +Literary Supplement</i> (London), June 20, 1929.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Religion_Without_Humanism"> + <i class="largeheading">Religion Without Humanism</i> + <br> + T. S. ELIOT + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>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 <i>Hound and Horn</i>, 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 <em>religion without +humanism</em>.</p> + +<p>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 <em>original</em> and not inherited. Orthodoxy must be +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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: <i>petrified ecclesiasticism</i>, and +<i>modernism</i>.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>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 <i>disjecta +membra</i> is completed by the humanists.</p> + +<p>I have examined several popular theological works by +Anglican clergy of the liberal school.⁠<a id="FNanchor_36_36" href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> 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 <i lang="fr">à rebours</i>) 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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 <em>poetry</em> (about which neither scientist nor theologian +knows anything) and say “<em>there</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>On the following point I speak with diffidence, recognising +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>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 <em>mean +what they say</em>. 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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>not</em> +being humanistic themselves, and for leaving humanism to +its own specialists. Humanism can offer neither the intellectual +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_4"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_36_36" href="#FNanchor_36_36" class="label">[36]</a> E.g., <i>Should Such a Faith Offend?</i>, by the Bishop of Birmingham; <i>I +Believe in God</i>, by Maude Royden; <i>The Impatience of a Parson</i>, by H. R. L. +Sheppard.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="The_Plight_of_Our_Arts"> + <i class="largeheading">The Plight of Our Arts</i> + <br> + FRANK JEWETT MATHER, <span class="smcap">Jr.</span> + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I_33">I</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="II_4"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>but rather a congeries of pseudo-aristocracies each with +its shifting preferences, which hardly deserve the name of +tastes at all.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="III_3"> + III +</h3> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>specifically</em> for painting, sculpture, and architecture.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="IV_1"> + IV +</h3> + +<p>Our desired rehabilitation of the traditional and also of +the new arts may in the last analysis depend upon the creation +<em>within</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>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 +<i>fainéant</i> 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="The_Dilemma_of_Modern_Tragedy"> + <i class="largeheading">The Dilemma of Modern Tragedy</i> + <br> + ALAN REYNOLDS THOMPSON + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I_4">I</h3> + +<p>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, <i>Ghosts</i> ought to be more inspiriting +than <i>Macbeth</i>. 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!</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_37_37" href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a></p> + +<p>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 <em>intentions</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>his case by so plainly admiring greatness in the very tragedies +whose passing he deplores.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>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: <em>He cannot be both honest and sublime.</em>⁠<a id="FNanchor_38_38" href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p> + + +<h3 id="II_5"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><i>Hernani</i> and <i>Ruy Blas</i>, 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 <i lang="fr">père</i> or the +<i lang="fr">mélodrames</i> of the Boulevards from which Hugo learned +his technic. As melodrama they are, to be sure, still entertaining.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span></p> + +<p>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 +<i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Monna Vanna</i>, which was +inspired by Browning, we get exaltation of passion rather +than will.</p> + +<p>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; +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>and they presented it with extreme violence. Thus in +Tolstoi’s <i>The Power of Darkness</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>In <i>Ghosts</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>code of morals—or “ideals”—of which the heroine is the +victim. And, as is proper in a naturalist tragedy, the +<i>Spirocheta pallida</i> is made the <i>deus ex machina</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>The contrast between this play and, let us say, <i>Hamlet</i> +is plain when we compare Oswald’s cry, “The sun—the sun,” +and the final speech of Fortinbras:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">For he was likely, had he been put on,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">To have prov’d most royally; and for his passage,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The soldiers’ music and the rites of war</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Speak loudly for him.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_39_39" href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a></p> + + +<h3 id="III_4"> + III +</h3> + +<p>The elevation which Ibsen gains in <i>Ghosts</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>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: <i>the road +of laughter</i>, which goes by way of irony and satire; and +<i>the road of tears</i>, by way of pathos or cruelty.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr">esprit gaulois</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Pathos and horror we find in Hardy, little mitigated by +any admiration except for the author’s artistry. Rarely we +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>find a heroism of sorts in characters like Michael Henchard; +but it is significant that the author ended his novels with +<i>Jude</i>. Galsworthy’s habitual irony always borders on pathos +if not sentiment. French “naturalism” is harsher and at +times, as in <i>Madame Bovary</i>, finds expression in bitter irony. +But pathos is none the less its most powerful effect. <i>The +Old Wives’ Tale</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>never picks a flower wantonly.” But in his art he more than +compensates for such sensibilities. <i>Roan Stallion</i>, for example, +depicts the passion of a modern Pasiphaë. The unlucky +husband is trampled by the stallion, and the woman +shoots the animal. <i>Tamar</i> deals with incest between brother +and sister, and ends with a fire which burns down the house +and its more or less crazy inmates. <i>The Tower Beyond +Tragedy</i>, though treating the Clytemnestra legend with +great power, ends in the incest motive between Orestes and +Electra.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Roan Stallion</i>.</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent14">Humanity is the start of the race; I say</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break</div> + <div class="verse indent4">through, the coal to break into fire,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The atom to be split.</div> + <div class="verse indent23">Tragedy that breaks man’s face</div> + <div class="verse indent4">and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural</div> + <div class="verse indent4">crime, inhuman science,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature,</div> + <div class="verse indent4">the wild fence-vaulter science,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning</div> + <div class="verse indent4">demons that make an atom,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly</div> + <div class="verse indent4">with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape</div> + <div class="verse indent0">He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the</div> + <div class="verse indent4">Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this</div> + <div class="verse indent4">cosmos? For him, the last</div> +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span> <div class="verse indent0">Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the</div> + <div class="verse indent4">mould to break away from, the coal</div> + <div class="verse indent0">To break into fire, the atom to be split.⁠<a id="FNanchor_40_40" href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>Roan +Stallion</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="IV_2"> + IV +</h3> + +<p>A writer’s ’prentice work is likely to be revealing, and +O’Neill’s is no exception. The one-act play <i>Thirst</i>, for +example, reveals an imaginative absorption in the violences +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>and brutalities of life. Most of the one-acts in the volume +with <i>The Moon of the Caribbees</i> have more normal and +convincing characterisation, but about half are built upon +abnormal situations involving incipient insanities or morbid +passions.</p> + +<p>This interest in mental abnormality has not diminished. +O’Neill’s plays are studies in psychopathology. <i>Beyond the +Horizon</i> deals with a weak romantic who takes refuge from +harsh reality in dreams, and finally dies of consumption. +<i>Gold</i> is a melodrama growing out of an insane delusion. +<i>Diff’rent</i> is the horrible case-history of a victim of sex-repression. +<i>The Hairy Ape</i> describes a character who, if he is +not a mere symbol, develops from incipient to raving madness. +A play with a normal beginning, “<i>The First Man</i>,” +turns out to be a study of an emotional fixation. <i>Welded</i> +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 <i>Desire Under the Elms</i>. +<i>The Great God Brown</i>, viewed apart from its symbolism, +portrays split personality and madness. <i>The Fountain</i>, beneath +its exotic romanticism, is the story of an <i lang="fr">idée fixe</i>. +The plot of <i>Strange Interlude</i> might have come from the +case-book of Freud. If we cannot judge the chief character +of <i>Lazarus Laughed</i> 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, <i>Dynamo</i>, is a study of religious mania.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Marco Millions</i> +and <i>The Fountain</i>. 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 <i>Ile</i>, moreover, is not only horrible but poetically +true. <i>The Emperor Jones</i> 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 <i>The Emperor Jones</i> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>romance. <i>Marco Millions</i> becomes heavy satire; and <i>The +Fountain</i> leaves a bitter taste. For the most part he seeks +to deal realistically with contemporary life.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Too often, indeed, the muddlement gets into the construction +as well as the themes of his plays. <i>Desire Under +the Elms</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>The lack of unity is felt, again, in <i>Anna Christie</i>, which +in spite of the author’s expressed intention has for the audience +simply a conventional happy ending. It is strikingly +manifest in <i>Strange Interlude</i>. The central character of this +alone knits together the various situations and themes of the +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Lazarus Laughed</i>.</p> + +<p>The symbolist technic of this play forces attention upon +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>planets, the heart of the atom with electrons.” Whence +does O’Neill derive his mirth?</p> + +<p>He may well have got his inspiration from Nietzsche. +I have summed up Nietzsche’s idea in <i>The Birth of Tragedy</i> +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 <em>laugh</em>, 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:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“‘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!...</p> + +<p>“‘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, <em>learn</em>, I pray you—to laugh!’”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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. <i>Lazarus Laughed</i> 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span></p> + + +<h3 id="V"> + V +</h3> + +<p>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_41_41" href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>If science grants an enveloping Unknown, the man who +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr">bête humaine</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>To follow the narrow path between cynicism and romantic +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_5"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_37_37" href="#FNanchor_37_37" class="label">[37]</a> I have considered the tragic emotions more fully in an article, “Melodrama +and Tragedy,” <i>Publications of the Modern Language Association</i>, +September, 1928.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_38_38" href="#FNanchor_38_38" class="label">[38]</a> Since this paper was written my attention has been called to “Humanism +and Tragedy,” an admirable article by Mr. F. McEachran (<i>Nineteenth Century +and After</i>, 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_39_39" href="#FNanchor_39_39" class="label">[39]</a> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_40_40" href="#FNanchor_40_40" class="label">[40]</a> From <i>Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems</i>, Boni & Liveright, 1925.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_41_41" href="#FNanchor_41_41" class="label">[41]</a> Should I remind the reader that in thus generalising I admit exceptions? +One such, whom I have discussed elsewhere (<i>Sewanee Review</i>, April, 1929) +is, in my opinion, Joseph Conrad.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="An_American_Tragedy"> + <i class="largeheading">An American Tragedy</i> + <br> + ROBERT SHAFER + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I_44">I</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The work, however, cannot be assessed—cannot indeed be +understood—apart from the man; and fortunately Mr. +Dreiser has written much about himself.⁠<a id="FNanchor_42_42" href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> 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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>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.” <ins title="[Transcriber’s–“abs” appears in other editions; “C” probably meant]">[sic]</ins></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span></p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_43_43" href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a></p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>First Principles</i>. 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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>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 <i>Synthetic +Philosophy</i> may easily be exaggerated—the more easily because +it really is important.</p> + +<p>Mr. Dreiser emphasises the fact that his reading of the +<i>First Principles</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>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 <em>that</em> 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.</p> + +<p>In these circumstances the <i>First Principles</i> 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 <em>say</em>, if not feel, +that life was a meaningless and unimportant phenomenon +anyhow.</p> + +<p>The <i>Synthetic Philosophy</i>, Mr. Dreiser tells the world, +“eternally verified” his “gravest fears as to the unsolvable +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>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 <em>say</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="II_6"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>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, <i>An American Tragedy</i>, was, upon its appearance, +widely proclaimed a masterpiece.</p> + +<p>Certainly, moreover, <i>An American Tragedy</i> is by all odds +the best of Mr. Dreiser’s novels, though perhaps not the +most <em>interesting</em>. 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, <i>The Hand of the Potter</i> +(1918), whose theme is similar in several respects. If one +should name a single change indicative of the intelligent +masterliness of <i>An American Tragedy</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>But though <i>An American Tragedy</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>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 <i>An American Tragedy</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>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.</p> + +<p>“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, +<i>The Financier</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>plaything of “chemic compulsion,” the paragon of +irresponsibility, the perfect exemplar of the truth as the +truth has been revealed to his creator.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>This difficulty, however, does not actually lie in the plot +of <i>An American Tragedy</i>, as the remark just cited implies. +The bare plot of the <i>Agamemnon</i> of Æschylus might equally +well form the basis of a mere sensational newspaper story, +and Clytemnestra in that play and in the <i>Choephori</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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. <i>An American Tragedy</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_44_44" href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a></p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>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 <i>An American Tragedy</i> gives form +to a view of life as gratuitous as it is unmeaning.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>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.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p><span class="smcap">Note</span>—For permission to quote from the writings of Mr. Dreiser, I am +indebted both to him and to his publisher, Mr. Horace Liveright.</p> +</blockquote> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_6"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_42_42" href="#FNanchor_42_42" class="label">[42]</a> In that which follows I draw chiefly upon <i>A Book About Myself</i> +(1922), but also make use of <i>A Hoosier Holiday</i> (1916), <i>Twelve Men</i> +(1919), and <i>Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub</i> (1920). <i>A Traveler at Forty</i> (1913) +is also a revealing book.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_43_43" href="#FNanchor_43_43" class="label">[43]</a> I refer particularly to <i>Jennie Gerhardt</i> and <i>The “Genius.”</i> Limitations +of space unfortunately prevent me from considering here any save Mr. +Dreiser’s latest novel, <i>An American Tragedy</i>.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_44_44" href="#FNanchor_44_44" class="label">[44]</a> From the <i>Bookman</i>, September, 1928 (Vol. 68, p. 25).</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Pandoras_Box_in_American_Fiction"> + <i class="largeheading">Pandora’s Box in American Fiction</i> + <br> + HARRY HAYDEN CLARK + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>America, Carlyle wrote Emerson, “is verily the Door of +Hope to distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see +crumbling down into blackness of darkness.”</p> + +<p>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 <em>within</em> thee, happier far.”</p> + + +<h3 id="I_5"> + I +</h3> + +<p>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 <i>Castle of Indolence</i>, this idyllic Arcadianism +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>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 <i>Vathek</i> 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 <i>The Cenci</i> 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</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent10">“devotion to something afar</div> + <div class="verse indent0">From the sphere of our sorrow.”</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“I loved I know not what—but this low sphere,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And all that it contains, contains not thee.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p><i>Alastor</i> and <i>Epipsychidion</i> are matchless records of his fruitless +quest for the phantom of desire. DeQuincey’s fantasies +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>are “filled with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of forgotten +deliriums.” <i>The Lady of Shalott</i> and <i>The Palace +of Art</i> testify to Tennyson’s reluctant renunciation of the +life of illusion. Swinburne characterised himself in <i>A +Nympholept</i>, while his friend, the author of <i>The Earthly +Paradise</i>, strove to</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent13">“build a shadowy isle of bliss</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Midmost the beating of the steely sea.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p>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 <i>The Author’s Account of Himself</i>, +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. <i>The Legend of Prince +Ahmed al Kamel</i>, 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 <i>The Legend of Sleepy +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>Hollow</i>. 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 <i>The Castle +of Indolence</i>, <i>The Legend</i> 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 <i>History of New England Witchcraft</i>,” 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Eleanora</i>. We +might better, however, turn to <i>The Domain of Arnheim</i>, +where Ellison, with “<i>a fortune of four hundred and fifty +million dollars</i>,” 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>“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 <i>Vathek</i>, 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 <i>The Island of the Fay</i>, +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch +of the fiery pen.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Mardi</i>, 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 +<i>Alastor</i> and <i>Epipsychidion</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>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. <i>Moby-Dick</i> 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:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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, <i>Moon-Calf</i> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>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.”</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Nay, I was sent a wanderer</div> + <div class="verse indent0">On Beauty’s desperate quest—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">To go forever seeking Her,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Nor, ere I find her, rest.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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 <i>Confessions</i>. 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>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, <i>Moon-Calf</i> is the +creation of the sort of hope which robbed Shelley of “peace +within.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>O Pioneers!</i> most piteous is the fate of the fair +Marie Tovesky, murdered in the arms of her lover. In +<i>The Song of the Lark</i> Thea Kronsburg develops her rare +voice in spite of a gossipy Colorado town. “There is only +one big thing—desire.” In <i>My Ántonia</i> 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 <i>Youth and the Bright Medusa</i> 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 <i>The Professor’s House</i>, 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; +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Linda Condon</i>, based on this theme, Peyton, +a sculptor, seeks in vain to win the beautiful Linda, who +marries another. The sculptor endeavours to sublimate his +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>passion in the creation of a great statue, which is destroyed +by a mob, and he dies in forlorn desolation.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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....”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Beyond +Life</i>, a series of essays, he outlines his literary creed, +his hostility to realism. Holding that “veracity is the one +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>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 <i>The Cream of the Jest</i>. 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.”</p> + +<p><i>Jurgen</i> may be said to deal mainly with the poignancy of +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“If I laugh at any mortal thing,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">’Tis that our nature cannot always bring</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Itself to apathy.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">And in the end we have Jurgen’s Shelley-like admission of +the futility and hopelessness of his aimless longing:</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span></p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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”</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">And Shelley of the iridescent dreams, who would</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent12">“Hope till Hope creates</div> + <div class="verse indent0">From its own wreck the thing it contemplates,”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">confessed in the end:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Alas! I have nor hope nor health,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Nor peace within nor calm around.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">Very beautiful are these rainbow visions—but they are conjured +out of night.</p> + + +<h3 id="II_7"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>decorative or allegorical until the eighteenth century. In +1711 Shaftesbury proclaimed the natural man benevolent, +compassionate, and altruistic; and as such he appears in +<i>Ossian</i>. 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”:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“A new Jerusalem, sent down from heaven,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Shall grace our happy earth, ...</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Thence called <i>Millennium</i>. Paradise anew</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost ...</div> + <div class="verse indent0">No tempting serpent to allure the soul</div> + <div class="verse indent0">From native innocence.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span></p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>The Crater</i>. 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,</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“... 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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>The Crater</i> (1847) we find him creating a Utopia +in a fabulous mid-Pacific island in order to furnish a contrast +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>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 +<i>The Monikins</i> (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!”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>reality. Take three stories, representing three different +periods. <i>The Jumping Frog</i> (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—<i>Roughing +It</i> (1873), <i>Tom Sawyer</i> (1876), <i>Life on +the Mississippi</i> (1883), and <i>Huck Finn</i> (1884). In contrast, +his first book, <i>Innocents Abroad</i> (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, <i>The Million +Pound Bank Note</i> (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—<i>The +$30,000 Bequest</i> (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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>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!</p> + +<p>What did Mark Twain report regarding his early hope +for a material paradise? In <i>The Mysterious Stranger</i> +(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 +<i>What Is Man?</i> and <i>To a Person Sitting in Darkness</i> 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!”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>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.”</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“When we’ve wood and prairie land,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Won by our toil,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">We’ll reign like kings in fairy land,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Lords of the soil!”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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.”</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>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....”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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.”</p> + +<p>Rolvaag’s <i>Giants in the Earth</i>, “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.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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....</p> + +<p>“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!”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">As she expects to die in childbirth, she pleads with Per Hansa +to take the other children back to civilisation: “Human beings +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>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.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.</p> + +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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 <i>Poor White</i>—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.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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, <i lang="fr">laissez faire</i>, 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</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent10">“may not hope from outward forms to win</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span></p> + + +<h3 id="III_5"> + III +</h3> + +<p>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—<i lang="la">auream mediocritatem</i>—and +Cicero’s praise of <i lang="la">mediocritatem illam quae est inter nimium +et parum</i> 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 <i>Everyman in His Humour</i> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent28">“Only add</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love</div> + <div class="verse indent0">By name to come called Charity, the soul</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth</div> + <div class="verse indent0">To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess</div> + <div class="verse indent0">A Paradise within thee, happier far.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>I have space for but one example in modern fiction—Dorothy +Canfield’s <i>The Brimming Cup</i>. 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>“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:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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!”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>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.”</p> + + +<h3 id="IV_3"> + IV +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>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.</p> + +<blockquote> +<p><span class="smcap">Note</span>—For copyrighted evidence used in the foregoing essay I am indebted +as follows: Sherwood Anderson, <i>Poor White</i> (Modern Library, N. Y., 1925); +Dorothy Canfield Fisher, <i>The Brimming Cup</i> (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., +1921); James Branch Cabell, <i>The Cream of the Jest</i> (Modern Library, N. Y., +1922); <i>Jurgen</i> (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); <i>Beyond Life</i> (Modern +Library, N. Y., 1919); <i>Straws and Prayerbooks</i> (Robert M. McBride and +Co., N. Y., 1925); Willa Cather, <i>The Professor’s House</i> (Alfred A. Knopf, +N. Y., 1925); Floyd Dell, <i>Moon-Calf</i> (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1921); +R. W. Emerson, <i>Complete Works</i> (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1903); +<i>Journals</i> (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1909–14); <i>The Correspondence of +Emerson and Carlyle</i> (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1888); Norman Foerster, +<i>American Criticism</i> (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1928); Hamlin +Garland, <i>A Son of the Middle Border</i> (Grosset and Dunlap, N. Y., 1927); +Joseph Hergesheimer, <i>Linda Condon</i> (Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., 1919); Mark +Twain, <i>Complete Works</i> (American Publishing Co., Hartford, 1903); A. B. +Paine, <i>Mark Twain, A Biography</i> (Harper and Brothers, N. Y., 1912); +F. L. Pattee, “James Fenimore Cooper” (<i>American Mercury</i>, Alfred A. +Knopf, N. Y.); Gregory Paine, Introduction to <i>The Deerslayer</i> (Harcourt, +Brace and Co., N. Y., 1927); O. E. Rolvaag, <i>Giants in the Earth</i> (Harper +and Brothers, N. Y., 1929).</p> +</blockquote> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Dionysus_in_Dismay"> + <i class="largeheading">Dionysus in Dismay</i> + <br> + STANLEY P. CHASE + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>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</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Three of us without a care</div> + <div class="verse indent0">In the red September</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Tramping down the roads of Maine,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Making merry with the rain,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">With the fellow winds a-fare</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Where the winds remember.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">Frost and Sandburg, Lindsay and Masefield, had not come +into our world—much less Walter de la Mare or Aldous +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>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 <i>A Shropshire +Lad</i>; 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.</p> + +<p>And even in that distant, unreal decade of the nineteen-hundreds, +before President Roosevelt, by a few kindly pages +in the <i>Outlook</i>, 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 <i>Captain Craig</i> volume of +1902.⁠<a id="FNanchor_45_45" href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Four o’clock this afternoon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Fifteen hundred miles away:</div> + <div class="verse indent0">So it goes, the crazy tune,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">So it pounds and hums all day.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Four o’clock this afternoon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Earth will hide them far away:</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Best they go to go so soon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Best for them the grave to-day.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Had she gone but half so soon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Half the world had passed away.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Four o’clock this afternoon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Best for them they go to-day.</div> +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span> </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Four o’clock this afternoon</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Love will hide them deep, they say;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Love that made the grave so soon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Fifteen hundred miles away.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Four o’clock this afternoon—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Ah, but they go slow to-day:</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Slow to suit my crazy tune,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Past the need of all we say.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Best it came to come so soon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Best for them they go to-day:</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Four o’clock this afternoon,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Fifteen hundred miles away.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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 <em>west</em>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>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:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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 <em>as a poem</em>. It was as if one should read Mr. Frost’s +“The Thatch” and demand to know <em>why</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="I_6"> + I +</h3> + +<p>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,⁠<a id="FNanchor_46_46" href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> we are warranted in assuming, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>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<a id="FNanchor_47_47" href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>seems somehow less than a sporting chance that the one you +finally choose as the least implausible will be what was +intended.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">ANECDOTE OF THE JAR⁠<a id="FNanchor_48_48" href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a></div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">I placed a jar in Tennessee,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And round it was, upon a hill.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">It made the slovenly wilderness</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Surround that hill.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The wilderness rose up to it,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And sprawled around, no longer wild.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The jar was round upon the ground</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And tall and of a port in air.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">It took dominion everywhere.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The jar was grey and bare.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">It did not give of bird or bush,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Like nothing else in Tennessee.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>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 <i lang="fr">objet d’art</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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) <i>Harper’s</i>. 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 <i>transition</i>⁠<a id="FNanchor_49_49" href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">INNOCENT LANDSCAPE⁠<a id="FNanchor_50_50" href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a></div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Here is no peace, although the air has fainted,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">And footfalls die and are buried in deep grass,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And reverential trees are softly painted</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Like saints upon an oriel of glass.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The pattern of the atmosphere is spherical,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">A bubble in the silence of the sun,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Blown thinner by the very breath of miracle</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Around a core of loud confusion.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Here is no virtue; here is nothing blessèd</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Save this foredoomed suspension of the end;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Faith is the blossom, but the fruit is cursèd;</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Go hence, for it is useless to pretend.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">“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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">THE END OF THE WORLD⁠<a id="FNanchor_51_51" href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a></div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The armless ambidextrian was lighting</div> + <div class="verse indent0">A match between his great and second toe</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough</div> + <div class="verse indent0">In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">There in the sudden blackness the black pall</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of nothing, nothing, nothing,—nothing at all.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">Here Archibald MacLeish, who stands somewhere between +the centre and the extreme left wing in poetry, employs a +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>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 <i>nothing</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>are the words (written as ordinary prose) of a poem +by E. E. Cummings from a group called “Impressions.”</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_52_52" href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></p> +</blockquote> + +<p class="noindent">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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_53_53" href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>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 <em>taken for granted</em>; 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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_54_54" href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>in literature or art is <em>for</em>. 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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_55_55" href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a></p> + + +<h3 id="II_8"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>made itself felt, acutely and widely, only within the last +three or four years.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The serene and humble mould</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Does in herself all selves enfold—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Kingdoms, destinies, and creeds,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Great dreams, and dauntless deeds,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Science that metes the firmament,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The high, inflexible intent</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of one for many sacrificed—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Plato’s brain, the heart of Christ;</div> + </div> +<hr class="tbpoetry"> + + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Out of the earth the poem grows</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Like the lily, or the rose;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And all man is, or yet may be,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Is but herself in agony</div> +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span> <div class="verse indent0">Toiling up the steep ascent</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Toward the complete accomplishment</div> + <div class="verse indent0">When all dust shall be, the whole</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Universe, one conscious soul.⁠<a id="FNanchor_56_56" href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a></div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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.</p> + +<p>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<a id="FNanchor_57_57" href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> is the relation to Whitman +at once apparent, for superficially neither the <i>Spoon River +Anthology</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>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 <i>The Modern Temper</i>, “[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 <i>Cavender’s House</i>,</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Have you not heard yet, anywhere, death-bells ringing</div> + <div class="verse indent0">For Love and poor Romance? Biologists</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And bolshevists are ringing them like mad—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">So loud that Love, we’re told, will soon be lost</div> + <div class="verse indent0">With dodos, dinosaurs, and pterodactyls.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Mr. Eliot, though no longer belonging even nominally +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>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.</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“We are the hollow men,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">We are the stuffed men.”</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_58_58" href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>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 <em>this</em> 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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_59_59" href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> 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 <i>impasse</i> +already described.</p> + +<p>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 +<em>practical</em> certainty, in all that concerns us most nearly as +ethical beings, available now, as it has been for centuries. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Essay +on Man</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>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<a id="FNanchor_60_60" href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> of A. E. Housman—</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The year might age, and cloudy</div> + <div class="verse indent2">The lessening day might close,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">But air of other summers</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Breathed from beyond the snows,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">And I had hope of those.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">They came and were and are not</div> + <div class="verse indent2">And come no more anew;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And all the years and seasons</div> + <div class="verse indent2">That ever can ensue</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Must now be worse and few.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">—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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">They came and were and are not.</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + +<p class="noindent">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, <em>given</em> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>any kind.⁠<a id="FNanchor_61_61" href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> 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 +<i>Lycidas</i> to <i>Samson Agonistes</i>, 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 <em>direct</em> effect upon it of those forces which +we think salutary, such as humanism.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>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.’”⁠<a id="FNanchor_62_62" href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> +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.</p> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_7"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_45_45" href="#FNanchor_45_45" class="label">[45]</a> Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_46_46" href="#FNanchor_46_46" class="label">[46]</a> “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, <i>Four and Twenty Minds</i>, quoted by I. A. +Richards, <i>The Principles of Literary Criticism</i> (1924), p. 255, note 4.</p> + +<p>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.’”</p> + +<p><i>Cf.</i> also the following from Gilbert Murray’s <i>The Classical Tradition in +Poetry</i> (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.”</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_47_47" href="#FNanchor_47_47" class="label">[47]</a> <i>A Survey of Modernist Poetry</i>, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, +1927, p. 125.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_48_48" href="#FNanchor_48_48" class="label">[48]</a> From <i>Harmonium</i>, by Wallace Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with +permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised +publishers.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_49_49" href="#FNanchor_49_49" class="label">[49]</a> For the sake of “communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind me, I +should explain that <i>transition</i> is “an international quarterly for creative +experiment,” edited in Paris by a group of young Americans and others.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_50_50" href="#FNanchor_50_50" class="label">[50]</a> From <i>Trivial Breath</i>, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and with +permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised +publishers.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_51_51" href="#FNanchor_51_51" class="label">[51]</a> From <i>Streets in the Moon</i>, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926. Reprinted by +permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_52_52" href="#FNanchor_52_52" class="label">[52]</a> From <i>Tulips and Chimneys</i>. Reprinted by permission of Alfred & +Charles Boni, Inc., Publishers.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_53_53" href="#FNanchor_53_53" class="label">[53]</a> For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr. Cummings’s poetry, +see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, <i>A Survey of Modernist Poetry</i>, Chapter +I.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_54_54" href="#FNanchor_54_54" class="label">[54]</a> E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously referred to, is printed by him as +follows (<i>Tulips and Chimneys</i>, New York, 1924, p. 78):</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">i was considering how</div> + <div class="verse indent0">within night’s loose</div> + <div class="verse indent0">sack a star’s</div> + <div class="verse indent0">nibbling in-</div> + <div class="verse indent0">fin</div> + <div class="verse indent0">-i-</div> + <div class="verse indent0">tes-</div> + <div class="verse indent0">i</div> + <div class="verse indent0">-mal-</div> + <div class="verse indent0">ly devours</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">darkness the</div> + <div class="verse indent0">hungry star</div> + <div class="verse indent0">which</div> + <div class="verse indent0">will e</div> + <div class="verse indent0">-ven</div> + <div class="verse indent0">tu-</div> + <div class="verse indent0">al</div> + <div class="verse indent0">-ly jiggle</div> + <div class="verse indent0">the bait of</div> + <div class="verse indent0">dawn and be jerked</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">into</div> + <div class="verse indent0">eternity. when over my head a</div> + <div class="verse indent0">shooting</div> + <div class="verse indent0">star</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Bur s</div> + <div class="verse indent8">(t</div> + <div class="verse indent10">into a stale shriek</div> + <div class="verse indent0">like an alarm-clock)</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_55_55" href="#FNanchor_55_55" class="label">[55]</a> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_56_56" href="#FNanchor_56_56" class="label">[56]</a> From the poem “Earth,” in <i>Dust and Light</i>, 1919, published by Charles +Scribner’s Sons.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_57_57" href="#FNanchor_57_57" class="label">[57]</a> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_58_58" href="#FNanchor_58_58" class="label">[58]</a> Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section <span class="allsmcap">LXXIII</span>, in <i>The +Drift of Romanticism</i> (1913), p. 291. The next section is almost prophetic +of what has happened in American poetry of the last few years:</p> + +<p>“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.”</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_59_59" href="#FNanchor_59_59" class="label">[59]</a> I. A. Richards, <i>Science and Poetry</i>, 1926, p. 60.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_60_60" href="#FNanchor_60_60" class="label">[60]</a> From <i>Last Poems</i>, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt +and Company.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_61_61" href="#FNanchor_61_61" class="label">[61]</a> I. A. Richards, <i>Science and Poetry</i>, Chapter <span class="allsmcap">VII</span>.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_62_62" href="#FNanchor_62_62" class="label">[62]</a> Richard Holt Hutton, <i>Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English +Thought in Matters of Faith</i>, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p. 146.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Our_Critical_Spokesmen"> + <i class="largeheading">Our Critical Spokesmen</i> + <br> + GORHAM B. MUNSON + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>“Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my +table, “aims to <em>be</em> something; while criticism aims first to +clarify and then to <em>value</em> something. Criticism is talk <em>about</em> +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.”</p> + +<p>“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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Lusitania</i> was torpedoed in 1915—events +that were vitally to affect us. Mr. Dreiser’s <i>The “Genius”</i> +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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>in the wake of Bull Moose Progressivism had hopefully +established the <i>New Republic</i>. Mr. P. E. More in the year +previous to 1915 had resigned from the editorship of the +<i>Nation</i>.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr">vers libre</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="I_7"> + I +</h3> + +<p>There have been no villains in the recent tragi-comedy +of American literary criticism.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>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, <i>Towards an American +Type</i>: “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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_63_63" href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> Lucid writing, of course, but it is not charming: it has +none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>then one of the pieces in <i>Americans</i> (1922) and then say, if +you can, that in respect to Sherman’s chief weakness I am +wrong. The piece in evidence is <i>An Imaginary Conversation +with Mr. P. E. More</i>, 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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_64_64" href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>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 <em>religion of democracy</em>, 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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_65_65" href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a></p> + +<p>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;⁠<a id="FNanchor_66_66" href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> +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.</p> + +<p>When in 1924 he became literary editor of the New York +<i>Herald Tribune</i>, Sherman had his opportunity to establish +what our milieu sorely lacks, a vigorous <em>conservative</em> literary +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>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 <i>Nation</i>. 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 <i>An American Tragedy</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>defensive</em> 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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_67_67" href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a></p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span></p> + +<p>When Sherman died, the professional literary world +eulogised fulsomely the <i>émigré</i> 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.</p> + + +<h3 id="II_9"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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, <i>Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century</i> +(1909) and the volume, <i>Literary Criticism in the Renaissance</i> +(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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>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, <i>The New Criticism</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>Nevertheless, for the purposes of a record, we must write +down such pronunciamentos in this lecture, in the addenda +to it in <i>Creative Criticism</i> (1917), in his article, <i>The Seven +Arts and the Seven Confusions</i>, and in his contribution to +<i>Civilization in the United States</i> (1921) as bear on the following +topics: the essence of art, the function of the artist, +the duty of the critic.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>exclaimed vehemently that the new critics have done with +the whole question of standards, including genres, hierarchies, +and moral judgments.</p> + +<p>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 <em>is</em> 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 <i>The Younger Generation</i>. +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.”</p> + +<p>It is not Mr. J. E. Spingarn, enthusiastic amateur of +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>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.</p> + +<p>“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 +<em>as he is</em> 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?—<em>to live +as unconsciously and mechanically as possible</em>. 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 <em>external</em> +conditions, for conceit makes one exaggeratedly sensitive +to the environment.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span>Mr. Irving Babbitt, but far from extreme in his humanitarian +socialism and, despite his psycho-analytic superstitions, +temperate in his faith in emotional expansiveness.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span>never, it seems to me, revive the spirit of the American +writer.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr">faute de +mieux</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Catechism</i> and +you will have it in one simple lesson. “<i>Q.</i> If you find so +much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, +then why do you live here? <i>A.</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span>self-satisfaction and a feeling of false superiority, and +this naturally enough makes for personal passivity.</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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 <i>Poetics</i> was +introduced into European thought, is the Aristotelian conception +of <i>katharsis</i>. Hear Mr. Mencken after the sages +and the learned have spoken. He is saying that capital punishment +affords <i>katharsis</i> to modern societies. “<i>Katharsis</i>, +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 <i>katharsis</i>. 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 <i>katharsis</i>. 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 +<i>katharsis</i>.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_68_68" href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> And this again is cheap intellectual vaudeville +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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’ <i>Spoon +River Anthology</i>, he says, is “the most eloquent, the most +profound and the most thoroughly national volume of +poetry published in America since <i>Leaves of Grass</i>.” 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.</p> + + +<h3 id="III_6"> + III +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Sacred Wood</i>. For after all Mr. +Spingarn only winded a horn and left the startled and delighted +self-expressionists to hunt for themselves.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_69_69" href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a></p> + +<p>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 <i>assuming</i> that it +is true. In <i>The Modern Temper</i> (1929) romantic criticism +in America culminates in weak despair.</p> + +<p>As we should expect, there have been departures lately. +There is Mr. Walter Lippmann,⁠<a id="FNanchor_70_70" href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> 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 <i>A Preface to Morals</i> (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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span>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.”⁠<a id="FNanchor_71_71" href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> And the remedy he proposes, +who can quarrel with it? The “good life,” he says, +is an <em>acquired</em> disposition,—surely an advance over the implication +of the other critics we have mentioned that somehow +the “good life” would <em>naturally</em> 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.”</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Re-discovery of America</i> (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.⁠<a id="FNanchor_72_72" href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a></p> + +<p>The most impressive of the contemporary critics who offer +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The +Sacred Wood</i> (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 <i>Tradition and the Individual Talent</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span>revealed as by disposition a neo-classicist (with some romantic +elements) thoroughly dependent upon literary authority.</p> + +<p>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 <i>The Sacred Wood</i>. 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.</p> + +<p>Turn to his essays on style and order entitled <i>For Lancelot +Andrewes</i>. 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<a id="FNanchor_73_73" href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> 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 <em>behind</em>, not in, him. Now observe that in <i>For +Lancelot Andrewes</i> 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span>directly about this occupation, about the stuff itself of moral +conflicts.</p> + +<p>Likewise Mr. Eliot, apologist for religion, does not write +about religion: he points to <em>a</em> 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 +“<i>Ersatz</i>-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.</p> + + +<h3 id="IV_4"> + IV +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span>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?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>primary</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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. +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>Really, <em>are</em> we practitioners of literary criticism distinguished +by any grandeur in breadth and elevation of thought? No +one can believe it.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>and</em> actions +would be his great desideratum.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="V_1"> + V +</h3> + +<p>I append <i>The Prayer of a Young Critic</i>.</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> + <div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">But we have heard rumour of the Mistral.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">It is a cold wind that blows from the heights,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Day after day it sweeps steadily down,</div> +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span> <div class="verse indent0">Cold and from above, changing the air</div> + <div class="verse indent0">In the lowlands.</div> + <div class="verse indent14">We are dwellers in lowlands</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And our air has been breathed before. It is</div> + <div class="verse indent0">A sultry air: men talk to each other</div> + <div class="verse indent0">In haze and their words are close and fevered.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">A warm breeze crosses our little hillocks,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And then the dust settles down again.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Not near the Alps do we live.</div> + <div class="verse indent28">Great Genius,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Grant us an electric climate! Touch us</div> + <div class="verse indent0">With snowy fire, send the Mistral to sweep</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Bare our plain and proclaim the gaiety</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of altitudes, the glory of clear stars,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The exaltation of the sun burning</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The rare air. Great Genius, send the Mistral!</div> + </div> + </div> +</div> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_8"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_63_63" href="#FNanchor_63_63" class="label">[63]</a> From <i>Points of View</i>, 1924, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_64_64" href="#FNanchor_64_64" class="label">[64]</a> From <i>Americans</i>, 1922, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_65_65" href="#FNanchor_65_65" class="label">[65]</a> 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.”</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_66_66" href="#FNanchor_66_66" class="label">[66]</a> Also he could have mastered the philosophy of Mr. John Dewey and +made his “religion of democracy” more respectable.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_67_67" href="#FNanchor_67_67" class="label">[67]</a> A perusal of the <i>Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman</i>, 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.”</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_68_68" href="#FNanchor_68_68" class="label">[68]</a> From <i>Prejudices: Fourth Series</i>, Alfred A. Knopf, publisher.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_69_69" href="#FNanchor_69_69" class="label">[69]</a> From <i>The Modern Temper</i>, Harcourt, Brace & Co., publisher.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_70_70" href="#FNanchor_70_70" class="label">[70]</a> Mr. Lippmann is not a literary critic but his views are pertinent to this +discussion.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_71_71" href="#FNanchor_71_71" class="label">[71]</a> The Macmillan Company, publisher.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_72_72" href="#FNanchor_72_72" class="label">[72]</a> 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_73_73" href="#FNanchor_73_73" class="label">[73]</a> In <i>Style and Form in American Prose</i> (1929).</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Behaviour_and_Continuity"> + <i class="largeheading">Behaviour and Continuity</i> + <br> + BERNARD BANDLER II + </h2> +</div> + + +<h3 id="I_8">I</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[260]</span>the most sublimated actions, by reference to the constitution +of the organism and to the determining factors of its +environment, approaches sound science.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Behaviourists are therefore right in excluding consciousness, +purpose, and mind from psychology. These are inaccessible +to science: first, because they can never be precisely +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[261]</span>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 <em>is</em> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[262]</span></p> + + +<h3 id="II_10"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<i lang="la">sub specie mortalitatis</i>. From the vantage point of +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[263]</span>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 <i lang="la">sub specie æternitatis</i> 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 <i lang="la">sub specie æternitatis</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[264]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[265]</span>manifold beings he felt contained within himself seemed a +violation of the ideal.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr">donnée</i>, 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 <i>Ethics</i> of Spinoza and <i>The +Wings of the Dove</i> say, will be identical.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[266]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[267]</span>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.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[268]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="The_Well_of_Discipline"> + <i class="largeheading">The Well of Discipline</i> + <br> + SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>The lapidary precedes the historian, and the sound of the +mallet is heard in the land chipping <i lang="la">Hic Jacet</i> on the monuments +which humanism has erected, with an epitaph which +runs blithely thus:</p> + +<blockquote> +<p>“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.”</p> +</blockquote> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[269]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="I_9"> + I +</h3> + +<p>In imagination we dramatise the Renaissance as a sweeping +revolution. Whether humanists or modernists, we look +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[270]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Divine Comedy</i>. The literary impulse of the Renaissance +lent itself no less triumphantly to religious themes; +there was <i>Paradise Lost</i>. Natural science, indeed, began +its modern course under the impulse of the Renaissance. +Still, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[271]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[272]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="II_11"> + II +</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>Jerusalem +Recovered</i> and <i>Paradise Lost</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[273]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[274]</span>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 <em>reason</em>.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>tradition</em>.</p> + +<p>In fancy I may picture a Romulus—abandoned on a hillside +and suckled by a wolf—inventing for himself a system +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[275]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[276]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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, <i>Gulliver</i>, or <i>Through the Looking Glass</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[277]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[278]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="III_7"> + III +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[279]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>By turning his mind! This contrast between <em>mind</em>, on +the one hand, and on the other hand specific knowledge to +which a <em>mind</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[280]</span>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.</p> + +<p>In shifting the basic common discipline from humane letters +to natural science, then, modernism has, in so far, <em>abandoned +the mind</em>. 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[281]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="IV_5"> + IV +</h3> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[282]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>“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.... <em>The meanings +of words had no longer the same relations to things</em>....” +And he goes on to detail wherein the confused meanings +of terms unsettled the mutual comprehension upon +which the harmony of civilised life depends.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[283]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[284]</span>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 <em>the same</em> elements filled with <em>the same</em> 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.</p> + +<p>Modernism reaches its ultimate goal in a knowledge of +nature. But nature has no need of our knowledge. It is <em>we</em> +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.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[285]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Courage_and_Education74"> + <i class="largeheading">Courage and Education</i><a id="FNanchor_74_74" href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> + <br> + RICHARD LINDLEY BROWN + </h2> +</div> + + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[286]</span>able to form for himself an intellectual and spiritual life +and destiny independent of origin and circumstance.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>As early as 1882, in <i>Literature and Science</i>, 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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[287]</span>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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[288]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>It is to the adoption of this principle by many secondary-school +teachers that we owe the presence in our colleges of +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[289]</span>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[290]</span>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.</p> + + +<h3 id="FOOTNOTES_9"> + FOOTNOTES +</h3> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_74_74" href="#FNanchor_74_74" class="label">[74]</a> A Senior paper read at Bowdoin College, Commencement, 1929.—Editor.</p></div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[291]</span></p> + + + <h2 class="nobreak" id="A_List_of_Books_Published_Since_1900"> + <i class="largeheading">A List of Books Published Since 1900</i> + </h2> +</div> + + +<p><span class="smcap">Note</span>—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 <i>The Forum</i>, <i>The Bookman</i>, <i>The Hound and +Horn</i>, <i>The Criterion</i>, and <i>The Nineteenth Century and After</i>. Helpful +recent critiques of the work of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More are those +by a young English critic, Philip S. Richards, in <i>The Nineteenth Century and +After</i> for April, 1928, May, 1928, and April, 1929, and an article on “Mr. +More and the Gentle Reader” by G. R. Elliott in <i>The Bookman</i> for April, +1929.</p> + +<blockquote class="hang"> +<p><span class="smcap">Santayana, George.</span> Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. +1900.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Brownell, W. C.</span> French Art, Revised ed. 1901.</p> + +<p>—— Victorian Prose Masters. 1901.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Shelburne Essays, First Series. 1904.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Chesterton, G. K.</span> Heretics. 1905.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Cox, Kenyon.</span> Old Masters and New. 1905.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Shelburne Essays, Second Series. 1905.</p> + +<p>—— Shelburne Essays, Third Series. 1905.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Woodberry, George Edward.</span> The Torch: Eight Lectures on +Race Power in Literature. 1905.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Shelburne Essays, Fourth Series. 1906.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Cox, Kenyon.</span> Painters and Sculptors. 1907.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Lasserre, Pierre.</span> Le Romantisme français. 1907.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Babbitt, Irving.</span> Literature and the American College: Essays in +Defence of the Humanities. 1908.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Frye, P. H.</span> Literary Reviews and Criticisms. 1908.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Shelburne Essays, Fifth Series. 1908.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Seillière, E.</span> Le Mal romantique. 1908.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Brownell, W. C.</span> American Prose Masters. 1909.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Chesterton, G. K.</span> Orthodoxy. 1909.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Shelburne Essays, Sixth Series. 1909.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[292]</span></p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Babbitt, Irving.</span> The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion +of the Arts. 1910.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series. 1910.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Cox, Kenyon.</span> The Classic Point of View: Six Lectures on Painting. +1911.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Babbitt, Irving.</span> The Masters of Modern French Criticism. +1912.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> The Drift of Romanticism (Shelburne +Essays, Eighth Series). 1913.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Brownell, W. C.</span> Criticism. 1914.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Cox, Kenyon.</span> Artist and Public. 1914.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Louis Trenchard.</span> The Limitations of Science. 1915.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Aristocracy and Justice (Shelburne Essays, +Ninth Series). 1915.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr.</span> Estimates in Art. 1916.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Brownell, W. C.</span> Standards. 1917.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Platonism (The Greek Tradition, Introduction). +1917, 1927.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Sherman, Stuart P.</span> Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him. +1917.</p> + +<p>—— On Contemporary Literature. 1917.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Shorey, Paul.</span> The Assault on Humanism. 1917.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Adams, George Plimpton.</span> Idealism and the Modern Age. +1919.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Babbitt, Irving.</span> Rousseau and Romanticism. 1919.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Gass, Sherlock Bronson.</span> A Lover of the Chair. 1919.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> With the Wits (Shelburne Essays, Tenth +Series). 1919.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Eliot, T. S.</span> The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. +1920, 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Inge, W. R.</span> The Idea of Progress. 1920.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Patrick, G. T. W.</span> The Psychology of Social Reconstruction. +1920.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Lasserre, Pierre.</span> Cinquante Ans de Pensée française. 1921.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> A New England Group and Others (Shelburne +Essays, Eleventh Series). 1921.</p> + +<p>—— The Religion of Plato (The Greek Tradition, Vol. I). +1921.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Canby, Henry S.</span> Definitions. 1922.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Frye, P. H.</span> Romance and Tragedy. 1922.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[293]</span></p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Shafer, Robert.</span> Progress and Science: Essays in Criticism. +1922.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Foerster, Norman.</span> Nature in American Literature: Studies in +the Modern View of Nature. 1923.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Houston, Percy H.</span> Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth +Century Humanism. 1923.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Massis, Henri.</span> Jugements I. 1923.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr.</span> A History of Italian Painting. +1923.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Hellenistic Philosophies (The Greek Tradition, +Vol. II). 1923.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Waterhouse, Francis A.</span> Random Studies in the Romantic +Chaos. 1923.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Babbitt, Irving.</span> Democracy and Leadership. 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Brownell, W. C.</span> The Genius of Style. 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Canby, Henry S.</span> Definitions, Second Series. 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Criticism in America.</span> (Essays by Irving Babbitt and others, ed. +by J. E. Spingarn.) 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Eliot, T. S.</span> Homage to John Dryden. 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Hulme, T. E.</span> Speculations (ed. by Herbert Read). 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Massis, Henri.</span> Jugements II. 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> The Christ of the New Testament (The +Greek Tradition, Vol. III). 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Seillière, E.</span> J.-J. Rousseau. 1924.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Gass, Sherlock Bronson.</span> Criers of the Shops. 1925.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Louis Trenchard.</span> The Dogma of Evolution. 1925.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Cerf, Barry.</span> Anatole France: The Degeneration of a Great +Artist. 1926.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Ferrero, Guglielmo.</span> Words to the Deaf. 1926.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Giese, W. F.</span> Victor Hugo, The Man and the Poet. 1926.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Shafer, Robert.</span> Christianity and Naturalism: Essays in Criticism, +Second Series. 1926.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Brownell, W. C.</span> Democratic Distinction in America. 1927.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr.</span> The American Spirit in Art (The +Pageant of America, Vol. XII). 1927.</p> + +<p>—— Modern Painting. 1927.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> Christ the Word (The Greek Tradition, +Vol. IV). 1927.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Munson, Gorham B.</span> Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and +Good Sense. 1927.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[294]</span></p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Von Hügel, Baron Friedrich.</span> Selected Letters, 1896–1924. +1927.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Babbitt, Irving.</span> French Literature (A. L. A. booklet). 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Benda, Julien.</span> La Trahison des Clercs. 1928. (Trans., The +Treason of the Intellectuals. 1928.)</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Eliot, T. S.</span> For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. +1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Elliott, W. Y.</span> The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Foerster, Norman.</span> American Criticism: A Study in Literary +Theory from Poe to the Present. 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Maritain, Jacques.</span> Three Reformers: Luther—Descartes—Rousseau. +1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Mercier, Louis J. A.</span> Le Mouvement humaniste aux États-Unis. +1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">More, Paul Elmer.</span> The Demon of the Absolute (New Shelburne +Essays, Vol. I). 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Munson, Gorham B.</span> Destinations: A Canvass of American +Literature Since 1900. 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Rand, E. K.</span> Founders of the Middle Ages. 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Sherman, Stuart P.</span> Shaping Men and Women: Essays on +Literature and Life. 1928.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Benda, Julien.</span> Belphégor (Trans., Introduction by Irving +Babbitt). 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Canby, Henry S.</span> American Estimates. 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Chesterton, G. K.</span> Generally Speaking. 1929.</p> + +<p>—— The Thing. 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Elliott, G. R.</span> The Cycle of Modern Poetry: A Series of Essays +toward Clearing our Present Poetic Dilemma. 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Foerster, Norman.</span> The American Scholar: A Study in Litteræ +Inhumaniores. 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Frye, P. H.</span> Visions and Chimeras. 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Munson, Gorham B.</span> Style and Form in American Prose. 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Warren, Austin.</span> Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist. +1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Wickham, Harvey.</span> The Impuritans. 1929.</p> + +<p><span class="smcap">Zeitlin, Jacob</span>, and <span class="smcap">Woodbridge, Homer</span>. Life and Letters of +Stuart P. Sherman. 2 vols. 1929.</p> +</blockquote> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78119 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/78119-h/images/cover.jpg b/78119-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..60425d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/78119-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6c72794 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. 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