One of the strange symptoms of the modern tarantism is this unrelenting hostility to beauty: in fashion not less than in art it is the ugly and the queer, in fiction and verse the pathological, the unpleasant, that seem to be assiduously striven for. The arts are sisters, children of one father; their aims are closely allied, and if one step down from her high estate, the others are likely soon to show the unfortunate influence of her example. Bad taste in sculpture affects us more disagreeably than bad taste in painting, because sculpture stands forth with us, in our own atmosphere, while the picture confines within its frame an atmosphere of its own; bad taste in dancing is worse in the drawing room than on the stage, being by so much nearer; and bad taste in literary expression is more distressing than any, because, after all, it is only music which has so intimate an appeal as the written word. Only music and the written word become a part of us, dwelling with us unsought, singing to us unurged, lingering with us in the silent hours when our mental sentinels or taskmasters are off guard, and if a graceless pretender, professing to be what he is not, intrude upon the starry company of the heaven-born, shall not the intrusion be resented?
What is poetry? There are many definitions with which few of us can quarrel; but one of the most direct, and at the same time most comprehensive, is that poetry is the expression, in terms of beauty, of what humanity feels—that beauty of thought, beauty of feeling, beauty of form, which implies truth, sympathy, clarity of vision, imagination, and the unerring sense of fitness which is good taste. And if this God-given beauty, twin-sister to music, be not inextricably woven, like a three-fold thread of gold, through and through the very fabric of the soul, it is never to be acquired—no mastery of prosody, of rules, of libraries full of the “best examples,” will avail. It is distinct from inspiration, which may be a single bolt from the blue: it is rather an attribute, to venture upon the methods of Sir Boyle Roche, of the voice of that inmost higher self which the late F. W. H. Myers called “the subliminal mind” and which Maeterlinck has termed “our unknown guest.” Let the man whose literary endeavor, well-intended though it be, is without this essence, call himself what he please: he is not, nor can he ever be, a poet.
Meanwhile, those who remain unbitten of the dread Lycosa may find peace in M. Andrè Salmon’s dictum that “critics encourage the most absurd, for the most absurd is necessary to art”—which may be stretched to include the art of letters—and anything that is really necessary may, by right effort, be endured. It is sufficiently clear that not on this side of the bridge of Al Sirat shall we and the Neo-Parnassians agree: but we can at least avoid each other like gentlemen.
HUMANISM AND DEMOCRACY
When our fathers formulated their program for democracy, and announced that its chief objective was to secure for the individual, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, contemporary records show that they generally believed that if these ends could be attained, a new golden age would be inaugurated among men, and that all the various ills would drop out of life. We have been disillusioned. Since the formulation of the Declaration of Independence we have learned the extreme antiquity of man upon the earth, and we have learned by what slow and tortuous paths the human family has zigzagged up to its present state of imperfection. To-day we do not hope that any form of government can assure us an immediate millennium, and we look with suspicion upon any prophet who promises an immediate utopia. Condemned as we are to look with straining eyes towards a distant land of promise, some remote perfection of our race, we are all the more jealous of our chance to do our bit in achieving that goal. The inalienable right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, has yielded place to the inalienable right to grow. Forms of government seem worthy to endure, in proportion as they minister to growth. We still cling to democracy, because it still seems to promise the largest chance for growth. It is a significant fact that along with the phrase “make the world safe for democracy,” there has sprung into existence the phrase “make democracy safe for the world,” as if to warn us that democracy like all forms of government, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and that end is humanism.
In conceiving this paper, my patriotic purpose was to prove how humanism helps democracy, but all the way along I have been conscious of being guilty of an enormous hysteron proteron, for the real issue is not how humanism helps democracy, but how much democracy helps humanism. And what is humanism? Something too large to be defined in a single sentence or paragraph. It is a number of things. In the first place humanism is humaneness; not exactly, however, the kind of humaneness that the editor of the New Republic believes in. Perhaps you remember how a year ago a distinguished professor of Greek hung a metaphorical millstone about the neck of Mr. Abraham Flexner and cast him into the midst of the sea, because he had attempted to poison the well-springs of knowledge for a whole generation of young people. On the millstone was inscribed the indictment: “Mr. Flexner is not the first man who has had the courage of his insensibilities.” At this the editor of the New Republic declared that the distinguished professor had been very inhumane, and was therefore an unfit exponent of the humanities. One wonders with what gentle and humane words Minos and Aeacus and Rhadamanthus will speak to Mr. Flexner when he comes to judgment in that long line of those who, having done irreparable harm in this world, present as their only excuse the fact that they were sincere in their good intentions. Humanism is humaneness based where Socrates and Plato based it, on knowledge, understanding and intelligence.
Humanism is a conservation of the highest achievements of the human spirit. It gives substance to the seemingly paradoxical belief that for the rank and file of men, nine-tenths of the future lies in the past,—that certain giant men long dead, still have power to lead the race to heights that the majority of us but dimly see. To put it negatively, humanism represents the belief that a majority of each generation go to their graves without having entered upon their inheritance, without even having suspected that they had an inheritance, having lived not so much in their sins, as in ignorance of the glory that humanity has already attained.
A true humanism will include and properly appraise the mental achievements of its own age. The danger always is that the newer achievements will be seen out of all proportion, and overrated because of their nearness. To-day we are dazzled and blinded by the stupendous achievements of a new materialism, a materialism far subtler than that which sprung up a century ago. In the first half of the Nineteenth Century some men of repute were saying that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,” and “life is but the action of the sun’s rays upon carbon.” Against this gross and crass materialism Emerson arose as our champion, a prophet who had lighted his torch at the altar of Prometheus in the Academy of Plato. By the light of that torch men again began to see things in true proportion, and to-day we can say of those earlier materialists “their knowledge is the wisdom of yesterday.” But the new materialism is far subtler, boasting far greater achievements. Two years ago the headlines in the papers announced that a man in Washington had talked by wireless telephony with a man in Hawaii. We were filled with pride at this new demonstration of the power of the human mind to master the laws of the external universe. And yet after all, the question is not how far you talk, but what you say. Did the man in Washington say to the man in Hawaii anything so important as the messages which Plato sent by wireless across the centuries to Emerson? When we read the prayer which Plato put into the mouth of Socrates at the close of the Phædrus: “Give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be as one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a wise and temperate man can bear and carry,” we are ready to strive to prepare ourselves to be torch-bearers in the great race.
This is no small program that humanism undertakes:—to make a man thoroughly humane; to eradicate all the brutal instincts and all the cruel traits which two hundred thousand, perhaps two million years of savagery have implanted in his nature; to conserve for him and in him all the highest spiritual experiences of the race; to make him a worthy member of any celestial gathering however nobly conceived and constituted, this is a program requiring not merely the fifteen or twenty years usually allotted to formal education, but a lifetime, and perhaps a million years beyond. The million years beyond is too much for the practical man, and he holds up his hands in protest, declaring: “Such doctrine is too other-worldly for me. If you train the children to tune their harps for another world, who is going to kill the hogs, and dig the sewers, and mine the coal?” To such a question I would reply in the same tone: “You need not worry. There is a certain gentleman, a veritable colossus on the educational sky-line, who uses one foot to direct the schools at Gary, and the other foot to trample down an over-rampant idealism in New York City. He will see to it that the millennium is not ushered in too hastily.” In the last municipal election in the city of New York, we had a splendid example of Tammany’s political astuteness in temporarily aligning itself with the idealism of the proletariat on the east side. To the foreigner who comes to this country, America means one thing above all else, and that is the chance to emerge from the class in which he was born. The rebellion among the foreign population of New York against the Gary system, was not a rebellion against industrial education as such, but a rebellion against the idea that their children were to have industrial education and nothing more. Our practical man, even if he is unwilling to look forward a million years, must at any rate look back a million years. No one can hope to see our educational problem in its true perspective unless he is willing to take his stand at the entrance of a palæolithic cave, and look across the centuries at the toils of our race as it has attempted to differentiate the brutal from the human.
In every school house there are palæolithic children, neolithic children, bronze age children, iron age children, children of the golden age, children of a thousand different aptitudes and limitations. The mussed up condition of our educational program, the incoherent wrangling about educational theory, is largely due to our failure to keep this steadily in mind. Somehow we have not fully appreciated the fact that endowment is more than training, and we are still hoping that in some way we can perform the miracle and carry the neolithic child on our shoulders across the ten thousand, or possibly the fifty thousand, years that intervene between him and abstract thought. And because we have wished to do the greater miracle, we have failed to do the lesser one that makes for the slow but sure growth of the race. It is not strange that a cry has gone up for vocational training. It is strange, however, that we did not foresee this just demand, and meet it even before the demand was made. At the present moment there is danger that the interests of the more gifted child will be sacrificed to meet the need of the less gifted one, that our whole public school system will be Garyized, and that the proper foundation of our higher education will be impaired if not destroyed. In a neighboring state a year or two ago, the state superintendent of education sent out notes to the smaller high schools advising that courses in domestic science and agriculture be substituted for geometry and Virgil. It did not occur to him that he could establish a lower form of education without destroying a higher form. It did not occur to him that the state was rich enough to pay for both forms. Many years ago I lived near a rich stock-man who owned the finest herd of shorthorn cattle in the Middle West. He paid a man $2,000 a year to care for his cattle; he sent his children to a school where no teacher received more than five hundred dollars a year. I will not say that he cared four times as much for his cattle as for his children, but I will say that we have here the solution of our problem. If we would spend four times as much money on our elementary schools, vocational and industrial courses could be properly established, classes could be reduced from fifty to fifteen, the needs of each pupil could be carefully studied, the pupil of lesser gifts could be directed into industrial courses without humiliation, and the pupil of higher gifts would make his way normally and naturally to geometry and Virgil.