Prejudices

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

But no doubt my jewels will after all, in spite of me, be the same source of mixed pleasure and responsibility that most jewelry is.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

BOOKS, the titles of which are interrogatory, always have a fascination for me. “What is Ibsenism?” “Can You Forgive Her?” “What Shall We Do With Our Girls?” for instance. Of course, they are invariably unsatisfactory and, sometimes, exasperating. They never really answer the questions they propound, and they leave one somewhat more muddled than one was before. Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” is a most bigoted and tedious performance. In it one of the greatest artists of modern times elaborately tells one nothing whatever about art, and leaves one with the impression that his claim on immortality is something of which he has become very much ashamed. But, crafty old person though I be, I succumb to them all, and read them because I can’t resist a title in the form of a question.

At present, I am longing for someone to write a book and call it “What Is Education?” What, as a matter of fact, is education? Every few days someone, in endeavoring to describe and sum up someone else, ends with the clinching statement: “And the strange part of it was that he was a man, or she was a woman, of education.” This is supposed to settle the matter—to arouse in one’s mind a definite image. “He was a man of education,” apparently means something, but what? To me it has come to mean nothing at all. A short time ago I read in the morning paper of a dead body that had been found in the river and taken to the county morgue. “All means of identification had been removed,” wrote the reporter, in commenting on the incident, “but,” he added, “the body was evidently that of a man of education.” And, to me, the remarkable part of this was that the reporter, without doubt, had a hazy idea of what he was trying to express. In the poor, dead, unidentified thing he had discovered and recognized something that, to him, implied “education,” but how he did it, and what it was, I don’t know, because he did not explain.

There are in this connection all sorts of questions I hope the author of the book, to which I look forward, will answer. Is, for instance, “a man of education” the same as “an educated man”? Or is one, perhaps, somewhat more—well, more educated than the other? At times both these phrases sound to me as if they meant precisely the same thing, and then again they suddenly, through no wish of mine, develop subtle but important differences that cause first the one and then the other to seem expressive of a higher, a more comprehensive, form of education. Then, too, is there any particular point at which education leaves off and “cultivation” begins? And can a person be “cultivated” without being educated? The words education and cultivation are constantly upon the American tongue, but what do they mean? Or, do they mean something entirely different to everyone who employs them? Every American girl who flirts her way through the high school is “educated,” and it would be indeed a brave man who dared to suggest that she wasn’t. But is she? (Heaven forbid that I should suggest anything; I merely crave information.) And here let me hasten to add that a friend of mine has always maintained, quite seriously, that he likes me in spite of the fact that I am, as he expresses it, “one of the most illiterate persons” of his acquaintance. His acquaintance, it is some slight comfort to remember, is not large, and he is a doctor of philosophy who lectures at one of the great English universities. Not only has he read and studied much, his memory is appalling; he has never forgotten anything. From his point of view I am not “an educated person.” But then, in the opinion of Macaulay, Addison was sadly lacking in cultivation! “He does not appear to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and moral writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his Latin verse,” Macaulay complains in the Edinburgh Review in 1843. And while Macaulay admits that “Great praise is due to the notes which Addison appended to his version of the second and third books of the Metamorphoses,” and confess them to be “rich in apposite references to Virgil, Stetius and Claudian,” he cannot understand anyone’s failing to allude to Euripides and Theocritus, waxes indignant over the fact that Addison quoted more from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero, and feels positively hurt at his having cited “the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus,” rather than the “authentic narrative of Polybius.” In Rome and Florence—Macaulay continues, more in sorrow than in anger—Addison saw all the best ancient works of art, “without recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or of the Attic dramatists.”

Of course all this is very sad and leaves us quite cross with Addison for having deluded us into believing him to be a person of considerable erudition. How could anybody in the presence of a statue be so absent-minded as not to recall a single verse of Pindar or Callimachus? And how hopelessly superficial must be the mind that actually prefers the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus to the authentic narrative of Polybius! Yet, on the other hand, if we casually referred to Polybius while conversing with most of our educated and even so-called cultivated acquaintances, how many of them, I wonder, would know whether we were talking about a Greek historian or a patent medicine. Macaulay would have considered them hopeless; we (and they) are in the habit (perhaps it is a very bad habit—I don’t know) of regarding them as educated.

Another question that my suppositious author must devote a chapter to, is the difference between just an education and a “liberal” education. We used to hear much more about a “liberal” education than we do now, although Prexy Eliot has of late endeavored to restore the phrase as well as the thing itself. When does an education leave off being penurious, so to speak, and become liberal? According to Mr. Eliot, Milton’s “Areopagitica” helps a lot. I once read Milton’s “Areopagitica” (“but not for love”) with great care, and when I had finished it I had to procure at much trouble and expense another book (written some hundreds of years later) that told me what it was all about. The next day I passed an examination in the subject—and to-day I couldn’t, if my life were at stake, recall the nature or the purpose of the work in question or even explain the meaning of the title. It is possible, of course, that this is more my fault than Milton’s, but whoever is to blame, I can truthfully say that never before or since have I read anything so completely uninteresting or that contributed so little to the liberality of my education. In Mr. Eliot’s opinion, however, and no one more firmly believes in the soundness of Mr. Eliot’s opinions than I do, this ghastly, unintelligible, jaw-breaking relic of the seventeenth century is, if not absolutely essential to a liberal education, at least highly conducive to one. What on earth does it all signify?

Some persons pin their entire faith to a correct use of the pronouns I and me. They cheerfully commit every other form of linguistic violence, but as long as they can preserve sufficient presence of mind boldly to say once in so often something like, “He left James and me behind,” instead of resorting to the cowardly “James and myself,” or the elegantly ungrammatical “James and I,” they feel that their educational integrity has been preserved. Others believe that education and true refinement begin and end with always saying, “You would better,” instead of “You had better,” while Mr. Eliot, in musing on the career of Mr. Roosevelt, no doubt remarks to himself, “An estimable, even an interesting man, but is he, after all, conversant with the ‘Areopagitica’?” (I hate to admit it, but I think it highly probable that he is.) And Macaulay, in the book review from which I have quoted, disposes once and for all of a certain scholar named Blackmore—rips open his intellectual back, in fact, by stating with dignified disgust: “Of Blackmore’s attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an apothegm.” Isn’t it all wonderful? And doesn’t it make you wish that someone would write a work called, “What Is Education?” so you could find out whether you were educated or not?