Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

I

The tradition of scholarship, like so many other things, comes to us from what used to be called the Renaissance, the period (it may not be ironical to be reminded) in which the Americas were discovered and explored; and whatever savour of distinction inheres in the idea of “the gentleman and the scholar” was created then. Scholarship at first meant merely a knowledge of the classics, and though it has since widened its scope, even then the diversity of its problems was apparent, for the classical writers had tilled many fields of human knowledge, and the student of Homer and Virgil was really faced with a different problem from the student of Plato or Thucydides. Scholarship has never been a reality, a field that could be bounded and defined in the sense in which poetry, philosophy, and history can be. It is a point of view, an attitude, a method of approach, and, so far as its meaning and purpose can be captured, it may be said to be the discipline and illumination that come from the intellectual mastery of a definite problem involved in the growth of the human spirit.

Scholarship, conceived in this sense, has no history (though dull and learned hodge-podges have served as such), for it is a spirit diffused over various fields of study; and in America this spirit has scarcely even come into existence. American Universities seem to have been created for the special purpose of ignoring or destroying it. The chief monuments of American scholarship have seldom if ever come from men who have been willing to live their whole lives in an academic atmosphere. The men whom we think of as our foremost literary scholars, Gildersleeve, Norton, and the rest, acquired their fame rather through their personalities than their scholarly achievements. The historians, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, Parkman, Rhodes, Lea, Fiske, Mahan, were not professors; books like Taylor’s “Mediæval Mind,” Henry Adams’s “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,” Thayer’s “Cavour,” Villard’s “John Brown,” and Beveridge’s “John Marshall,” even Ticknor’s “History of Spanish Literature,” were not written within University walls, though Ticknor’s sixteen years of teaching tamed the work of a brilliant man of the world until there is little left save the characteristic juiceless virtue of an intelligent ordering of laborious research. It would seem as if in the atmosphere of our Universities personality could not find fruitage in scholarly achievement worthy of it, and learning can only thrive when it gives no hostages to the enemy, personality.

Of the typical products of this academic system, the lowest is perhaps the literary dissertation and the highest the historical manual or text-book. It may be because history is not my own special field of study that I seem to find its practitioners more vigorous intellectually than the literary scholars. Certainly our historians seem to have a special aptitude for compiling careful summaries of historical periods, and some of these have an ordered reasonableness and impersonal efficiency not unlike that of the financial accounting system of our large trusts or the budgets of our large universities. To me most of them seem feats of historical engineering rather than of historical scholarship; and if they represent a scholarly “advance” on older and less accurate work, written before Clio became a peon of the professors, it can only be said that history has not yet recovered from the advance. Nor am I as much impressed as the historians themselves by the more recent clash between the “old” school and the “new,” for both seem to me equally lacking in a truly philosophic conception of the meaning of history. Yet there is among the younger breed a certain freshness of mind and an openness to new ideas, though less to the problems of human personality or to the emotional and spiritual values of man’s life. This deficiency is especially irritating in the field of biography. Not even an American opera (corruptio optimi) is as wooden as the biographies of our statesmen and national heroes; and if American lives written by Englishmen have been received with enthusiasm, it was less because of any inherent excellence than because they at least conceived of Hamilton or Lincoln as a man and not as an historical document or a political platitude.

But literary scholarship is in far worse plight in our Universities. No great work of classical learning has ever been achieved by an American scholar. It may be unfair to suggest comparison with men like Gilbert Murray, Croiset, or Wilamowitz; but how can we be persuaded by the professors or even by a dean that all culture will die if we forget Greek and Latin, until they satisfy us by their own work that they themselves are alive? Asia beckons to us with the hand of Fate, but Oriental scholarship is a desert through which a few nomadic professors wander aimlessly. As to the literatures in the modern European tongues, Dante scholarship has perhaps the oldest and most respectable tradition, but on examination dwindles into its proper proportions: an essay by Lowell and translations by Longfellow and Norton pointed the way; a Dante Society has nursed it; and its modern fruits, with one or two honourable exceptions, are a few unilluminating articles and text-books. Ticknor’s pioneer work in the Spanish field has had no successors, though Spanish America is at our doors; the generous subsidies of rich men have resulted as usual in buildings but not in scholarship. Of the general level of our French and German studies I prefer to say nothing; and silence is also wisest in the case of English. This field fairly teems with professors; Harvard has twice as many as Oxford and Cambridge combined, and the University of Chicago almost as many as the whole of England. Whether this plethora of professors has justified itself, either by distinguished works of scholarship or by helping young America to love literature and to write good English, I shall not decide, but leave entirely to their own conscience. This at least may be said, that the mole is not allowed to burrow in his hole without disturbance; for in this atmosphere, as a protest and counterfoil, or as a token of submission to the idols of the market-place, there has arisen a very characteristic academic product,—the professor who writes popular articles, sometimes clever, sometimes precious, sometimes genteel and refined, sometimes merely commonplace, but almost always devoid of real knowledge or stimulating thought. Even the sober pedant is a more humane creature than the professorial smart-Aleck.

Whence arises this inhibition of mediocrity, this fear of personality and intellect, this deep antinomy of pedant and dilettante? The “fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease” which affected the professors of the Colleges of Unreason in “Erewhon” is mildly endemic in every University in the world, and to a certain degree in every profession; but nowhere else does it give the tone to the intellectual life of a whole people. If I were a sociologist, confident that the proper search would unearth an external cause for every spiritual defect, I might point to any one of a dozen or more damning facts as the origin and source of all our trouble,—to the materialism of a national life directed solely toward practical ends, to the levelling and standardizing influences of democracy, to Anglo-Saxon “Colonialism,” to the influence of German erudition, or to the inadequate economic rewards of the academic life. I should probably make much of that favourite theme of critical fantasy, the habits derived from the “age of the pioneers,” a period in which life, with its mere physical discomforts and its mere demands on physical energy and endurance, was really so easy and simple that Americans attempt to reproduce it on all their holidays.

But in so far as they have any reality, all these are merely symptoms of the same disease of the soul. The modern sanatorium may be likened to the mediæval monastery without its spiritual faith; the American University to a University without its inner illumination. It is an intellectual refuge without the integration of a central soul,—crassly material because it has no inner standards to redeem it from the idols of the market-place, or timid and anæmic because it lacks that quixotic fire which inheres in every act of faith. It is at one and the same time our greatest practical achievement and our greatest spiritual failure. To call it a compound of sanatorium and machine-shop may seem grossly unfair to an institution which has more than its share of earnest and high-minded men; but though the phrase may not describe the reality, it does indicate the danger. When we find that in such a place education does not educate, we cry for help to the only gods we know, the restless gods of Administration and Organization; but scholarship cannot be organized or administered into existence, even by Americans.

What can we say (though it seem to evade the question) save that America has no scholarship because as yet it has a body but no soul? The scholar goes through all the proper motions,—collects facts, organizes research, delivers lectures, writes articles and sometimes books,—but under this outer seeming there is no inner reality. Under all the great works of culture there broods the quivering soul of tradition, a burden sometimes disturbing and heavy to bear, but more often helping the soul to soar on wings not of its own making. We think hungrily that the freshness of outlook of a young people should be more than compensation; but the freshness is not there. Bad habits long persisted in, or new vices painfully acquired, may pass for traditions among some spokesmen of “Americanism,” but will not breathe the breath of life into a national culture. All is shell, mask, and a deep inner emptiness. We have scholars without scholarship, as there are churches without religion.

Until there comes a change of heart or a new faith or a deep inner searching, scholarship must continue to live this thwarted and frustrated life. Only a profound realization of its high purpose and special function, and the pride that comes from this realization, can give the scholar his true place in an American world. For this special function is none other than to act as the devoted servant of thought and imagination and to champion their claims as the twin pillars that support all the spiritual activities of human life,—art, philosophy, religion, science; and these it must champion against all the materialists under whatever name they disguise their purpose. What matter whether they be scientists who decry “dialectics,” or sociologists who sneer at “mere belles-lettres,” or practical men who have no use for the “higher life”? Whether they be called bourgeois or radical, conservative or intellectual,—all who would reduce life to a problem of practical activity and physical satisfaction, all who would reduce intellect and imagination to mere instruments of practical usefulness, all who worship dead idols instead of living gods, all who grasp at every flitting will-o’-the-wisp of theory or sensation,—all these alike scholarship must forever recognize as its enemies, and its chief tempters.