Chapter II (1)

I have thrown together these remarks in an elliptical and haphazard way, hoping to show what sort of thing education is, and as a prologue to a few reflections upon the educational conditions in the United States.

It is easy to think of reasons why the standards of general education should be low in America. Almost every influence which is hostile to the development of deep thought and clear feeling has been at the maximum of destructive power in the United States. We are a new society, made of a Babel of conflicting European elements, engaged in exploiting the wealth of a new continent, under conditions of climate which involve a nervous reorganization to Europeans who come to live with us. Our history has been a history of quiet colonial beginnings, followed by a national life which, from its inception, has been one of social unrest. And all this has happened during the great epoch of the expansion of commerce, the thought-destroying epoch of the world.

Let us take a rapid glance at our own past. In the beginning we were settlers. Now the settlement of any new continent plays havoc with the arts and crafts. Let us imagine that among the Mayflower pilgrims there had been a few expert wood-carvers, a violin player or two, and a master architect. These men, upon landing in the colony, must have been at a loss for employment. They would have to turn into backwoodsmen. Their accomplishments would in time have been forgotten. Within a generation after the landing of the pilgrims there must have followed a decline in the fine arts, in scholarship, and in certain kinds of social refinement. This decline was, to some extent, counteracted in our colonial era by the existence of wealth in the Colonies and by the constant intercourse with Europe, from which the newest models were imported by every vessel. Nevertheless, it is hard for a colony to make up for its initial loss; and we have recently seen the United States government making efforts on a large scale to give to the American farmer those practices of intensive cultivation of the soil which he lost by becoming a backwoodsman and has never since had time to recover for himself.

The American Revolution was our second serious set-back in education. So hostile to culture is war that the artisans of France have never been able to attain to the standards of workmanship which prevailed under the old monarchy. Our national culture started with the handicap of a seven years’ war, and was always a little behindhand. During the nineteenth century the American citizen has been buffeting the waves of new development. His daily life has been an experiment. His moral, social, political interests and duties have been indeterminate; nothing has been settled for him by society. Is a man to have an opinion? Then he must make it himself. This demands a more serious labor than if he were obliged to manufacture his own shoes and candlesticks. No such draught upon individual intellect is made in an old country. You cannot get a European to understand this distressing overtaxing of the intelligence in America. Nothing like it has occurred before, because in old countries opinion is part of caste and condition: opinion is the shadow of interest and of social status.

But in America the individual is not protected against society at large by the bulwark of his class. He stands by himself. It is a noble idea that a man should stand by himself, and the conditions which force a man to do so have occasionally created magnificent types of heroic manhood in America. Lincoln, Garrison, Emerson, and many lesser athletes are the fruits of these very conditions which isolate the individual in America and force him to think for himself. Yet their effect upon general cultivation has been injurious. It seems as if character were always within the reach of every human soul; but men must have become homogeneous before they can produce art.

We have thus reviewed a few of the causes of our American loss of culture. Behind all these causes, however, was the true and overmastering cause, namely, that sudden creation of wealth for which the nineteenth century is noted, the rise all over the world of new and uneducated classes. We came into being as a part of that world movement which has perceptibly retarded culture, even in Europe. How, then, could we in America hope to resist it? Whether this movement is the result of democratic ideas, or of mechanical inventions, or of scientific discovery, no one can say. The elements that go to make up the movement cannot be unraveled. We only know that the world has changed: the old order has vanished with all its charm, with all its experience, with all its refinement. In its place we have a crude world, indifferent to everything except physical well-being. In the place of the fine arts and the crafts we have business and science.

Business is, of course, devoted to the increase of physical well-being; but what is Science? Now, in one sense, science is anything that true scientific men of the moment happen to be studying. In one decade, science means the discussion of spontaneous generation, or spontaneous variation, in the next of plasm, in the next of germs, or of electrodes. Whatever the scientific world takes up as a study becomes “science.” It is impossible to deny the truth of this rather self-destructive definition. In a more serious sense, however, science is the whole body of organized knowledge; and a distinction is sometimes made between “pure” science and “applied” science; the first being concerned solely with the ascertainment of truth, the second, with practical matters.

In these higher regions, in which science is synonymous with the search for truth, science partakes of the nature of religion. It purifies its votaries; it speaks to them in cryptic language, revealing certain exalted realities not unrelated to the realities of music, or of poetry and religion. The men through whom this enthusiasm for pure science passes are surely, each in his degree, transmitters of heroic influence; and, in their own way, they form a kind of priesthood. It must be confessed, too, that this priesthood is peculiarly the product of the nineteenth century.

The Brotherhood of Science is a new order, a new Dispensation. It would seem to me impossible to divide one’s feeling toward science according to the divisions “pure” and “applied”; because many men in whom the tide of true enthusiasm runs the strongest deal in applied science, as, for instance, surgeons, bacteriologists, etc. Nor ought we to forget those great men of science who have an attitude of sympathy toward all human excellence, and a reverence for things which cannot be approached through science. Such men resemble those saints who have also, incidentally, been kings and popes. Their personal magnitude obliterates our interest in their position in the hierarchy. We think of them as men, not as popes, kings or scientists. In the end we must admit that there are as many kinds of science as there are of men engaged in scientific pursuits. The word science legitimately means an immense variety of things, loosely connected together, some of them deserving of strong reprobation. I shall use the term with such accuracy as I am able to command, and leave it to the candid reader to make allowance for whatever injustice this course may entail.

To begin with, we must find fault with the Brotherhood of Science on much the same ground that we fought the old religions, upon grounds of tyranny and narrowness, of dogmatism and presumption. In the next place, it is evident that, in so far as science is not hallowed by the spirit of religion, it is a mere extension of business. It is the essence of world-business, race-business, cosmic-business. It saves time, saves lives, and dominates the air and the sea; but all these things may be accomplished, for ought we know, in the course of the extinction of the better nature of mankind. Science is not directly interested in the expression of spiritual truth; her notation cannot include anything so fluctuating, so indeterminate, as the language of feeling. Science neither sings nor jokes; neither prays nor rejoices; neither loves nor hates. This is not her fault; but her limitation. Her fault is that, as a rule, she respects only her own language and puts trust only in what is in her own shop window.

I deprecate the contempt which science expresses for anything that does not happen to be called science. Imperial and haughty science proclaims its occupancy of the whole province of human thought; yet, as a matter of fact, science deals in a language of its own, in a set of formulae and conceptions which cannot cover the most important interests of humanity. It does not understand the value of the fine arts and is always at loggerheads with philosophy. Is it not clear that science, in order to make good her claim to universality, must adopt a conception of her own function that shall leave to the fine arts and to religion their languages? She cannot hope to compete with these languages, nor to translate or expound them. She must accept them. At present she tramples upon them.

There are, then, in the modern world these two influences which are hostile to education,--the influence of business and the influence of uninspired science. In Europe these influences are qualified by the vigor of the old learning. In America they dominate remorselessly, and make the path of education doubly hard. Consider how they meet us in ordinary social life. We have all heard men bemoan the time they have spent over Latin and Greek on the ground that these studies did not fit them for business,--as if a thing must be worthless if it can be neither eaten nor drunk. It is hard to explain the value of education to men who have forgotten the meaning of education: its symbols convey nothing to them.

The situation is very similar in dealing with scientific men,--at least with that large class of them who have little learning and no religion, and who are thus obliged to use the formulae of modern science as their only vehicle of thought. These men regard humanity as something which started up in Darwin’s time. They do not listen when the humanities are mentioned; and if they did they would not understand. When Darwin confessed that poetry had no meaning for him, and that nothing significant was left to him in the whole artistic life of the past, he did not know how many of his brethren his words were destined to describe.

We can forgive the business man for the loss of his birthright: he knows no better. But we have it against a scientist if he undervalues education. Surely, the Latin classics are as valuable a deposit as the crustacean fossils, or the implements of the Stone Age. When science shall have assumed her true relation to the field of human culture we shall all be happier. To-day science knows that the silkworm must be fed on the leaves of the mulberry tree, but does not know that the soul of man must be fed on the Bible and the Greek classics. Science knows that a queen bee can be produced by care and feeding, but does not as yet know that every man who has had a little Greek and Latin in his youth belongs to a different species from the ignorant man. No matter how little it may have been, it reclassifies him. There is more kinship between that man and a great scholar than there is between the same man and some one who has had no classics at all: he breathes from a different part of his anatomy. Drop the classics from education? Ask rather, Why not drop education? For the classics are education. We cannot draw a line and say, ‘Here we start.’ The facts are the other way. We started long ago, and our very life depends upon keeping alive all that we have thought and felt during our history. If the continuity is taken from us, we shall relapse.

When we discover that these two tremendous interests--business and commercial science have arisen in the modern world and are muffling the voice of man, we tremble for the future. If these giants shall continue their subjugation of the gods, the whole race, we fear, may relapse into dumbness. By good fortune, however, there are other powers at work. The race is emotionally too rich and too much attached to the past to allow its faculties to be lost through disuse. New and spontaneous crops will soon be growing upon the mould of our own stubbly, thistle-bearing epoch.

In the meantime we in America must do the best we can. It is no secret that our standards of education are below those of Europe. Our art, our historical knowledge, our music and general conversation, show a stiffness and lack of exuberance--a lack of vitality and of unconscious force--the faults of beginners in all walks of life. During the last twenty-five years much improvement has been made in those branches of cultivation which depend directly upon wealth. Since the Civil War there seems to have been a decline in the higher literature, accompanied by an advance in the plastic arts. And more recently still there has been a literary reawakening, perhaps not of the most important kind, yet signifying a new era. If I may employ an obvious simile, I would liken America to a just-grown man of good impulses who has lacked early advantages. He feels that cultivation belongs to him; and yet he cannot catch it nor hold it. He feels the impulse of expression, and yet he can neither read nor write. He feels that he is fitted for general society, and yet he has no current ideas or conversation. And, of course--I say it with regret, but it is a part of the situation--of course he is heady and proud of himself.

What do we all desire for this ingenuous youth on whom the postponed expectation of the world, as Emerson called it, has waited so long? We desire only to furnish him with true advantages. Let us take a simultaneous survey of the two extremities of the youth’s education, namely, of nursery training and of the higher education. The two are more intimately dependent upon each other than is generally suspected. With regard to the nursery, early advantages are the key to education. The focus of all cultivation is the fireside. Learning is a stove plant that lives in the cottage and thrives during the long winter in domestic warmth. Unless it be borne into children in their earliest years, there is little hope for it. The whole future of civilization depends upon what is read to children before they can read to themselves. The world is powerless to reconvey itself through any mind that it has not lived in from the beginning,--so hard is the language of symbols, whether in music, or in poetry, or in painting. The art must expand with the heart, as a hot rod of glass is touched by the gold-leaf, and is afterwards blown into dusty stars and rainbows of mantling irradiation. If the glass expand before it has been touched by the metal, there is no means of ever getting the metal into it.

The age of machinery has peopled this continent with promoters and millionaires, and the work of a thousand years has been done in a century. The thing has, however, been accomplished at some cost. An ignorant man makes a fortune and demands the higher education for his children. But it is too late: he should have given it to them when he was in his shirt sleeves. All that they are able to receive now is something very different from education. In receiving it they drag down the old standards. School and college are filled with illiterates. The whole land must patiently wait till Learning has warmed back to life her chilled and starved descendants. Perhaps the child or grandchild of the fortune-builder will teach the children on his knee what he himself learned too late in life to stead him much.

Hunger and thirst for learning is a passion that comes, as it were, out of the ground; now in an age of wealth, now in an age of poverty. Young men are born whom nothing will satisfy except the arts and the sciences. They seek out some scholar at a university and aim at him from boyhood. They persuade their parents to send them to college. They are bored and fatigued by everything that life offers except this thing. Now, society does not create this hunger. All that society can do is to provide nourishment of the right kind, good instruction, true learning, the best scholarship which history has left behind. I believe that to-day there is a spirit of learning abroad in America--here and there, in the young--the old insatiable passion. I feel as if men were arising--most of them still handicapped by the lack of early training--to whom life has no meaning except as a search for truth. This exalted famine of the young scholar is the hope of the world. It is religion and art and science in the chrysalis. The thing which society must beware of doing is of interposing between the young learner and his natural food some mechanical product or patent food of its own. Good culture means the whole of culture in its original sources; bad culture is any substitute for this.

Let us now examine the higher departments of education, the university, the graduate school, the museum,--the learned world in America. There is one function of learned men which is the same in every age, namely, the production of text-books. Learned men shed text-books as the oak sheds acorns, and by their fruits ye shall know them. Open almost any primary text-book or school book in America, and you will, on almost every page of it, find inelegancies of usage, roughnesses, inaccuracies, and occasional errors of grammar. The book has been written by an incompetent hand. Now, what has the writer lacked? Is it grammar? Is it acquaintance with English literature, with good models, with the Bible, with history? It is all these things, and more than all. No school-room teaching can make a man write good English. No school teaching ever made an educated man, or a man who could write a good primary text-book. It requires a home of early culture, supplemented by the whole curriculum of scholarship and of university training. Nothing else but this great engine will produce that little book.

The same conditions prevail in music. If you employ the nearest excellent young lady music teacher to teach your boys to play the piano, she will bring into the house certain child’s music written by American composers, in which the rules of harmony are violated and of which the sentiment is vulgar. The books have been written by incompetent people. There is a demand for such books and they are produced. They are the best the times afford: let us be glad that they exist at all and that they are no worse. But note this: it will require the whole musical impulse of the age, from the oratorio society and the musical college down to the street organ, to correct the grammar of that child’s music book. Ten or twenty years from now a like book will perhaps be brought into your home, filled with better harmony and with truer musical feeling; and the change will have been wrought through the influence of Sebastian Bach, of Beethoven,--of the masters of music.

It is the same with all things. The higher culture must hang over the cradle, over the professional school, over the community. If you read the lives of the painters of Italy or of the musicians of Germany, you will find that, no matter where a child of genius was born, there was always an educated man to be found in the nearest village--a priest or a schoolmaster--who gave the child the rudiments himself, and became the means of sending him to the university. Without this indigent scholar, where would have been the great master?

It is familiarity with greatness that we need--an early and first-hand acquaintance with the thinkers of the world, whether their mode of thought was music or marble or canvas or language. Their meaning is not easy to come at, but in so far as it reaches us it will transform us. A strange thing has occurred in America. I am not sure that it has ever occurred before. The teachers wish to make learning easy. They desire to prepare and peptonize and sweeten the food. Their little books are soft biscuit for weak teeth, easy reading on great subjects; but these books are filled with a pervading error: they contain a subtle perversion of education.

Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous. This truth is often forgotten among us; and yet there are fields of work in which it is not forgotten, and in such fields art springs up. Let us remember the accomplishments of our country. The art in which we now most excel is architecture. America has in it many beautiful buildings and some learned architects. And how has this come about? Through severe and conscientious study of the monuments of art, through humble, old-fashioned training. The architects have had firstrate text-books, generally written by Europeans, the non-peptonized, gritty, serious language of masters in the craft. Our painters have done something of the same sort. They have gone to Europe, and are conversant with what is being done in Europe. If they are developing their art here, they do it not ignorantly, but with experience, with consciousness of the past.

I do not recommend subserviency to Europe, but subserviency to intellect. Recourse to Europe we must have: our scholars must absorb Europe without themselves becoming absorbed. It is a curious thing that the American who comes in contact with the old world exhibits two opposite faults: he is often too much impressed and loses stamina, or he is too little impressed and remains a barbarian. Contact with the past and hard work are the cure for both tendencies. Europe is merely an incidental factor in the problem of our education, and this is very well shown in our conduct of our law schools. The Socratic method of instruction in law schools was first introduced at Harvard, and since then it has spread to many parts of the world. This is undoubtedly one of our best achievements in scholarship; and Europe had, so far as I know, no hand in it. The method consists in the _viva voce_ discussion of leading cases, text-books being used merely as an auxiliary: the student thus attacks the sources themselves. Here we have American scholarship at its best, and it is precisely the same thing as the European article: it is simply scholarship.

If we can exhibit this spirit in one branch of learning, why not in all? The Promethean fire is one single element. A spark of this fire is all that is needed to kindle this flame. The glance of a child of genius at an Etruscan vase leaves the child a new being. That is why museums exist: not only for the million who get something from them, but for the one young person of intelligence to whom they mean everything.

Our American universities exhibit very vividly all the signs of retardation in culture, which are traceable in other parts of our social life. A university is always a stronghold of the past, and is therefore one of the last places to be captured by new influence. Commerce has been our ruler for many years; and yet it is only quite recently that the philosophy of commerce can be seen in our colleges. The business man is not a monster; but he is a person who desires to advance his own interests. This is his occupation and, as it were, his religion. The advancement of material interests constitutes civilization to him. He unconsciously infuses the ideas and methods of business into anything that he touches. It has thus come about in America that our universities are beginning to be run as business colleges. They advertise, they compete with each other, they pretend to give good value to their customers. They desire to increase their trade, they offer social advantages and business openings to their patrons. In some cases they boldly conduct intelligence offices, and guarantee that no hard work done by the student shall be done in vain: a record of work is kept during the student’s college life, and the college undertakes to furnish him at any time thereafter with references and a character which shall help him in the struggle for life.

This miscarriage of education has been developed and is being conducted by some of our greatest educators, through a perfectly unconscious adaptation of their own souls to the spirit of the age. The underlying philosophy of these men might be stated as follows: “There is nothing in life nobler than for a man to improve his condition and the condition of his children. Learning is a means to this end.” Such is the current American conception of education. How far we have departed from the idea of education as a search for truth, or as the vehicle of spiritual expression, may be seen herein. The change of creeds has come about innocently, and the consequences involved in it are, as yet, perceived by hardly anyone. The scepticism inherent in the new creed is concealed by its benevolence. You wish to help the American youth. This unfortunate, benighted, ignorant boy, who has from his cradle heard of nothing but business success as the one goal of all human effort, turns to you for instruction. He comes to you in a trusting spirit, with reverence in his heart, and you answer his hope in this wise: ‘Business and social success are the best things that life affords. Come to us, my dear fellow, and we will help you toward them.’ Your son asks you for bread and you give him a stone, for fish and you give him a serpent. It would have been better for that boy if he had never come to your college, for in that case he might have retained a belief that somewhere in the world there existed ideas, art, enthusiasm, unselfishness, inspiring activity.

In so far as our universities have been turning into business agencies, they have naturally lost their imaginative importance. Our professors seem to be of little more consequence in the community than the department managers of other large shops. If learning is a useful commodity which is to be distributed for the personal advantage of the recipients, it is a thing to be paid for rather than to be worshiped. To be sure, the whole of past history cannot be swept away in a day, and we have not wholly discarded a certain conventional and rhetorical reverence for learning. A dash and varnish of education are thought to be desirable,--the wash that is growing every year more thin.

Now, the truth is that the higher education does not advance a man’s personal interests except under special circumstances. What it gives a man is the power of expression; but the ability to express himself has kept many a man poor. Let no one imagine that society is likely to reward him for self-expression in any walk of life. He is much more likely to be punished for it. The question of a man’s success in life depends upon society at large. The more highly an age is educated, the more highly it rewards education in the individual. In an age of indifference to learning, the educated man is at a disadvantage. Thus the thesis that education advances self-interest--that thesis upon which many of our colleges are now being conducted--is substantially false. The little scraps and snatches of true education which a man now gets at college often embarrass his career. Our people are finding this out year by year, and as they do so, they naturally throw the true conception of the higher education overboard. If education is to break down as a commercial asset, what excuse have they for retaining it at all? They will force the colleges to live up to the advertisements and to furnish the kind of education that pays its way. It is clear that if the colleges persist in the utilitarian view, the higher learning will disappear. It has been disappearing very rapidly, and can be restored only through the birth of a new spirit and of a new philosophic attitude in our university life.

There are ages when the scholar receives recognition during his lifetime and when the paths which lead to his lecture-room are filled with men drawn there by his fame. This situation arises in any epoch when human intellect surges up and asserts itself against tyranny and ignorance. In the past the tyrannies have been political tyrannies, and these have become well understood through the struggles of intellect in the past; but the present commercial tyranny is a new thing and as yet little understood. It lies like a heavy fog of intellectual depression over the whole kingdom of Mammon, and is fed by the smoke from a million factories. The artist works in it, the thinker thinks in it. Even the saint is born in it. The rain of ashes from the nineteenth-century Vesuvius of business seems to be burying all our landscape.

And yet this is not true. We shall emerge: even we who are in America and suffer most. The important points to be watched are our university class-rooms. If our colleges will but allow something unselfish, something that is true for its own sake, something that is part of the history of the human heart and intellect, to live in their class-rooms, the boys will find their way to it. The museum holds the precious urn, to preserve it. The university, in like manner, stands to house the alphabets of civilization--the historic instruments and agencies of intellect. They are all akin to each other as the very name and function of the place imply. The presidents and professors who sit beside the fountains of knowledge bear different labels and teach subjects that are called by various names. But the thing which carries the label is no more than the shell. The life you cannot label; and it is to foster this life that universities exist. Enthusiasm comes out of the world and goes into the university. Toward this point flow the currents of new talent that bubble up in society: here is the meeting-place of mind. All that a university does is to give the poppy-seed to the soil, the oil to the lamp, the gold to the rod of glass before it cools. A university brings the spirit in touch with its own language, that language through which it has spoken in former days and through which alone it shall speak again.

PROFESSORIAL ETHICS.

When I was at a university as an undergraduate--I will not say how many years ago--I received one morning a visit from a friend who was an upper classman; for, as I remember it, I was a freshman at the time. My friend brought a petition, and wished to interest me in the case of a tutor or assistant professor, a great favorite with the college boys, who was about to be summarily dismissed. There were, to be sure, vague charges against him of incompetence and insubordination; but of the basis of these charges his partisans knew little. They only felt that one of the bright spots in undergraduate life surrounded this same tutor; they liked him and they valued his teaching. I remember no more about this episode, nor do I even remember whether I signed the petition or not. The only thing I very clearly recall is the outcome: the tutor was dismissed.

Twice or thrice again during my undergraduate life, did the same thing happen--a flurry among the students, a remonstrance much too late, against a deed of apparent injustice, a cry in the night, and then silence. Now, had I known more about the world, I should have understood that these nocturnal disturbances were signs of the times, that what we had heard in all these cases was the operation of the guillotine which exists in every American institution of learning, and runs fast or slow according to the progress of the times. The thing that a little astonished the undergraduate at the time was that in almost every case of summary decapitation the victim was an educated gentleman. And this was not because no other kind of man could be found in the faculty. It seemed as if some whimsical fatality hung over the professorial career of any ingenuous gentleman who was by nature a scholar of the charming, old-fashioned kind.

Youth grieves not long over mysterious injustice, and it never occurred to me till many years afterward that there was any logical connection between one and another of all these judicial murders which used to claim a passing tear from the undergraduate at Harvard. It is only since giving some thought to recent educational conditions in America, that I have understood what was then happening, and why it was that a scholar could hardly live in an American University.

In America, society has been reorganized since 1870; the old universities have been totally changed and many new ones founded. The money to do this has come from the business world. The men chosen to do the work have been chosen by the business world. Of a truth, it must needs be that offenses come; but woe be unto him through whom the offense cometh. As the Boss has been the tool of the business man in politics, so the College president has been his agent in education. The colleges during this epoch have each had a “policy” and a directorate. They have been manned and commissioned for a certain kind of service, as you might man a fishing-smack to catch herring. There has been so much necessary business--the business of expanding and planning, of adapting and remodeling--that there has been no time for education. Some big deal has always been pending in each college--some consolidation of departments, some annexation of a new world--something so momentous as to make private opinion a nuisance. In this regard the colleges have resembled everything else in America. The colleges have simply not been different from the rest of American life. Let a man express an opinion at a party caucus, or at a railroad directors’ meeting, or at a college faculty meeting, and he will find that he is speaking against a predetermined force. What shall we do with such a fellow? Well, if he is old and distinguished, you may suffer him to have his say, and then override him. But if he is young, energetic, and likely to give more trouble, you must eject him with as little fuss as the circumstances will permit.

The educated man has been the grain of sand in the college machine. He has had a horizon of what “ought to be,” and he could not help putting in a word and an idea in the wrong place; and so he was thrown out of education in America exactly as he was thrown out of politics in America. I am here speaking about the great general trend of influences since 1870, influences which have been checked in recent years, checked in politics, checked in education, but which it is necessary to understand if we would understand present conditions in education. The men who, during this era, have been chosen to become college presidents have, as a rule, begun life with the ambition of scholars; but their talents for affairs have been developed at the expense of their taste for learning, and they have become hard men. As toward their faculties they have been autocrats, because the age has demanded autocracy here; as toward the millionaire they have been sycophants, because the age has demanded sycophancy here. Meanwhile these same college presidents represent learning to the imagination of the millionaire and to the imagination of the great public. The ignorant millionaire must trust somebody; and whom he trusts he rules. Now if we go one step further in the reasoning, and discover that the millionaire himself has a somewhat exaggerated reverence for the opinions of the great public, we shall see that this whole matter is a coil of influence emanating from the great public, and winding up--and generally winding up very tight--about the necks of our college faculties and professional scholars. The millionaire and the college president are simply middle men, who transmit the pressure from the average citizen to the learned classes. What the average citizen desires to have done in education gets itself accomplished, though the process should involve the extinction of the race of educated gentlemen. The problem before us in America is the unwinding of this “knot intrinsicate” into which our education has become tied, the unwinding of this boa-constrictor of ignorant public opinion which has been strangling and, to some extent, is still strangling our scholars.

I have no categorical solution of the problem, nor do I, to tell the truth, put an absolute faith in any analysis of social forces, even of my own. If I point out one of the strands in the knot as the best strand to begin work on, it is with the consciousness that there are other effectual ways of working, other ways of feeling about the matter that are more profound.

The natural custodians of education in any age are the learned men of the land, including the professors and schoolmasters. Now these men have, at the present time, in America no conception of their responsibility. They are docile under the rule of the promoting college president, and they have a theory of their own function which debars them from militant activity. The average professor in an American college will look on at an act of injustice done to a brother professor by their college president, with the same unconcern as the rabbit who is not attacked watches the ferret pursue his brother up and down through the warren, to predestinate and horrible death. We know, of course, that it would cost the non-attacked rabbit his place to express sympathy for the martyr; and the non-attacked is poor, and has offspring, and hopes of advancement. The non-attacked rabbit would, of course, become a suspect, and a marked man the moment he lifted up his voice in defense of rabbit-rights. Such personal sacrifice seems to be the price paid in this world for doing good of any kind. I am not, however, here raising the question of general ethics; I refer to the philosophical belief, to the special theory of _professorial_ ethics, which forbids a professor to protect his colleague. I invite controversy on this subject; for I should like to know what the professors of the country have to say on it. It seems to me that there exists a special prohibitory code, which prevents the college professor from using his reason and his pen as actively as he ought in protecting himself, in pushing his interests, and in enlightening the community about our educational abuses. The professor in America seems to think that self-respect requires silence and discretion on his part. He is too great to descend into the arena. He thinks that by nursing this gigantic reverence for the idea of professordom, such reverence will, somehow, be extended all over society, till the professor becomes a creature of power, of public notoriety, of independent reputation as he is in Germany. In the meantime, the professor is trampled upon, his interests are ignored, he is overworked and underpaid, he is of small social consequence, he is kept at menial employments, and the leisure to do good work is denied him. A change is certainly needed in all of these aspects of the American professor’s life. My own opinion is that this change can only come about through the enlightenment of the great public. The public must be appealed to by the professor himself in all ways and upon all occasions. The professor must teach the nation to respect learning and to understand the function and the rights of the learned classes. He must do this through a willingness to speak and to fight for himself. In Germany there is a great public of highly educated, nay of deeply and variously learned people, whose very existence secures pay, protection, and reverence for the scholar. The same is true in France, England, and Italy.

It is the public that protects the professor in Europe. The public alone can protect the professor in America. The proof of this is that any individual learned man in America who becomes known to the public through his books or his discoveries, or his activity in any field of learning or research, is comparatively safe from the guillotine. His position has at least some security, his word some authority. This man has educated the public that trusts him, and he can now protect his more defenseless brethren, if he will. I have often wondered, when listening to the sickening tale of some brutality done by a practical college president to a young instructor, how it had been possible for the eminent men upon the faculty to sit through the operation without a protest. A word from any one of them would have stopped the sacrifice, and protected learning from the oppressor. But no, these eminent men harbored ethical conceptions which kept them from interfering with the practical running of the college. Merciful heavens! who is to run a college if not learned men? Our colleges have been handled by men whose ideals were as remote from scholarship as the ideals of the New York theatrical managers are remote from poetry. In the meanwhile, the scholars have been dumb and reticent.

At the back of all these phenomena we have, as I have said, the general atmospheric ignorance of the great public in America. We are so used to this public, so immersed in it, so much a part of it ourselves, that we are hardly able to gain any conception of what that atmospheric ignorance is like. I will give an illustration which would perhaps never have occurred to my mind except through the accident of actual experience. If you desire a clue to the American in the matter of the higher education, you may find one in becoming a school trustee in any country district where the children taught are the children of farmers. The contract with any country school-teacher provides that he shall teach for so many weeks, upon such and such conditions. Now let us suppose a teacher of genius to obtain the post. He not only teaches admirably, but he institutes school gardens for the children; he takes long walks with the boys, and gives them the rudiments of geology. He is in himself an uplifting moral influence, and introduces the children into a whole new world of idea and of feeling. The parents are pleased. I will not say that they are grateful; but they are not ungrateful. It is true that they secretly believe all this botany and moral influence to be rubbish; but they tolerate it. Now, let us suppose that before the year is out the teacher falls sick, and loses two weeks of school time through absence. You will find that the trustees insist upon his making up this lost time; the contract calls for it. This seems like a mean and petty exaction for these parents to impose upon a saint who has blessed their children, unto the third and fourth generation, by his presence among them. But let us not judge hastily. This strange exaction does not result so much from the meanness of the parents, as from their intellectual limitations. To these parents the hours passed in school are schooling; the rest does not count. The rest may be pleasant and valuable, but it is not education.

In the same way, the professional and business classes in America do not see any point in paying salaries to professors who are to make researches, or write books, or think beautiful thoughts. The influence which an eminent man sheds about him by his very existence, the change in tone that comes over a rude person through his once seeing the face of a scholar, the illumination of a young character through contact with its own ideals--such things are beyond the ken of the average American citizen to-day. To him, they are fables, to him they are foolishness. The parent of our college lad is a farmer compared to the parent of the European lad.

The American parent regards himself as an enlightened being--yet he has not, in these matters, an inkling of what enlightenment is. Now, the intelligence of that parent must be reached; and the learned classes must do the work of reaching it. The Fathers of the Christian church made war with book and speech on Paganism. The leaders of the Reformation went out among the people and made converts. The patriots of the American Revolution--nay, the fathers of modern science, Tyndal, Huxley, Louis Agaziz, Helmholtz--wrote popular books and sought to interest and educate the public by direct contact. Then let the later-coming followers in learning imitate this popular activity of the old leaders: we need a host of battlers for the cause.

For whom do these universities exist, after all? Is it not for the people at large? Are not the people the ultimate beneficiaries? Then why should the people not be immediately instructed in such manner as will lead to their supporting true universities? It is hard to say why our professors are so timid. Perhaps too great a specialization in their own education has left them helpless, as all-around fighters. But the deeper reason seems to be a moral one; they think such activity is beneath them. It is not beneath them. Whatever be a man’s calling, it is not beneath him to make a fight for the truth. As for a professor’s belonging to a mystic guild, no man’s spiritual force is either increased or diminished by the name he calls his profession. Learning is their cause, and every honest means to promote learning should be within their duty. Nor does duty alone make this call for publicity. Ambition joins in it; the legitimate personal ambition of making one’s mind and character felt in the world. This blow once struck means honor, and security of tenure in office, it means public power.

In fine, the scholars should take the public into their confidence and dominate the business men on our college boards. This will be found more easy than at first appears, because the money element, the millionaire element, is very sensitive to public feeling, and once the millionaire succumbs, the college president will succumb also. The step beyond this would consist in the scholars’ taking charge of the college themselves, merely making use of certain business men on their boards for purposes of financial administration.

THE DRAMA.

When a subject is too complex and too subtle to admit of any adequate analysis, people dogmatize about it. They believe that they are thus recurring to first principles. But what are the principles? That is just what no one can state. The drama is one of those difficult subjects which lure the writer on and draw him out. It is a subject upon which ideas flow easily, theories form of themselves, and convictions deepen in the very act of improvisation. The writer who will trust his own inspiration can hardly fail to end by saying something very true about the drama. That is the trouble with the drama: so many things are true of it. It is scarcely less confusing than human life itself. The difficult thing is to strike some balance between all these interlocking and oscillating truths.

Consider, for example, how many and illusive are the influences that go to make up a good dramatic performance. The elements are interwoven in our consciousness, mingled and flowing together like motes in the sunbeam, rising, falling, fading, changing, glowing, and ever suffering transformation and re-birth, like the dream-things that they are. No matter what you say about a performance you can hardly be sure that you have hit upon the right explanation. Let us suppose that there has been an evening of inspiring success. Some golden lead of the imagination has sprung up and overshot one performance--paused, passed and vanished--leaving audience and actors, and even critics, to account for it as they may. You think you have a clue to the situation; but you have barely time to rejoice over your discovery, when, on the next evening, disaster follows from the same apparent causes as led to the first success. The fact is that some unseen power has been at work upon one evening and not upon the next. The weather, or the composition of the audience, or the mood of the actors has changed. The fact is that no two occasions are really alike; but they differ in so many ways that one can scarcely catalogue their divergencies.

There is no ill-considered thing that an author may write, or an actor do on the stage, no mistake or violation of common sense and good art, that may not be counterbalanced by some happiness which carries the play in spite of it. And conversely, there is no well-reasoned, profound, and true theory of play-writing or stage management which, if logically carried out, may not prove the very vehicle of damnation. The reason is that your theories are mere nets waved in the air some miles below the stars which they seem to imprison. Your true theories are true only to theory; the conditions always upset them. It is, therefore, not without some trepidation that I tread the paths of this subject. I almost fear the sound of my own voice and the conclusions of my own reason. This fear shall be my compass, this the silken thread, unwinding as I walk, which shall lead me back again out of the labyrinth and into the daylight.

The aim of any dramatic performance is to have something happen on a stage that shall hold people’s attention for two hours and a half or three hours. Anything that does this is a good drama; and there are as many kinds of good drama as there are flowers in the meadow. All of these species are closely related to each other. They are modifications that spring up from the roots of old tradition, like shoots in an asparagus bed.

The different great divisions and species of drama depend on the size and shape of the theatre used, more than on any other one thing. For the great theatre you must have slow speech, or, at any rate, a concentration of theme. For a small modern theatre you must have quicker motion and more variety. Not only the actor but the playwright must have some special size of theatre in his mind as he plans a play, and must adapt his whole art to that size, as he fashions his work. You might call this the first canon of the drama.

Now, we have, at present, no controlling conventions, no overmastering habits of thought about stage matters, and this leads us to forget the original force, not to say tyranny, of convention in other ages. England has had no controlling convention in stage matters since Charles II’s time; and the English stage has thus become a free, wild sort of place where anything is permitted. It is like the exhibition of the “Independents” in Paris, where anyone may hire space and hang what pictures he please, leaving the public to reward or punish him for his temerity.

The disadvantage of this condition of things is that the public does not know what to expect, and therefore fine things may be misunderstood. The playwright is not sufficiently supported by the crutch of tradition. He has lost his task-master; but he has lost also the key to expression. A well-developed, formal tradition is as necessary to any powerful spiritual deliverance as a system of punctuation is to writing. It was not until Haydn and Mozart had developed the form of the symphony and sonata that Beethoven’s work became possible. The same holds true of all the arts; the great artist who finds no harness ready-made for his ideas must set to work like Giotto to painfully create a makeshift of his own.