Chapter V: Part 5

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because of any inherent excellence than because they at least conceived of Hamilton or Lincoln as a man and not as an historical document or a political platitude.

But literary scholarship is in far worse plight in our Universities. No great work of classical learning has ever been achieved by an American scholar. It may be unfair to suggest comparison with men like Gilbert Murray, Croiset, or Wilamowitz; but how can we be persuaded by the professors or even by a dean that all culture will die if we forget Greek and Latin, until they satisfy us by their own work that they themselves are alive? Asia beckons to us with the hand of Fate, but Oriental scholarship is a desert through which a few nomadic professors wander aimlessly. As to the literatures in the modern European tongues, Dante scholarship has perhaps the oldest and most respectable tradition, but on examination dwindles into its proper proportions: an essay by Lowell and translations by Longfellow and Norton pointed the way; a Dante Society has nursed it; and its modern fruits, with one or two honourable exceptions, are a few unilluminating articles and text-books. Ticknor’s pioneer work in the Spanish field has had no successors, though Spanish America is at our doors; the generous subsidies of rich men have resulted as usual in buildings but not in scholarship. Of the general level of our French and German studies I prefer to say nothing; and silence is also wisest in the case of English. This field fairly teems with professors; Harvard has twice as many as Oxford and Cambridge combined, and the University of Chicago almost as many as the whole of England. Whether this plethora of professors has justified itself, either by distinguished works of scholarship or by helping young America to love literature and to write good English, I shall not decide, but leave entirely to their own conscience. This at least may be said, that the mole is not allowed to burrow in his hole without disturbance; for in this atmosphere, as a protest and counterfoil, or as a token of submission to the idols of the market-place, there has arisen a very characteristic academic product,--the professor who writes popular articles, sometimes clever, sometimes precious, sometimes genteel and refined, sometimes merely commonplace, but almost always devoid of real knowledge or stimulating thought. Even the sober pedant is a more humane creature than the professorial smart-Aleck.

Whence arises this inhibition of mediocrity, this fear of personality and intellect, this deep antinomy of pedant and dilettante? The “fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease” which affected the professors of the Colleges of Unreason in “Erewhon” is mildly endemic in every University in the world, and to a certain degree in every profession; but nowhere else does it give the tone to the intellectual life of a whole people. If I were a sociologist, confident that the proper search would unearth an external cause for every spiritual defect, I might point to any one of a dozen or more damning facts as the origin and source of all our trouble,--to the materialism of a national life directed solely toward practical ends, to the levelling and standardizing influences of democracy, to Anglo-Saxon “Colonialism,” to the influence of German erudition, or to the inadequate economic rewards of the academic life. I should probably make much of that favourite theme of critical fantasy, the habits derived from the “age of the pioneers,” a period in which life, with its mere physical discomforts and its mere demands on physical energy and endurance, was really so easy and simple that Americans attempt to reproduce it on all their holidays.

But in so far as they have any reality, all these are merely symptoms of the same disease of the soul. The modern sanatorium may be likened to the mediæval monastery without its spiritual faith; the American University to a University without its inner illumination. It is an intellectual refuge without the integration of a central soul,--crassly material because it has no inner standards to redeem it from the idols of the market-place, or timid and anæmic because it lacks that quixotic fire which inheres in every act of faith. It is at one and the same time our greatest practical achievement and our greatest spiritual failure. To call it a compound of sanatorium and machine-shop may seem grossly unfair to an institution which has more than its share of earnest and high-minded men; but though the phrase may not describe the reality, it does indicate the danger. When we find that in such a place education does not educate, we cry for help to the only gods we know, the restless gods of Administration and Organization; but scholarship cannot be organized or administered into existence, even by Americans.

What can we say (though it seem to evade the question) save that America has no scholarship because as yet it has a body but no soul? The scholar goes through all the proper motions,--collects facts, organizes research, delivers lectures, writes articles and sometimes books,--but under this outer seeming there is no inner reality. Under all the great works of culture there broods the quivering soul of tradition, a burden sometimes disturbing and heavy to bear, but more often helping the soul to soar on wings not of its own making. We think hungrily that the freshness of outlook of a young people should be more than compensation; but the freshness is not there. Bad habits long persisted in, or new vices painfully acquired, may pass for traditions among some spokesmen of “Americanism,” but will not breathe the breath of life into a national culture. All is shell, mask, and a deep inner emptiness. We have scholars without scholarship, as there are churches without religion.

Until there comes a change of heart or a new faith or a deep inner searching, scholarship must continue to live this thwarted and frustrated life. Only a profound realization of its high purpose and special function, and the pride that comes from this realization, can give the scholar his true place in an American world. For this special function is none other than to act as the devoted servant of thought and imagination and to champion their claims as the twin pillars that support all the spiritual activities of human life,--art, philosophy, religion, science; and these it must champion against all the materialists under whatever name they disguise their purpose. What matter whether they be scientists who decry “dialectics,” or sociologists who sneer at “mere belles-lettres,” or practical men who have no use for the “higher life”? Whether they be called bourgeois or radical, conservative or intellectual,--all who would reduce life to a problem of practical activity and physical satisfaction, all who would reduce intellect and imagination to mere instruments of practical usefulness, all who worship dead idols instead of living gods, all who grasp at every flitting will-o’-the-wisp of theory or sensation,--all these alike scholarship must forever recognize as its enemies, and its chief tempters.

II

Scholarship, so conceived, is the basis of criticism. When a few years ago I published a volume which bore the subtitle of “Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste,” the pedants and the professors were in the ascendant, and it seemed necessary to emphasize the side of criticism which was then in danger, the side that is closest to the art of the creator. But the professors have been temporarily routed by the dilettanti, the amateurs, and the journalists, who treat a work of the imagination as if they were describing fireworks or a bull-fight (to use a phrase of Zola’s about Gautier); and so it is necessary now to insist on the discipline and illumination of scholarship,--in other Words, to write an “Essay on the Divergence of Criticism and Creation.”

American criticism, like that of England, but to an even greater extent, suffers from a want of philosophic insight and precision. It has neither inherited nor created a tradition of æsthetic thought. For it every critical problem is a separate problem, a problem in a philosophic vacuum, and so open for discussion to any astute mind with a taste for letters. Realism, classicism, romanticism, imagism, impressionism, expressionism, and other terms or movements as they spring up, seem ultimate realities instead of matters of very subordinate concern to any philosophy of art,--mere practical programmes which bear somewhat the same relation to æsthetic truth that the platform of the Republican Party bears to Aristotle’s “Politics” or Marx’s “Capital.” As a result, critics are constantly carrying on a guerilla warfare of their own in favour of some vague literary shibboleth or sociological abstraction, and discovering anew the virtues or vices of individuality, modernity, Puritanism, the romantic spirit or the spirit of the Middle West, the traditions of the pioneer, and so on ad infinitum. This holds true of every school of American criticism, “conservative” or “radical”; for all of them a disconnected body of literary theories takes the place of a real philosophy of art. “Find an idea and then write about it” sums up the American conception of criticism. Now, while the critic must approach a work of literature without preconceived notion of what that individual work should attempt, he cannot criticize it without some understanding of what all literature attempts. The critic without an æsthetic is a mariner without chart, compass, or knowledge of navigation; for the question is not where the ship should go or what cargo it should carry, but whether it is going to arrive at any port at all without sinking.

Criticism is essentially an expression of taste, or that faculty of imaginative sympathy by which the reader or spectator is able to re-live the vision created by the artist. This is the soil without which it cannot flourish; but it attains its end and becomes criticism in the highest sense only when taste is guided by knowledge and thought. Of these three elements, implicit in all real criticism, the professors have made light of taste, and have made thought itself subservient to knowledge, while the dilettanti have considered it possible to dispense with both knowledge and thought. But even dilettante criticism is preferable to the dogmatic and intellectualist criticism of the professors, on the same grounds that Sainte-Beuve is superior to Brunetière, or Hazlitt to Francis Jeffrey; for the dilettante at least meets the mind of the artist on the plane of imagination and taste, while the intellectualist or moralist is precluded by his temperament and his theories from ever understanding the primal thrill and purpose of the creative act.

Back of any philosophy of art there must be a philosophy of life, and all æsthetic formulæ seem empty unless there is richness of content behind them. The critic, like the poet or the philosopher, has the whole world to range in, and the farther he ranges in it, the better his work will be. Yet this does not mean that criticism should focus its attention on morals, history, life, instead of on the forms into which the artist transforms them. Art has something else to give us; and to seek morals, or economic theories, or the national spirit in it is to seek morals, economic theories, the national spirit, but not art. Indeed, the United States is the only civilized country where morals are still in controversy so far as creative literature is concerned; France, Germany, and Italy liberated themselves from this faded obsession long ago; even in England critics of authority hesitate to judge a work of art by moral standards. Yet this is precisely what divides the two chief schools of American criticism, the moralists and the anti-moralists, though even among the latter masquerade some whose only quarrel with the moralists is the nature of the moral standards employed.

Disregarding the Coleridgean tradition, which seems to have come to an end with Mr. Woodberry, and the influence of the “new psychology,” which has not yet taken a definite form, the main forces that have influenced the present clashes in the American attitude toward literature seem to be three. There is first of all the conception of literature as a moral influence, a conception which goes back to the Græco-Roman rhetoricians and moralists, and after pervading English thought from Sidney to Matthew Arnold, finds its last stronghold to-day among the American descendants of the Puritans. There is, secondly, the Shavian conception of literature as the most effective vehicle for a new _Weltanschauung_, to be judged by the novelty and freshness of its ideas, a conception particularly attractive to the school of young reformers, radicals, and intellectuals whose interest in the creative imagination is secondary, and whose training in æsthetic thought has been negligible; this is merely an obverse of the Puritan moralism, and is tainted by the same fundamental misconception of the meaning of the creative imagination. And there is finally the conception of literature as an external thing, a complex of rhythms, charm, beauty without inner content, or mere theatrical effectiveness, which goes back through the English ’nineties to the French ’seventies, when the idea of the independence of art from moral and intellectual standards was distorted into the merely mechanical theory of “art for art’s sake”; the French have a special talent for narrowing æsthetic truths into hard-and-fast formulæ, devoid of their original nucleus of philosophic reality, but all the more effective on this account for universal conquest as practical programmes.

The apparent paradox which none of these critics face is that the _Weltanschauung_ of the creative artist, his moral convictions, his views on intellectual, economic, and other subjects, furnish the content of his work and are at the same time the chief obstacles to his artistic achievement. Out of morals or philosophy he has to make, not morals or philosophy, but poetry; for morals and philosophy are only a part, and a small part, of the whole reality which his imagination has to encompass. The man who is overwhelmed with moral theories and convictions would naturally find it easiest to become a moralist, and moralists are prosaic, not poetic. A man who has strong economic convictions would find it easiest to become an economist or economic reformer, and economics too is the prose of life, not the poetry. A man with a strong philosophic bias would find it easiest to become a pure thinker, and the poet’s visionary world topples when laid open to the cold scrutiny of logic. A poet is a human being, and therefore likely to have convictions, prejudices, preconceptions, like other men; but the deeper his interest in them is, the easier it is for him to become a moralist, economist, philosopher, or what not, and the harder for him to transcend them and to become a poet. But if the genius of the poet (and by poet I mean any writer of imaginative literature) is strong enough, it will transcend them, pass over them by the power of the imagination, which leaves them behind without knowing it. It has been well said that morals are one reality, a poem is another reality, and the illusion consists in thinking them one and the same. The poet’s conscience as a man may be satisfied by the illusion, but woe to him if it is not an illusion, for that is what we tell him when we say, “He is a moralist, not a poet.” Such a man has really expressed his moral convictions, instead of leaping over and beyond them into that world of the imagination where moral ideas must be interpreted from the standpoint of poetry, or the artistic needs of the characters portrayed, and not by the logical or reality value of morals.

This “leaping over” is the test of all art; it is inherent in the very nature of the creative imagination. It explains, for example, how Milton the moralist started out to make Satan a demon and how Milton the poet ended by making him a hero. It explains the blindness of the American critic who recently objected to the “loose thinking” of a poem of Carl Sandburg in which steel is conceived of as made of smoke and blood, and who propounded this question to the Walrus and the Carpenter: “How can smoke, the lighter refuse of steel, be one of its constituents, and how can the smoke which drifts away from the chimney and the blood which flows in the steelmaker’s veins be correlates in their relation to steel?” Where shall we match this precious gem? Over two centuries ago, Othello’s cry after the death of Desdemona,

“O heavy hour,
Methinks it should now be a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon!”

provoked another intellectualist critic to enquire whether “the sun and moon can both together be so hugely eclipsed in any one heavy hour whatsoever;” but Rymer has been called “the worst critic that ever lived” for applying tests like these to the poetry of Shakespeare. Over a century ago a certain Abbé Morellet, unmoved by the music of Chateaubriand’s description of the moon,--

“She pours forth in the woods this great secret of melancholy
which she loves to recount to the old oaks and the ancient
shores of the sea,”--

asked his readers: “How can the melancholy of night be called a secret; and if the moon recounts it, how is it still a secret; and how does she manage to recount it to the old oaks and the ancient shores of the sea rather than to the deep valleys, the mountains, and the rivers?”

These are simply exaggerations of the inevitable consequence of carrying over the mood of actual life into the world of the imagination. “Sense, sense, nothing but sense!” cried a great Austrian poet, “as if poetry in contrast with prose were not always a kind of divine nonsense. Every poetic image bears within itself its own certain demonstration that logic is not the arbitress of art.” And Alfieri spoke for every poet in the world when he said of himself, “Reasoning and judging are for me only pure and generous forms of feeling.” The trained economist, philosopher, or moralist, examining the ideas of a poet, is always likely to say: “These are not clearly thought out or logical ideas; they are just a poet’s fancy or inspiration;” and that is the final praise of the poet. If the expert finds a closely reasoned treatise we may be sure that we shall find no poetry. It is a vision of reality, and not reality, imagination and not thought or morals, that the artist gives us; and his spiritual world, with all that it means for the soaring life of man, fades and disappears when we bring to it no other test than the test of reality.

These are some of the elementary reasons why those who demand of the poet a definite code of morals or manners--“American ideals,” or “Puritanism,” or on the other side, “radical ideas”--seem to me to show their incompetence as critics. How can we expect illumination from those who share the “typical American business man’s” inherent inability to live in the world of fantasy which the poets have created, without the business man’s ability to face the external facts of life and mould them to his will? These men are schoolmasters, pedants, moralists, policemen, but neither critics nor true lovers of the spiritual food that art provides. To the creative writers of America I should give a wholly different message from theirs. I should say to them: “Express what is in you, all that serene or turbulent vision of multitudinous life which is yours by right of imagination, trusting in your own power to achieve discipline and mastery, and leave the discussion of ‘American ideals’ to statesmen, historians, and philosophers, with the certainty that if you truly express the vision that is in you, the statesmen, historians, and philosophers of the future will point to your work as a fine expression of the ‘American ideals’ you have helped to create.”

But it is no part of the critic’s duty to lay down laws for the guidance of the creator, though he may have insight enough to foresee some of the directions which literature is likely to take. He may even point out new material for the imagination of poets to feed on,--the beautiful folklore of our native Indians, the unplumbed depths of the Negro’s soul, the poetry and wisdom of Asia (which it may be our chief destiny to interpret for the nations of Europe), the myth and story of the hundred races that are to make up the new America, and all the undiscovered coigns and crannies of our national life. I shall not say that these services are extraneous and unimportant, like furnishing the fountain-pen with which a great poem is written; but incursions into the geography of the imagination are incidental to the critic’s main duty of interpreting literature and making its meaning and purpose clear to all who wish to love and understand it.

The first need of American criticism to-day is education in æsthetic thinking. It needs above all the cleansing and stimulating power of an intellectual bath. Only the drenching discipline that comes from intellectual mastery of the problems of æsthetic thought can train us for the duty of interpreting the American literature of the future. The anarchy of impressionism is a natural reaction against the mechanical theories and jejune text-books of the professors, but it is a temporary haven and not a home. The haphazard empiricism of English criticism and the faded moralism of our own will serve us no more. We must desert these muddy waters, and seek purer and deeper streams. In a country where philosophers urge men to cease thinking, it may be the task of the critic to revivify and reorganize thought. Only in this way can we gain what America lacks, the brain-illumined soul.

The second need of American criticism can be summed up in the word scholarship--that discipline of knowledge which will give us at one and the same time a wider international outlook and a deeper national insight. One will spring from the other, for the timid Colonial spirit finds no place in the heart of the citizen of the world; and respect for native talent, born of a surer knowledge, will prevent us alike from overrating its merits and from holding it too cheap. Half-knowledge is either too timid or too cocksure; and only out of this spiritual discipline can come a true independence of judgment and taste.

For taste is after all both the point of departure and the goal; and the third and greatest need of American criticism is a deeper sensibility, a more complete submission to the imaginative will of the artist, before attempting to rise above it into the realm of judgment. If there is anything that American life can be said to give least of all, it is training in taste. There is a deadness of artistic feeling, which is sometimes replaced or disguised by a fervour of sociological obsession, but this is no substitute for the faculty of imaginative sympathy which is at the heart of all criticism. When the social historian is born, the critic dies; for taste, or æsthetic enjoyment, is the only gateway to the critic’s judgment, and over it is a flaming signpost, “Critic, abandon all hope when this gate is shut.”

“To ravish Beauty with dividing powers
Is to let exquisite essences escape.”

Only out of the fusion of these three elements of taste, intellect, and knowledge can American criticism gain what in one of its manifestations is called “personality” and in another “style.” Only in this way can it win in the battle against the benumbing chaos and the benumbing monotony of American art and life.

We are all cocksure but bewildered children in a world we cannot understand. We are all parvenus--parvenus on a new continent, on the fringes of which some have lived a little longer than others, but the whole of which has been encompassed by none of us for more than two or three generations; parvenus in a new world of steam and electricity, wireless and aeroplane, machinery and industry, which none of us has yet been able to subdue to a mould that satisfies our deepest cravings; parvenus in our culture, which still seems like a borrowed garment instead of flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. What is the good of all the instruments that our hands have moulded if we have neither the will nor the imagination to wield them for the uses of the soul? Not in this fashion shall we justify our old dream of an America that is the hope of the world. Here are hundreds of colleges and universities; why not fill these empty barracks with scholars and thinkers? Here are a hundred races; why not say to them: “America can give you generous opportunity and the most superb instruments that the undisciplined energy of practical life has ever created, but in the spiritual fields of art, poetry, religion, culture, it has little or nothing to give you; let us all work together, learning and creating these high things side by side”? Here are more hearts empty and unfulfilled and more restless minds than the world has ever before gathered together; why not lead them out of their corrals, and find a fitting pasture for their brains and souls?

J. E. SPINGARN

_GLOSSARY_

The English language, extraordinarily rich and expressive in everything that concerns the practical or the imaginative life, suffers from the poverty and lack of precision of English æsthetic thought. It may therefore be useful to indicate briefly the special sense in which certain terms are used in this essay.

“_Spectator_: I should say that you have advanced a subtlety
that is little more than a play on words.

“_Friend_: And I maintain that when we are speaking of the
operations of the soul, no words can be delicate and subtle
enough.”--GOETHE.

_Art_--Any creation of the imagination, whether in the form of
imaginative literature or of painting, sculpture, music,
etc.

_Artist_--The creator of a work of art in any of its forms;
not used in this essay in the narrower sense of painter or
sculptor.

_Taste_--The faculty of imaginative sympathy by which the
reader or spectator is able to re-live the vision of the
artist, and therefore the essential pre-requisite to all
criticism.

_Criticism_--Any expression of taste guided by knowledge
and thought. (The critic’s training in knowledge is
scholarship, and his special field of thought æsthetics.)

_Æsthetics_--An ordered and reasoned conception of the meaning
and purpose of art, intended for the guidance of the critic
and not of the artist.

_A Literary Theory_--An isolated “idea” or theory in regard to
imaginative literature, without reference to any ordered
and reasoned conception of its meaning and purpose.

_Impressionist Criticism_--Any expression of taste without
adequate guidance of knowledge or thought.

_Intellectualist (or dogmatic) criticism_--Criticism based on
the conception that art is a product of thought rather than
of imagination, and that the creative fantasy of the artist
can be limited and judged by the critic’s pre-conceived
theories; or in the more ornate words of Francis Thompson,
criticism that is “for ever shearing the wild tresses of
poetry between rusty rules.”

_The Intellectuals_--All who lay undue stress on the place of
intellect in life, and assume that the turbulent flux of
reality can be tied up in neat parcels of intellectual
formulæ.

_Poetry_--All literature in which reality has been transfigured
by the imagination, including poetry in its narrower sense,
the novel, the drama, etc.; used instead of “imaginative
literature,” not merely for the sake of brevity, but as
implying a special emphasis on creative power.

_Poet_--A writer of imaginative literature in any of its forms;
not used in this essay in the narrower sense of a writer of
verse.

_Learning_--The accumulation of certain forms of knowledge
as a basis for scholarship, but no more the main purpose
of scholarship than his preparatory training is the sole
object of the athlete or soldier.

_Scholarship_--The discipline and illumination that come from
the intellectual mastery of a definite problem in the
spiritual (as opposed to the practical) life of man.

_Pedant_--Any one who thinks that learning is the whole of
scholarship.

J. E. S.

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE

Should we ever entertain an intelligent explorer from Mars, we should of course importune him, in season and out, for his impressions of America. And if he were candid as well as intelligent, he might ultimately be interviewed somewhat as follows:

“At first I thought the most striking fact about you was your passion for education. While I have been enjoying your so thorough hospitality I have met a minority of Americans who express themselves less complacently than the rest about your material blessings; I have talked with a few dissidents from your political theory; and I have even heard complaints that it is possible to carry moral enthusiasm too far. But I have yet to meet that American who is sceptical about education as such, though on the other hand I have found few of your citizens quite content with the working of every part of your educational establishment. And this very discontent was what clinched my first impression that schooling is the most vital of your passionate interests.

“Yet as I have travelled from one to another of your cities, a second fact about you has struck me so forcibly as to contest the supremacy of the first. You Americans more and more seem to me to be essentially alike. Your cities are only less identical than the trains that ply between them. Nearly any congregation could worship just as comfortably in nearly any other church. The casts of almost any two plays, the staffs of almost any two newspapers, even the faculties of almost any two colleges could exchange ‘vehicles’ with about the same results that would attend their exchanging clothes.

“And in nothing are you so alike as in your universal desire to be alike--to be inconspicuous, to put on straw hats on the same day, to change your clothes in Texas in accordance with the seasons in New York, to read the books everybody else is reading, to adopt the opinions a weekly digests for you from the almost uniform opinions of the whole of the daily press, in war and peace to be incontestably and entirely American.

“Now, I should scarcely make bold to be so frank about these observations if some of my new friends had not reassured me with the information that they are not novel, that a distinguished Englishman has put them into what you have considered the most representative and have made the most popular book about your commonwealth, that in fact you rather enjoy having outsiders recognize the success of your efforts in uniformity. There is, of course, no reason why you should not be as similar to each other as you choose, and you must not interpret my surprise to mean that I am shocked by anything except the contradiction I find between this essential similarity and what I have called your passion for education.

“On Mars it has for a long time been our idea that the function of the school is to put our youth in touch with what all sorts of Martians have thought and are thinking, have felt and are feeling. I say ‘put in touch’ rather than ‘teach,’ because it is not so much our notion to pack their minds and hearts as to proffer samples of our various cultures and supply keys to the storehouses--not unlike your libraries, museums, and laboratories--that contain our records. We prefer to think of schooling as a kind of thoroughfare between our past and our present, an avenue to the recovery and appreciation of as many as possible of those innumerable differences between Martian and Martian, those conflicting speculations and cogitations, myths and hypotheses regarding our planet and ourselves that have gone into the warp and woof of our mental history. Thus we have hoped not only to preserve and add to the body of Martian knowledge, but also to understand better and utilize more variously our present minds. So it seems to us perfectly natural, and has rather pleased than distressed us, that our students should emerge from their studies with a multitude of differing sympathies, beliefs, tastes, and ambitions. We have thought that such an education enriched the lives of all of us, lives that ignorance could not fail to constrict and subject to hum-drum monotony.

“So when I return to Mars and report that I found Earth’s most favourable continent inhabited by its most literate great people, a people that has carried the use of print and other means of communication to a point we Martians have never dared dream about; that this people has at once the most widely diffused enthusiasm for education and the most comprehensive school equipment on Earth; and finally that this people is at the same time the most uniform in its life--well, I fear I shall not be believed.”

On subsequent visits the Martian might, as a wise man does who is confronted by a logical impasse, re-examine the terms of his paradox.

As regards our uniformity, fresh evidence could only endorse his first impressions. The vestigial remnants of what regional cultures we have had are rapidly being effaced by our unthinking standardization in every department of life. The railroad, the telephone and telegraph, the newspaper, the Ford, the movies, advertising--all have scarcely standardized themselves before they have set about standardizing everything within their reach. Not even our provinces of the picturesque are immune, the places and things we like to think of as “different” (word that betrays our standard sameness!) and glamorous of our romantic golden age. In the Old South, Birmingham loves to call herself the Pittsburgh of the South; our railroads have all but hounded the packets from the Mississippi; it is notorious that our apostles to the Indians, whether political, religious, or pedagogic, wage relentless war on the very customs and traditions we cherish in legend; the beautiful Missions that a kindlier evangelism bequeathed to them are repeated and cheapened in every suburb and village of the land, under every harsher sky; those once spontaneous fêtes of the plains, the “Stampede” and the “Round-Up,” have been made so spurious that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West Show made in the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’ Mardi Gras will be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St. Louis and elsewhere.

As with these adventitious and perhaps not very important regional differentiations, so with the one fundamental demarcation our people have all along recognized as conditioning the give-and-take of American life. The line between the East and the West, advancing from the Alleghanies to the Rockies and then part of the way back, has never stayed long enough in one zone to be precisely drawn, but it has always been sharply felt. Since Colonial times the East has meant many things--wealth, stability, contacts with Europe, refinement, industry, centralized finance--and the West has meant many things--hardship and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self-reliance, agriculture, vast enterprise; but they have never been so close to meaning the same things as to-day. To-morrow they will merge. Even now the geographical line between them may be drawn anywhere in a belt two thousand miles wide, in which it will be fixed according to the nativity of the critic rather than by any pronounced social stigmata. East or West, there is a greater gulf between the intelligent and the unintelligent of the same parish than divides the intelligent of different parishes. East or West, Americans think pretty much the same thoughts, feel about the same emotions, and express themselves in the American tongue--that is, in slang. If the slang, the accent, the manner differ noticeably, as they still do, there are not wanting signs that another generation will obliterate these differences too. Publishing, to be sure, tends to concentrate in the East, though without impoverishing the West, since all notable circulations have to be national to survive. The very fact that the country’s publishing can be done from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston demonstrates our national unanimity of opinion and expression.

Before it overleapt the geographical walls, this national unanimity had wiped out every class distinction but one, which it has steadily tended to entrench--the money line. Families may continue to hold their place only on the condition that they keep their money or get more; and a moderate fortune, no matter how quickly come by, has only to make a few correct strokes, avoid a few obvious bunkers, and it will found a family by inadvertence. The process is so simple that clerks practise it during their vacations at the shore.

Besides money, there is one other qualification--personal charm. Its chief function, perhaps, is to disguise the essentially monetary character of American social life. At any rate, Americans are almost as uniformly charming as they are uniformly acquisitive. For the most part it is a negative charm, a careful skirting of certain national taboos: it eschews frank egoism, unfavourable criticism, intellectual subtlety, unique expressions of temperament, humour that is no respecter of persons, anything that might disturb the _status quo_ of reciprocal kindliness and complacent optimism. The unpopular American is unpopular not because he is a duffer or a bore, but because he is “conceited,” a “knocker,” a “highbrow,” a “nut,” a “grouch,” or something of that ilk. We do not choose, as the Martian suggested, to be as similar as possible; we choose _not_ to be dissimilar. If our convictions about America and what is American sprang from real knowledge of ourselves and of our capacities, we should relish egoists, disinterested critics, intellectuals, artists, and irreverent humourists, instead of suppressing them when we cannot mould them. That we do not relish them, that we protect ourselves from them, is evidence that we fear them. What reason should we have to fear them save a secret distrust of our asseverated convictions? Our unanimity, then, would seem to the Martian to be an artificial substitute for some natural background we lack but should like to have; and a most dangerous wish-fulfilment it is, for it masks our ignorance of what we are and what we may reasonably become. Far from being self-knowledge, Americanism would seem to him to be a hallucination, an article of faith supported only by our determination to believe it, and to coerce others into believing it. The secret of our uniformity would be a stubborn ignorance.

At which point our critic would have to re-examine his earlier impressions about our “passion for education,” and strive to understand the uses to which we actually put our educational establishment, to appraise its function in our life.

Beginning with the kindergarten, it provides us a few hours’ relief from our responsibility toward our youngsters. Curiously, the Americans most given to this evasion are the Americans most inveterately sentimental about the “kiddies” and most loath to employ the nursery system, holding it somehow an undemocratic invasion of the child’s rights. Then somewhere in the primary grades we begin to feel that we are purchasing relief from the burden of fundamental instruction. Ourselves mentally lazy, abstracted, and genuinely bewildered by the flow of questions from only one mouth, we blithely refer that awakening curiosity to a harassed young woman, probably less well informed than we are, who has to answer, or silence, the questions of from a score to three score mouths. So begins that long throttling of curiosity which later on will baffle the college instructor, who will sometimes write a clever magazine essay about the complacent ignorance of his pupils.

A few years, and our expectation has shifted to the main chance. We begin worrying over grade reports and knotting our brows over problems in arithmetic by way of assisting our offspring to the practical advantages of education. For the child, we now demand of his teachers solid and lasting preparation in the things whose monetary value our office or domestic payroll keeps sharply before us--figures, penmanship, spelling, home economics. For us, the vicarious glory of his “brightness.” But we want this brightness to count, to be in the direct avenue to his career; so we reinforce the environment that gently discourages him from the primrose paths of knowledge. Nothing “practical” is too good for the boy at this moment--tool chests, bicycles, wireless, what not. Thank God, we can give him a better start than we had. As for arts and letters, well, we guess what was good enough for his dad is good enough for him. Meanwhile we are rather pleased than not at the athletics and the other activities in which the grammar school apes the high school that apes the college.

The long spiral of repetitive schooling in study and sport has now commenced its climb: year by year reviews and adds its fresh increment to last year’s subject-matter in the classroom and on the field. Is it so strange that when the boy meets his college professors he is cock-sure of knowing to a hair the limits of what is normal and important in life, beyond which lie the abnormal interests of the grinds? That mediocre _C_ is a gentleman’s mark? Not his to question the system that, in season and out, has borne down on passing instead of on training, and that ends somewhere, soon or late, with a diploma and, amid family plaudits, graduation from family control.

The high schools are expected to fit ninety-five per cent. of their charges for life and five per cent. for college. If our boy and girl are of the ninety and five, we demand very early specialization toward their precious careers, wax enthusiastic over the school’s model mercantile and banking establishment, expand to know our children are being dosed with a course in “Civics,” generously admire the history note-books in which they have spread much tinted ink over a little stereotyped information, and in what we fool ourselves into believing are the margins to all these matters proudly watch them capture a class numeral or a school letter, grumblingly pay for real estate signs that have gone up in flame to celebrate some epochal victory, and bear with their antics during hazings and initiations. It’s a democratic country, and if the poor man’s son cannot go to college, why the college must come to him. Nor are we without a certain undemocratic satisfaction in the thought that he has stolen a four years’ march into business over the rich man’s son, who spends his college hours, we assure ourselves, acquiring habits that will leave him weak in the hour of competition.

Meanwhile the straddling masters are cramming the other five with all the dates and rules and verbs and prose passages which long and bitter experience has demonstrated to be likeliest on entrance examinations. From the classrooms, as term follows term with its endless iteration of short advances and long reviews, there rises the bruit of rivalry: masters decorously put forward the claims of their own colleges; pupils rejoice when their future alma mater notches another athletic victory to the well-remembered tally; the weak of heart are urging upon their bewildered parents the superior merits of the “back-door” route to some exacting university--by certificate to a small college and transfer at the end of the first year.

There are high schools in whose cases all this is understatement; and of course there are innumerable others, especially in these days when the most rigorous colleges have lost a little of their faith in entrance examinations, where it is absurd overstatement. Nevertheless your son, if he goes to a representative Eastern college from a representative high school, goes as a man steals second in the seventh. And his subsequent instructors marvel at the airy nonchalance with which he ignores “the finer things of life”!

The private secondary schools, save those that are frankly designed to relieve parents of recalcitrant boys when the public schools will have no more of them, are pretty much without the ninety-five per cent. of non-college men. Frequently they have their charges for longer periods. So they are free to specialize in cramming with more singleness of mind and at the same time to soften the process as their endowments and atmospheres permit. But at bottom the demand you make of the “prep school” is the same demand your bookkeeper puts on his son’s high school: you want your boy launched into college with the minimum of trouble for yourself and the maximum of practical advantage for him; your bookkeeper wants his boy launched into business with a minimum of frippery and a maximum of marketable skill. One boy is experted into college, the other is experted into business. You are both among those passionate believers in education who impressed the Martian on his first visit.

Some educator has announced that the college course should not only provide preparation for life but should itself be a satisfactory portion of life. What college student so dull as not to know that? For the most part, he trusts the faculty to provide the preparation--sometimes it would seem that he dares it to--but he takes jolly good care that the four years shall give him life more abundantly. He has looked forward to them with an impatience not even the indignity of entrance examinations could balk; he will live them to the top of his bent; and he will look back on them tenderly, even sentimentally, as the purplest patch of his days. So the American undergraduate is representative of the American temper at its best. He is the flower of our youth at its moment of perfect bloom, its ideals not yet corrupted, its aspirations unwithered. As he thinks and feels, all America would think and feel if it dared and could.

At this point, therefore, the Martian’s inquiry into what we expect from our educational establishment would have to shift its point of view from the older to the younger generation. The Martian would be much in demand at our colleges, both as a sure-fire lecturer and as a shining target for degrees certain to attract wide publicity to the donors. Let us imagine him setting aside a page in his notebook for a scheme of undergraduate emphases, grouped and amended as his triumphant progress permitted him to check up on his observations.

Athletics would of course head the list. Regarded as play--that is, as they affect the spectator--college sports proffer a series of thrilling Roman holidays extending from the first week or so of term-time to the final base-ball game and crew race of Commencement week the next June, and for some colleges there may be transatlantic sequels in midsummer or later. It is by no means all play for the spectator, whose loyalty to his institution makes it his duty to watch the teams practise, follow the histories of the gladiators who are at once his representatives and his entertainers, and drill himself in songs and yells at noisy mass meetings; to bet on his college according to his purse and without any niggardly regard for his sober judgment as to the event; then to deck himself in the colours, march to the field, and watch the fray from the cheering section, where his attention will be perpetually interrupted by the orders and the abuse of a file of insatiable marionettes who are there to dictate when he may and when he may not give throat to his enthusiasm; and finally, if Providence please, to be one of the snake-dancing celebrants of victory. If he have the right physique or talent for one of the sports, he will find himself conscripted by public opinion to enter upon the long and arduous regimen that turns out the annual handful of athletic heroes--to slave on freshman squads, class teams, scrub and third and second teams, and finally perhaps, if he has been faithful, to play a dull minute or two of a big game that is already decided and so receive his coveted letter and side-line privilege as a charity. Or at the dizziest pinnacle of success, a “star,” to endure the unremitting discipline of summer practice, incessant training, eating with his fellow-stars at the training table, in season and out to be the butt of instruction and exhortation from all the experts of the entourage. As they affect the participant, then, college sports are to be regarded as work that differs from the work of professional sportsmen chiefly by being unremunerated.

The student’s next most vivid concern is the organization of the social life in the academic commonwealth of which he is a citizen. Every American college has, or fancies it has, its own tone, its ideal type of man; and good citizenship prescribes conformity to the spirit of the place and observance of the letter of its unwritten code. For the type is defined by a body of obligations and taboos transmitted from generation to generation, sometimes through the mouthpiece of the faculty, sometimes by way of the college “Bible” (to use the slang name for those handy manuals of what to do and what to avoid which the college Y.M.C.A. issues for the guidance of newcomers), but most often by a rough process of trial and error which very speedily convinces the freshman that the Fence is for seniors only, or that it is impracticable to smoke his pipe in the Yard, or that it is much healthier to take the air in a class cap than bareheaded. The cherished “traditions” of a college are for the most part a composite of just such privileges and prohibitions as these, clustering round the notion of the type and symbolizing it; and, curiously, the younger the institution, the more insistent it is likely to be about the sanctity of its traditions--a college feels the need of a type in much the same degree that a factory needs a trademark.