Literature and the American college; essays in defense of the humanities

Preface

Nearly half the matter in this volume has been printed elsewhere. "The Rational Study of the Classics," " Literature and the College," and " On Being Original " are reproduced with immaterial changes from the " Atlantic Monthly." Two papers in the " Nation " are combined with a great deal of new material in the essay on " Literature and the Doctor's Degree." Portions of the essays on "Ancients and Moderns " and "Academic Leisure " are taken from two articles in the " Harvard Graduates' Magazine." I wish to thank the publishers of these periodicals for permission to reprint.

I have often been forced in these essays to tread on burning ground, at the risk of giving offense to some of my readers. I may at least say that my aim has been to define types and tendencies, and not to satirize or even label individuals. Individuals are usually not easy to label, especially at a time like the present. A highly unified age may offer examples of highly unified personalities ; but there is likely to exist in the individual of to-day the same confused conflict of tendencies that we see in the larger world. What I try to show is, not that our

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PREFACE

contemporary scholars are lacking in humanistic traits, but that the scholars in whom these traits predominate are few (rari nantes in gurgite vasto).

I would also remind the reader that my treatment of certain eminent persons of the past and present is limited by my subject, and makes no claim to completeness. It was, for example, inevitable in dealing with college education that I should discuss the r61e of President Eliot. It was also inevitable, in the case of one who has exercised so many-sided an influence on his time, that I should fall very far short of a rounded estimate.

I desire to take this opportunity of expressing my sense of obligation to Professor Charles Eliot Norton. Those who during the past generation have felt the need of a more humane scholarship are indebted to him, many for direct aid and encouragement, and all for an example. To Mr. Paul E. More, literary editor of the New York " Evening Post " and the " Nation," who read several of these essays in manuscript, acknowledgments are due for various criticisms and suggestions.

I. B.

Contents

I. What is Humanism? i II. Two Types of Humanitarians : Bacon

and Rousseau 32

III. The College and the Democratic Spirit 72

II

We should of course remember that though we have been talking of ancient humanism and humanists, the word humanist was not used until the Renaissance and the word humanism not until a still later period. In studying the humanism of the Renaissance the significant contrast that we need to note is the one commonly made at this time between humanity and divinity. In its essence the Renaissance is a protest against the time when there was too much divinity and not enough humanity, against the starving and stunting of certain sides of man by mediaeval theology, against a vision of the supernatural that imposed a mortal constraint upon his more purely human and natural faculties. The models of a full and free play of these faculties were sought in the ancient classics, but the cult of the ancients soon became itself a superstition, so that a man was called a humanist from the mere fact of having received an initiation into the ancient languages, even though he had little or nothing of the doctrine and discipline that the term should imply. Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane. For many of them humanism, so far from being a doctrine and discipline, was a revolt from all discipline, a wild rebound from the mediaeval extreme into an opposite excess. What predominates in the first part of the Renaissance is a movement of emancipation — emancipation of the senses, of the intellect, and in the northern countries of the conscience. It was the first great modern era of expansion, the first forward push of individualism. As in all such periods, the chief stress is on the broadening of knowledge, and, so far as was compatible with the humanistic exclusiveness, of sympathy. The men of that time had what Emerson calls a canine appetite for knowledge. The ardor with which they broke away from the bonds and leading-strings of mediaeval tradition, the exuberance with which they celebrated the healing of the long feud between nature and human nature, obscured for a time the need of decorum and selection. A writer like Rabelais, for instance, is neither decorous nor select ; and so in spite of his great genius would probably have seemed to a cultivated ancient barbaric rather than humane. Such a disorderly

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

and undisciplined unfolding of the faculties of the individual, such an over-emphasis on the benefits of liberty as compared with the benefits of restraint, brought in its train the evils that are peculiar to periods of expansion. There was an increase in anarchical self-assertion and self-indulgence that seemed a menace to the very existence of society; and so society reacted against the individual and an era of expansion was followed by an era of concentration. This change took place at different times, and under different circumstances, in different countries. In Italy the change coincides roughly with the sack of Rome (1527) and the Council of Trent ; in France it follows the frightful anarchy of the wars of religion and finds political expression in Henry IV, and literary expression in Malherbe. Of course in so complex a period as the Renaissance we must allow for innumerable eddies and crosscurrents and for almost any number of individual exceptions. In an age as well as in an individual there are generally elements, often important elements, that run counter to the main tendency. But if one is not a German doctor who has to prove his " originality," or a lover of paradox for its own sake,

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it is usually possible to discern the main drift in spite of the eddies and counter-currents.

'We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanisn that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective., The whole movement was complicated by what is at bottom a different problem, the need that was felt in France and Italy, at least, of protecting society against the individual. One can insist on selection and discipline without at the same time being so distrustful of individualism. Many of the humanists of this period fell into hardness and narrowness (in other words, ceased to be humane) from over-emphasis on a discipline that was to be imposed from without and from above, and on a doctrine that was to be codified in a multitude of minute prescriptions. The essence of art, according to that highly astringent genius, Scaliger, who had a European influence on the literary criticism of this age, is electio et fastidium sui — selection and fastidiousness toward one's self (in practice Scaliger reserved his fastidiousness for other people). This spirit of fastidious selection gained

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

ground until instead of the expansive Rabelais we have the exclusive Malherbe, until a purism grew up that threatened to impoverish men's ideas and emotions as well as their vocabulary. Castiglione had said in his treatise on the Courtier that there should enter into the make-up of the gentleman an element of aloofness and disdain (sprezzatura), a saying that, properly interpreted, contains a profound truth. Unfortunately, aristocratic aloofness, coupled with fastidious selection and unleavened by broad and sympathetic knowledge, leads straight to the attitude that Voltaire has hit off in his sketch of the noble Venetian lord Pococurante, — to the type of scholar who would be esteemed, not like the man of to-day by the inclusiveness of his sympathies, but by the number of things he had rejected. Pococurante had cultivated sprezzatura with a vengeance, and rejected almost everything except a few verses of Virgil and Horace. " What a great man is this Pococurante ! " says the awestricken Candide ; " nothing can please him."

The contrast between the disciplinary and selective humanism of the later Renaissance and the earlier period of expansion should not blind us to the underlying unity of aim. Like the ancient humanists whom they took as their guides, the men of both periods aimed at forming the complete man (totus, teres atque rotundus). But the men of the later period and the neo-classicists in general hoped to attain this completeness not so much by the virtues of expansion as by the virtues of concentration. It seemed to them that the men of the earlier period had left too much opening for the whims and vagaries of the individual ; and so they were chiefly concerned with making a selection of subjects and establishing a doctrine and discipline that should be universal and human. To this end the classical doctrine and discipline were to be put into the service of the doctrine and discipline of Christianity. This attempt at a compromise between the pagan and Christian traditions is visible both in Catholic countries in the Jesuit schools, and in Protestant countries in the selection of studies that took shape in the old college curriculum. No doubt the selection of both divinity and humanity that was intended to be representative was inadequate ; and no doubt the whole compromise between doctrines and disciplines, that were in many respects

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

divergent and in some respects hostile, laid itself open to the charge of being superficial. The men of the early Renaissance had felt more acutely the antagonism between divinity as then understood and humanity, and had often taken sides uncompromisingly for one or for the other. Machiavelli accused Christianity of having made the world effeminate, whereas Luther looked on the study of the pagan classics, except within the narrowest bounds, as pernicious. Calvin execrated Rabelais, and Rabelais denounced Calvin as an impostor. Yet, after all, the effort to make the ancient humanities and arts of expression tributary to Christianity was in many respects admirable, and the motto that summed it up, sapiens atque eloquens pietas, might still, if properly interpreted, be used to define the purpose of the college.

A desideratum of scholarship at present is a study of the way certain subjects came to be selected as representative and united into one discipline with elements that were drawn from religion; we need, in short, a more careful history than has yet been written of the old college curriculum. Closely connected with this and equally needful is a history of the development of the gentleman, going back to the work of Castiglione and other Italian treatises on manners in the sixteenth century, and making clear especially how the conception of the gentleman came to unite with that of the scholar so as to form an ideal of which something still survives in England. A Castiglione in Italy and a Sir Philip Sidney in England already realize the ideal of the gentleman and scholar, and that with the splendid vitality of the Renaissance. But a Scaliger, for all his fastidious selection, remains a colossal pedant. In general, it is only under French influence that scholarship gets itself disengaged from pedantry and acquires urbanity and polish, that the standards of the humanist coalesce with those of the man of the world. But it is likewise under French influence that the ideal of the gentleman and scholar is externalized and conventionalized, until in some of the later neo-classic Pococurantes it has degenerated into a mixture of snobbishness and superficiality, until what had once been a profound insight becomes a mere polite prejudice. We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration. Even in his worst artificiality, the neo-classicist is still related to the ancient humanist by his horror of one-sidedness, of all that tends to the atrophy of certain faculties and the hypertrophy of others, by his avoidance of everything that is excessive and over-emphatic; and, inasmuch as it is hard to be an enthusiast and at the same time moderate, by his distrust of enthusiasm. He cultivates detachment and freedom from affectation (sprezzaturd) and wonders at nothing (nil admirari) ; whereas the romanticist, as all the world knows, is prone to wonder at everything — especially at himself and his own genius. / In his appearance and behavior, the neo-classicist would be true to the general traits of human nature, and is even careful to avoid technical and professional terms in his writing and conversation. "Perfected good-breeding," says Dr. Johnson, " consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners." (A standard that Dr. Johnson himself did not entirely attain.) At the bottom of the whole point of view is the fear of specialization. " The true gentleman and scholar " (honnete honime), says La Rochefoucauld, " is he who does not pride himself on anything." We may contrast this with a maxim that is sometimes heard in the American business world : A man who knows two things is damned. In other words, the man of that time would rather have been thought superficial than one-sided, the man of to-day would rather be thought one-sided than superficial.

in

We may perhaps venture to sum up the results of our search for a definition of humanism. We have seen that the humanist, as we know him historically, moved between an extreme of sympathy and an extreme of discipline and selection, and became humane in proportion as he mediated between these extremes. To state this truth more generally, the true mark of excellence in a man, as Pascal puts it, is his power to harmonize in himself opposite virtues and to occupy all the space between them {tout Ventredeux). By his ability thus to unite in himself opposite qualities man shows his humanity, his superiority of essence over other animals. Thus Saint Francois de Sales, we are told, united in himself the qualities of the eagle

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

and the dove — he was an eagle of gentleness. The historian of Greek philosophy we have alreadyquoted remarks on the perfect harmony that Socrates had attained between thought and feeling. If we compare Socrates in this respect with Rousseau, who said that " his heart and his head did not seem to belong to the same individual," we shall perceive the difference between a sage and a sophist. Man is a creature who is foredoomed to one-sidedness, yet who becomes humane only in proportion as he triumphs over this fatality of his nature, only as he arrives at that measure which comes from tempering his virtues, each by its opposite. The aim, as Matthew Arnold has said in the most admirable of his critical phrases, is to see life steadily and see it whole ; but this is an aim, alas, that no one has ever attained completely — not even Sophocles, to whom Arnold applies it. After man has made the simpler adjustments, there are other and more difficult adjustments awaiting him beyond, and the goal is, in a sense, infinitely remote. For most practical purposes, the law of measure is the supreme law of life, because it bounds and includes all other laws. It was doubtless the perception of this fact that led the most eminent personality of the Far East, Gotama Buddha, to proclaim in the opening sentence of his first sermon that extremes are barbarous. But India as a whole failed to learn the lesson. Greece is perhaps the most humane of countries, because it not only formulated clearly the law of measure ("nothing too much"), but also perceived the avenging nemesis that overtakes every form of insolent excess (tyfyis) or violation of this law.

Of course, even in Greece any effective insight into the law of measure was confined to a minority, though at times a large minority. The majority at any particular instant in Greece or elsewhere is almost sure to be unsound, and unsound because it is one-sided. We may borrow a homely illustration from the theory of commercial crises. A minority of men may be prudent and temper their enterprise with discretion, but the majority is sure to over-trade, and so unless restrained by the prudent few will finally bring on themselves the nemesis of a panic. The excess from which Greek civilization suffered should be of special interest, because it is plain that so humane a people could not have failed to make

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

any of the ordinary adjustments. Without attempting to treat fully so difficult a topic, we may say that Greece, having lost its traditional standards through the growth of intellectual skepticism, fell into a dangerous and excessive mobility of mind because of its failure to develop new standards that would unify its life and impose a discipline upon the individual. It failed, in short, to mediate between unity and diversity, or, as the philosophers express it, between the absolute and the relative. The wisest Greek thinkers, notably Socrates and Plato, saw the problem and sought a solution ; but by putting Socrates to death Athens made plain that it was unable to distinguish between its sages and its sophists.

There is the One, says Plato, and there is the Many^ " Show me the man who can combine the One with the Many and I will follow in his footsteps, even as in those of a God."1 To harmonize

1 Phcedrus, 266 B. The Greeks in general did not associate the law of measure with the problem of the One and the Many. Aristotle, who was in this respect a more representative Greek than Plato, can scarcely be said to have connected his theory of the contemplative life or attainment to a sense of the divine unity, with his theory of virtue as a mediating between extremes.

the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it. Ancient India was devoured by a too overpowering sense of the One. The failure of Greece, on the other hand, to attain to this restraining sense of unity led at last to the pernicious pliancy of the " hungry Greekling," whose picture Juvenal has drawn.

The present time in its loss of traditional standards is not without analogy to the Athens of the Periclean age; and so it is not surprising, perhaps, that we should see a refurbishing of the old sophistries. The so-called humanism of a writer like Mr. F. C. S. Schiller has in it something of the intellectual impressionism of a Protagoras.1 Like the ancient sophist, the pragmatist would forego the discipline of a central standard, and make of the in-

1 Mr. Schiller himself points out this connection (see Humanism, p. xvii). As will appear clearly from a later passage (pp. 82 ff.) I do not quarrel with the pragmatists for their appeal to experience and practical results, but for their failure, because of an insufficient feeling for the One, to arrive at real criteria for testing experience and discriminating between judgments and mere passing impressions.

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

dividual man and his thoughts and feelings the measure of all things. "Why may not the advancing front of experience," says Professor James, "carrying its imminent satisfaction and dissatisfaction, cut against the black inane, as the luminous orb of the moon cuts against the black abyss ? " * But the sun and moon and stars have their preordained courses, and do not dare, as the old Pythagoreans said, to transgress their numbers. To make Professor James's metaphor just, the moon would need to deny its allegiance to the central unity, and wander off by itself on an impressionistic journey of exploration through space. It is doubtless better to be a pragmatist than to devote one's self to embracing the cloud Junos of Hegelian metaphysics. But that persons who have developed such an extreme sense of the otherwiseness of things as Professor James and his school should be called humanists — this we may seriously doubt. There would seem to be nothing less humane — or humanistic — than pluralism pushed to this excess, unless it be monism pushed to a similar extremity.

The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must

1 Humanism and Truth, p. 16.

maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality. There are moments when it should have the sense of communion with absolute being, and of C the obligation to higher standards that this insight brings ; other moments when it should see itself as but a passing phase of the everlasting flux and relativity of nature ; moments when, with Emerson, it should feel itself "alone with the gods alone;" and moments when, with Sainte-Beuve, it should look upon itself as only the " most fugitive of illusions in the bosom of the infinite illusion." If man's nobility lies in his kinship to the One, he is at the same time a phenomenon among other phenomena, and only at his risk and peril neglects his phenomenal self. The humane poise of his faculties suffers equally from an excess of naturalism and an excess of supernaturalism. We have seen how the Renaissance protested against the supernaturalist excess of the Middle Ages, against a one-sidedness that widened unduly the gap between nature and human nature. Since that time the world has been tending to the opposite extreme ; not content with establishing a better harmony between nature and human nature, it would close up the

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gap entirely. Man, according to the celebrated dictum of Spinoza, is not in nature as one empire in another empire, but as a part in a whole. Important faculties that the supernaturalist allowed to decay the naturalist has cultivated, but other faculties, especially those relating to the contemplative life, are becoming atrophied through long disuse. Man has gained immensely in his grasp on facts, but in the meanwhile has become so immersed in their multiplicity as to lose that vision of the One by which his lower self was once overawed and restrained. " There are two laws discrete," as Emerson says in his memorable lines ; and since we cannot reconcile the " Law for man " and the " Law for thing," he would have us preserve our sense of each separately, and maintain a sort of "double consciousness," a "public " and a " private " nature ; and he adds in a curious image that a man must ride alternately on the horses of these two natures, " as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one and the other foot on the back of the other."

There is, perhaps, too much of this spiritual circus-riding in Emerson. Unity and plurality appear too often in his work, not as reconciled opposites, but as clashing antinomies. He is too satisfied with saying about half the time that everything is like everything else, and the rest of the time that everything is different from everything else. And so his genius has elevation and serenity, indeed, but at the same time a disquieting vagueness and lack of grip in dealing with particulars. Yet Emerson remains an important witness to certain truths of the spirit in an age of scientific materialism. His judgment of his own time is likely to be definitive : —

" Things are in the saddle And ride mankind."

Man himself and the products of his spirit, language, and literature, are treated not as having a law of their own, but as things ; as entirely subject to the same methods that have won for science such triumphs over phenomenal nature. The president of a congress of anthropologists recently chose as a motto for his annual address the humanistic maxim : " The proper study of mankind is man ; " and no one, probably, was conscious of any incongruity.

WHAT IS HUMANISM?

At this rate, we may soon see set up as a type of the true humanist the Chicago professor who recently spent a year in collecting cats'-cradles on the Congo.

The humanities need to be defended to-day against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachments of theology. But first we must keep a promise already made, and in the following essay try to trace from its origins that great naturalistic and humanitarian movement which is not only taking the place of the humanistic point of view, but actually rendering it unintelligible for the men of the present generation.

II

TWO TYPES OF HUMANITARIANS BACON AND ROUSSEAU

According to Renan, the capital event of modern thought is the substitution in the sixteenth century of the Copernican astronomy for the old anthropocentric view. With the advent of the new astronomy, man, we are told, first had the sensation of the infinite ; it would be less misleading to say that he then had forced upon him as never before the sense of physical immensity. It is this shuddering sense of physical immensity that one finds in Pascal, for example, and which one would seek in vain in a mediaeval writer like Dante. Instead of looking on the world as the centre of the universe and himself as the centre of the world, man was turned adrift, as it were, in the infinitude of space. Thus swallowed up in vastness, he found it increasingly difficult to assert his own superiority of essence ; he regarded himself more and more, not as an empire in another empire, but as a part in a whole. This new feeling of the oneness of nature and human nature brought its own consolations to man for his loss of supernatural privilege. On the sentimental side man was consoled by the boons that, according to Wordsworth, spring from a " wise passiveness ; " on the scientific side by the prospect of the dominion that, according to Bacon, he is to win over nature by the very act of obeying her.

Naturalists then have evidently been divided into two great classes, according as the predominant temper has been sentimental or scientific, and corresponding closely to the two classes of naturalists have been the scientific and sentimental humanitarians. The positivist and utilitarian movements, we should add, have been inspired mainly by scientific humanitarianism, and sentimental naturalism again has been an important element, if not the most important element, in the so-called romantic movement. We have not space to discuss fully why the various forms of naturalism and humanitarianism have been so closely associated in modern thought. It is evident, however, that the vitally important element in this association has been the idea of progress. The Greeks and Romans studied nature scientifically, and to some extent communed sentimentally with nature. Humanism and naturalism coexisted in the men of classical antiquity, as well as in the men of the Renaissance, and often passed over into one another by almost insensible gradations. But only in comparatively recent times have the conquests of science become so pronounced as to raise the hope of a general and systematic advance of the human race. The old philanthropy, as we have said, has been profoundly modified and converted into humanitarianism by being more closely connected with this idea of progress ; and the idea of progress in turn rests mainly on a belief in the benefits that are to come to mankind in the mass as the result of a closer cooperation with nature. The role of science in the new conception has evidently been greater than the role of sentiment. Men have always dreamed of the Golden Age, but it is only with the triumphs of modern science that they have begun to put the Golden Age in the future instead of in the past. The great line that separates the new era from the old is, as Renan remarks, the idea of humanity and the cult of its collective achievements. With the decay of the traditional faith this cult of humanity is coming more and more to be our real religion. We would all like to be Abou ben Adhems (whose tribe has increased), and are, indeed, almost incapable of conceiving of the love of God as something apart from the love of man. The new religion threatens even to impair that historical sense which is the special boast of the nineteenth century. Our modern believers in progress view the past as complacently from their own special angle as did the man of the Middle Ages when he imagined nunneries and cathedrals in ancient Troy.

Possibly our definitions of sentimental and scientific humanitarianism may be made still clearer if we remove them from the cloud-land of abstraction and make them concrete and historical ; and perhaps this may best be done by picking out for each point of view some individual who not only held it but actually illustrated its workings in his life and character. We already have in the sixteenth century a perfect example of the scientific naturalist and humanitarian, in Bacon. For sentimental naturalism, on the other hand, we have to wait until the eighteenth century, when it is embodied with extraordinary completeness in the personality and writings of

Rousseau. Bacon and Rousseau represent between them the main tendencies that are at present disintegrating the traditional disciplines, whether humanistic or religious. When in the following pages we speak of any one as a Baconian or a Rousseauist, we do not mean to assert in all cases a direct or even an indirect influence, but merely that these men are prefigured if not actually anticipated in their outlook on life by either Bacon or Rousseau. Thus the direct or indirect obligations of Wordsworth to Rousseau are not always easy to determine, but no careful student can fail to see that the sentimental naturalism of Wordsworth, all that element in his work by which he is an innovator in English poetry, is either latent or more often fully expressed in the earlier naturalism of Rousseau.