grown up a great and loud contempt for the dilettante and æsthete. I hope these words will not be misunderstood. The dilettante at Harvard is any man who writes, thinks, talks well, is not particularly athletic and does not go to the moving-picture shows which have become the chief attraction at the Harvard Union. (This last, by the way, is not fantasy but fact; the “movie” has proved the great agent for class solidarity at Harvard). An æsthete at Harvard is one who has any diversity of interests and activities. At Harvard it is almost a crime to be interested in art, anarchism, literature, music, pageantry, dancing, acting; to write poetry or fiction, to talk English, to read French (except de Maupassant) for pleasure. Mr. Eric Dawson, whose article in The Yale Lit I have already quoted, advises the Yale man to keep it darkly secret “if he cares for etchings, prefers Beethoven to Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and Meredith to Meredith Nicholson.” It is a terrible commentary on Harvard’s intellectual life that the words should be applicable now.
They are. Within the past three years the degeneration of every cultural activity has been persistently rapid. The Lampoon alone resists, and it is marked by its satire on all the new movements. The Socialist Club was founded in 1909. Its boast that it included the active intelligence of the college was always a gross exaggeration, but it was in itself active and intelligent. This year it is practically dead; free, incisive thinking has gone out of fashion. The Dramatic Club started at about the same time with high ideals and even higher achievement. Its record for the past two years has been one of protracted failure. (There is some excuse; other organizations have taken some of its most talented actors.) The activity is too “detached” for Harvard men of the brave new stripe. Even more disastrous has been the career of The Harvard Monthly—The Atlantic Monthly of the colleges—which was founded about thirty years ago and has had on its boards such men as George Santayana, Professor George P. Baker, Robert Herrick, Norman Hapgood, and a host of other distinguished men. It always lacked popular appeal, but there were always enough men at Harvard to produce a superior magazine and almost enough readers to make the production
worth while. Within the last few years it has been found almost impossible to keep the Monthly going, and its dissolution is imminent. It may combine with The Advocate, another paper of other ideals, once graced with infinite wit, now failing because that too is out of fashion. It is possible that these activities may revive, that succeeding generations will take up the slack. That is the work of individuals. The creation of a receptive body is the work of the college, and that has been forgotten.
And if you ask what the Harvard man is doing, what he is talking about, while these activities are being ruined before his eyes, the answer is not merely as Mr. Stearns gave it, that the Harvard man talks smut. So do most other men. The terrible thing is that the Harvard man talks very little else that is worth listening to. Lectures, cuts, assignments, exams, and shows; baseball, daily news (a mere “Did you see that?” conversation), steam engines; girls, parties, class elections, piffling nonsense—that is the roster of the college man. I am terribly conscious of the intolerable stupidity of “intellectual” conversation; I do not wish that conversation at college should consist of nothing but considerations of the Fourfold Root. But it does seem rather unfortunate that the men who are, theoretically, to be the leaders of the next generation, should never talk or think about art, should have no interest in ideas, should be ignorant of philosophy and impatient of fine thinking, should use their own tongue as a barbarous instrument, should be loud and vulgar of speech, commonplace in manner, entirely lacking in distinction of spirit and mind.
The college has failed to make intelligent activity the basis of democracy; there is no community of interest in things of the mind or spirit and that is why artificial means, with the peril they bring to the individual, are resorted to. How far President Lowell is responsible for that which has happened in his administration is a question I cannot answer. He has seen the signs of his time; he has warned Harvard of the terrible danger which has come to it with the decadence of individual study and independent reading. He is trying to make intellectual activity the basis of Harvard’s democracy at the very moment when he is
the ablest of those who in reality help to sustain all that I have here ventured to criticise.
It has been in no reactionary spirit. I have not intended to say that Harvard actually produces the type I have described. The truth is that it does so little to refine what it gets. The care of the superior individual, which always results in the greatest benefit to all, has ceased to engross the college. The new order will not be of the same heterogeneous excellence. That change all suffer, and all resent. Granted that the new Harvard will be glorious and great, was there not room, besides all the State colleges and the technical schools, for its intransigeant detachment, its hopeless struggle for a “useless” culture? It will be said that for such a training men should go to smaller colleges, like Amherst, where they will receive the special attention they may deserve. But I think of what William James said once of Harvard, and I wonder what Harvard men, and what the country, will do when they realize that it can never be said again:
“The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons…. As a nursery for independent and lonely thinkers … Harvard still is in the van…. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product!”
THE NEW STEERAGE
Francis Byrne Hackett