The other thing needful to restore education to health and usefulness is that it should surrender its hold upon the superstitious adoration of the public, by giving up its pretensions to individual or social salvation, by ceasing its flattery of nationalistic and capitalistic ambitions, and by laying aside its pomps and ceremonies which conduce mainly to sycophancy and cant. Education has shown in special lines that it can be thoroughly scientific, disinterested, devoted. It is its task to translate these virtues of the specialist into the general field. It is not the business of education to humbug the people in the interest of what any person may think to be for their or for his advantage. It is its business to deal frankly and honestly with them, accepting in the most literal sense the responsibility and the promise contained in the text: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Robert Morss Lovett
SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM
It is natural for the musician to think any land barbarous if it has produced no great composers, the painter if it has produced no great painters, the critic or the scholar if it has produced no great scholars and critics, and so on for all the other arts and sciences. But it is idle to insist that every race should express itself in the same way, or to assume that the genius of a nation can be tested by its deficiencies in any single field of the higher life. Great critics are rare in every age and country; and even if they were not, what consolation is there for the clash and diversity of races and nations except the special and diverse gifts which each may furnish to the spiritual whole? England has achieved greatness without great music, Germany without great sculpture, ancient Rome without great science or philosophy, Judæa with little but poetry and religion; and it is not necessary to lay too much stress on our own lack of great scholars and great critics—yes, even on our lack of great poets and great painters. They may come to-day or to-morrow, or we may be destined never to have them. The idea that great national energy must inevitably flower in a great literature, and that our wide-flung power must certainly find expression in an immortal poem or in the “great American novel,” is merely another example of our mechanical optimism. The vision of great empires that have been both strong and silent, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, haunts all history; Virgil or Camoens only fitfully expresses the power that is summed up in Cæsar or Magellan.
But without insisting on impossible aims or illusory standards of greatness, it is fair to ask some flow of spiritual activity, some general spirit of diffused culture,—in a word, the presence of a soul. For though we must eat (and common sense will cook better dinners than philosophy), though we must work (and the captain of industry can organize trade better than the poet), though we must play (and the athlete can win more games than the scholar), the civilization that has no higher outlets for its intellect and imagination will show at least some marks of spiritual starvation. You may see the signs of its restless gnawing on the face of almost any American woman beyond the first flush of youth; you may see some shadow of its hopeless craving on the face of almost any mature American man.
The same signs are to be seen in American scholarship and American criticism. If scholarship were what most people think it, the dull learning of pedants, and criticism merely the carping and bickering of fault-finders, the fact would hardly be worth recording. But since they are instruments which the mind of man uses for some of its keenest questionings, their absence or their weakness must indicate something at least in the national life and character which it is not unimportant to understand.
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.