Atlantic Classics

by Unknown

Take away from youth the power of seeing visions, of dreaming dreams, and you take away the future. It would behoove us to remember, perhaps, that the eras of great deeds have not been eras of analysis, but eras when the creative imagination was at work. Yet our modern mental habit is overwhelmingly a habit of analysis, for which science, in teaching us to pick the world to bits, is partly, though not wholly, responsible. It has brought us an immense amount of interesting information; it has brought also a danger whose gravity we can hardly estimate, in the constant lessening of the synthetic power. The power to image, to fashion high ideals, and to create along the line of the imagining, is weakening, instead of growing more strong. In the glorious days of Queen Elizabeth, in the unparalleled days of Periclean Athens, great ideals formed themselves before men's eyes and great achievements followed; emotion, hope, vision, shaped human nature to great issues. I wonder what influence those perfect marble representations of perfect form had upon the very bodies of the youths and the maidens of Athens, what creative force they exercised,—the imaginative grasp of the perfect reaching forward toward perfectness in the human being. I wonder what influence the character of Sir Philip Sidney alone, with 'high-erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,' has had upon succeeding generations of English youth. 'A man to be greatly good,' said Shelley, 'must imagine intensely and comprehensively.'

Here my quarrel with our present intellectual trend and our present system of education becomes more acute. We are not only losing the habit of mind that fosters idealism, but we are more and more breaking with the past. The door of that storehouse of noble thought and noble example is being slowly but firmly closed, and there is little in modern teaching that can meet the inroads made by the devastating knowledge of evil of which we have been speaking; little that can build up where this tears down. Study of Greek life, with its incomparable power of shaping existence toward the beautiful, is all but cast aside; most unfortunately now, when, with the rush of ignorant peoples to our shores, it might have a far-reaching potency never attained before. The ignorance of contemporary youth regarding that other and finer loveliness of 'Gospel books' is amazing. More and more we are stripped of the humanities; the incredulity of science in contemplating philosophy, art, literature, as part of the educational curriculum, is full of menace. There has never been, I think, in the history of the civilized world, a time when people were so anxious to cast off the past. In our eager Marathon race of material and physical progress we want to go as lightly equipped as possible. The æroplane carries small luggage; our light modern mind is ever ready to throw overboard even its precious heritage, in its eagerness for swift flight. As earlier days have reverenced the old, we reverence the new, and are all too insistently contemporaneous.

We need, as we never needed before, a broader and deeper study of history, of philosophy, of literature; for most of our young, a knowledge of the mental and spiritual past of the race is of far greater importance than a knowledge of the physical past, at the amœba stage, or any other. Science, much as it can do for us, can never meet our deepest need; the world of imaginative beauty and the world of ethical endeavor are apart from its domain. It has no spring to touch the will, yet that which has, the magnificent inheritance of our literature, is more and more neglected for the latest machinery that applied science has devised, or the most recent treatise on insect, bird, or worm. It is well to study insect, bird, and worm, for they are endlessly interesting, but I maintain that neither the full sum of knowledge concerning them, nor even the ultimate fact about the ultimate star, can be a substitute for knowledge of the idealism of Thomas Carlyle, of the categorical imperative of Kant,—for that study of the humanities which means preserving, for the upbuilding of youth, that which was best and finest in the past, as we go on toward the future.

If the swift retort should come, from those who think the present the only era of attainment and the physical world the only source of wisdom, that the past is full of villainies, of lapses from high standards, one can but say that for ethical purposes our study should be frankly a selective study, emphasizing the fine and high, subordinating the evil. There is no hypocrisy in such selection; there is deliberate choice of the higher upon which to dwell, as a formative power, quickening feeling and imagination. I have heard it said that a woman, by resolute dwelling on things noble and pure, may shape the inner nature of her unborn child, and I have faith to believe it. Even so should the nation yet to be be shaped by resolute dwelling on the good. It was not all cowardice, as many a present writer thinks, that led the mothers of earlier days to say little to their sons and daughters regarding evil things, and much regarding right things. Doubtless greater frankness would have been better, yet I doubt if our protracted dwelling on the evil will produce better results.

Should any one object that this emphasis on the good means suppression of the truth, we can but reply that, for the rational soul, the truth is not necessarily the mechanically worked-out sum of all the facts. That we have forgotten the distinction between fact—that which has indeed come to pass, but which may be momentary—and truth, which endures, is one of the many signs of what William Sharp calls the 'spiritual degradation' of our time. Much of our modern thinking and teaching, much of our realistic fiction, rests upon a failure to make the distinction; much that is indisputable in individual instances of wrong-doing may be, thank God! false in the long run.

'That is not true, scientifically true,' we hear often in regard to some fine hope or aspiration of the race; but in the real import of the term there is no such thing as scientific truth. It is a pity that a word of such profound and distinctive meaning should come to be more and more exclusively identified with the observation of physical phenomena, and the formulation of physical laws, whereas the very root-meaning of the word true, from Anglo-Saxon treowe, signifying faithful, gives justification for the idealist's belief that vital truth is partly a matter of the will, not of mere perception and of intellectual deductions drawn therefrom. We have need of deeper truth than that of mere fact; and the truth that shall set us free is a truth of choice, of selection; it embraces that part of human thought and human experience which is worth keeping.

Faithfulness to the best and finest in the past and in the present, rather than horrified gaping at the present's worst, is the attitude that means continued and bettered life, for we become what we will. What are we offering, in the way of concrete examples, or of finely expressed thought about virtue, to the young, to the ignorant nations who are pouring in upon us, that will help them form their vision of the perfect? With our narrowing knowledge of the greater past, our choice of heroes becomes more and more local and national, yet our hierarchy of sacred dead is too small to afford that variety of heroic action and heroic choice that should always be kept before the minds of youth. We teach them that George Washington never told a lie; we teach them something—and there could be nothing better—of Lincoln; but those two figures are lonely upon Olympus, and the great tragic story of the way in which Lincoln faced the greatest crisis in our history will not alone suffice to help the everyday citizen shape his thought and action toward constructive idealism. The lesser heroes of our young republic have acquitted themselves nobly in this struggle and in that, but the struggles have been too closely akin in nature to give the embryo hero that breadth and depth of nurture that he requires. We need an enlarged vision of history, and the sight of great men of all ages faithful to small tasks as to great; we need the companionship of heroes of other times and of other nations, and not of military heroes alone. Saint Francis with his unceasing tenderness to man and beast, Father Damien at work among the lepers, might far better occupy the pages of our magazines, than the pictured deeds of criminals and the achievements of contemporary multimillionaires.

If we need a wider range of concrete examples of the good, we need still more a wider range of nobly expressed ideals. Our thought grows narrow; we smother for lack of breathing space. Benjamin Franklin's philosophy was far from grasping the best of life, yet we remember him better than we do our Emerson, whose plea for spiritual values as the only real ones is lost in the louder and louder groaning of the wheels of our machinery. The idealism that is taught the young in Sunday schools is too often inextricably bound up with unnecessary theology; and many and many a pupil, in discarding the latter, discards the other also. The ideal of success upheld in much journalistic admonition is often rather mean and low; the young of this country need no printed incentives to urge them into commercialism and the victories of trade. The best influences that are being brought to bear upon them are those which concern social responsibilities and the needs of the poor. Yet all this thought and endeavor should supplement and not supersede, as it is doing, a deep concern with the things of the spirit; and no admonition regarding hygiene for one's self or others is a substitute for—

A sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought

And rolls through all things.