Chapter II: Part 2

But which of these and other unlisted world-conceptions are most conspicuous in intelligent American society today? I think they are the two that G. R. has been victimized by; one asserts the universe to be purposive and meaningful to man, the other declares the contrary. The first for convenience we can call the Victorian world-view, and the second the “Scientific” view. Both when stripped bare seem pretty absurd, yet who will say that we, even when we recognize the puerile character of our governing conceptions, do not go on being dominated by or at least being considerably influenced by absurdities? It is not easy, any one who has tried will testify, to overcome our early education.

Consider the Victorian world-view which is implanted in most people brought up like G. R. in one of the Protestant churches. H. G. Wells has sought for thirty-five years to shatter it. His procedure has been to delineate its formation time and again in his novels and then show how impotent it is to face a really hard blow from circumstance. From _Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_, for instance, I can quote a very neat description of the present-day Protestant _Weltanschauung_ as it is popularly held, but in this form who but a very honest man will see that something very like it underlies much of his opinions about life?

“God began afresh with me in England,” says Mr. Blettsworthy in reference to his boyhood, “as the confederated shadow of my uncle, a dear English gentleman of a God, a super-Blettsworthy in control, a God of dew and bright frosty mornings, hopeful and unresentful, whose peculiar festivals were Easter and Christmas and the Harvest Thanksgiving. He was the God of a world that was right way up, stern only to smile again, and even through the solemnity and restraint of Good Friday peeped out my uncle’s assurance that the young gentleman would come back safe and sound on Sunday. A serious time, of course, occasion for grave reflections, but meanwhile we had our hot cross buns....

“He was awfully decent, was God, as his uncle displayed him, and he and my uncle made me want to be decent too. In a world of ‘All right’ and ‘Right O’ and ‘Right you are, Sir.’...

“My uncle shook back the sleeves of his surplice and leant smiling and persuasive over the pulpit, making everything clear and mild like English air, and I felt that if I were given a vision sufficiently penetrating I should see high above the blue ether another such kindly Father, instructing his fortunate world.”

Considering the results of the recent research by Dr. Angus Hector MacLean of Columbia University into the ideas about God of Protestant children, Mr. Blettsworthy’s account is more than fair toward what we learn in Sunday School. Furthermore, since most of us never give any serious thought in later years to Religion, we never learn very thoroughly what a travesty of the religion of Christ our instruction has been. We take it naïvely for something like the genuine thing. We may vary or subtilize the picture, trying to make its anthropomorphism less crude, but in essentials it remains the same. A fatherly personage rules the universe and we are his darling concern. At the back of our minds there is still a “little Sunday School pupil” piping up in adult’s language that the world runs on a benevolent principle and that we should therefore be altruistic toward our neighbors in imitation of the divine principle.

But it is possible for many people by an extension of their reading to exorcise this “little Sunday School pupil” and to install in his place what I can only designate as “the village atheist.” Once this oddity is established there, we react to life according to the dictates of the “Scientific” imagination of it. In this view there is only one kind of real knowledge, and that is modern science: there is only one sanction for knowledge and that is bestowed by the scientist. All art, all religion, all morals, all philosophy must bow before the final authority of science. They do not yield us other and different knowledge of the world, valid in its own way, but they are purely fictive unless backed up by the arch-critic of all contemporary culture, the scientist. “This is a scientific age,” says G. R. to his friends who still continue to speculate about religious matters.

This point, our exclusive reliance on scientific investigation and thought for the truth about things, needs no stressing. It is one of the preëminent signs of the modern mind. We do not take seriously the kind of knowledge offered by art, for instance, and in fact we do not call it knowledge at all. But it needs to be repeated again, for we continually forget it, that modern science is carried on by intensely specialized men whose activities are understandable to only a few hundreds and who do not popularize their doctrines. In many cases indeed, the various theories of quantum for one, these activities are extraordinarily hard to render into the idiom of the world. So it comes about that the many intelligent men who have adopted the “Scientific” view are actually just as Victorian as those who retain a sentimental “religious” life-picture. For their “Scientific” view is forty or fifty years old, going back to such famous and gifted popularizers as Huxley and Tyndall. By it they believe that the world is a vast mechanical concern, thoroughly materialistic, orderly and eventually knowable, but without purpose, and in this world man is an accidental form of life. He is alien to the world, and it is indifferent to him. How old-fashioned this is! Does it not bring to mind the discussions of some provincial group of tight-minded atheists set on combating the conventional propaganda of latter-day Christians? Yet, though the advanced physicist has forsaken this world-conception, it persists in many persons today who fancy themselves as intellectually “free.”

G. R., for instance, picks up the latest _Nation_ the postman has brought to his door and there in a feature article of one of our most intelligent weeklies, he reads: “It (the natural world) is a system if not with any purpose at least with an order.... Man is a half happy but, historically considered, quite explicable accident.” Now what is that but saying over again to G. R. what the Victorian scientist said in effect to G. R.’s father--the universe is all dressed up but has no place to go? Yet these sentences are by a professor of philosophy in a large university who is regarded as _au courant_ with the latest developments in thought. By this you may see how beneath a considerable surface complexity in the modern mind there may lie major assumptions of an astonishing naïveté. There is indeed a “village atheist” in many of us who controls our emotional state toward the world, and we shall have a great deal of trouble to dislodge him.

The truth is that neither the Victorian world-outlook, nor the “Scientific,” nor the “Pagan,” nor the “Æsthetic,” nor any other of the world-outlooks subscribed to in the present time by minorities inspires a creative emotion toward life. But of that, a creative world-conception and its corresponding attitude, more is to be said in a later chapter.

* * * * *

Perhaps we shall make a better case for ourselves if we examine our chief current conceptions of man. After all, nothing obviously is closer to us than our organisms: we may find that the world at large is a receding object for speculation, but who can be oblivious of the intimate bonds existing between what we call our “ego” and the manifestations of our personality? It is a truism (which we are always trying to forget) that we are attached by self-love to the strange being that bears our name, and it is furthermore known that self-love falls into a certain number of stock forms or attitudes toward oneself. Into these we need not go now: they fall more logically into the psychologist’s province. But it is pertinent for us to take up certain large conceptions of man which have a great hold on us, and deeply color our self-attitudes.

To begin with, a very large party, probably the most numerous in fact, thinks of man as existing wholly within Nature. By this its members mean that man contains naught of the supernatural: on the contrary, his psychology belongs as much to Nature as does his physiology. He rises out of Nature, but does not transcend it. There is no special law for man as distinct from law for thing: man is utterly material: the old doctrine of the soul’s immortality is a delusion. Browning has sung for them:

Let us not always say,
“Spite of this flesh today
I strove, made head, gained ground, upon the whole!”
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, “All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”

But this party which as a whole denies the existence of any radical discontinuity between Nature and Man is itself divided into a sentimental and a scientific faction, and both have representatives in the schools of psychology. The Freudian psycho-analyst will do very well as a spokesman for the sentimental naturalists, and for the scientific naturalists the Behaviorist is perfectly ready to offer his conclusions.

It happens that G. R. belongs to the former persuasion: he has been twice psycho-analysed and the stock he takes in the process can be gauged by the considerable expense he has put himself to. He is convinced that we have a kind of bastard soul, the “unconscious” or as most people prefer to call it, the subconscious, which is a basic conception in the teachings of the Freudians. This bastard soul is dynamic, not merely the residue of the impressions which we have either forgotten or received unawares, and it works its will deviously upon us. The important thing is to become aware of its modes of operating and to keep them from being perverted by false education and false social notions. Repressions and suppressions are, on the whole, mischievous, though sometimes necessary. The mind furthermore is suspect. It fools us by rationalizations: it oftentimes aids in unhealthy sublimations.

G. R. therefore seeks to free his impulses and to follow them spontaneously. He has turned anti-intellectual and tries to establish himself upon his instincts and his feelings without interference from his mind. He trusts in his “unconscious” which he believes to be innocent and naturally good in the old sense of Rousseau. That is why we may term G. R. a sentimental naturalist, for the mark of the breed is its faith in the essential goodness of man and its contention that the environment alone is to blame for the spoiling of man.

At the present time, G. R. is hostile to the scientific naturalist, not on the fundamental ground that man is entirely within Nature, but because the Behaviorist drives out sentiment about the inherent goodness of man. To the Behaviorist man is a doomed creature. He is the product solely of biology and sociology, will-less, an automaton, purely a response-mechanism. His consciousness is doubted, though his complexity is granted. But it is the complexity of a machine. G. R. finds it difficult to refute the Behaviorist’s laboratory experiments, but his “mystic” faith in the “unconscious” insulates him against the terrible conclusions of Dr. Watson and his co-workers.

Nor does he like the phrase, “the indignity of man,” which the New Humanists use for the conceptions of psycho-analyst and Behaviorist alike.

* * * * *

It may seem to some readers that I have overdrawn this portrait of a typical child of our age. But we must not mistake complexity of thinking for thought itself. An elaborate superstructure may rest upon a few naïve assumptions. I have tried to get below the superstructure and there I find a man who leads a standardized life due to the manipulations of Society, who either returns to his mother’s knee when he looks at the world or else regurgitates the stale conclusions of Victorian materialism, who conceives of himself as being naturally good if only he can return to the state of Nature or else he conceives of himself as purely mechanical--and it is impossible to exaggerate either this man’s ignorance of what life may mean or his lack of creative emotion toward the world and himself. His leaders, for all I can see, only subtilize his blindness, but they are stricken in the same way. It is true, one can confidently affirm of our epoch at least, that as A. N. Whitehead observes, “The mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in question.” Our leaders and this poor stock figure G. R. live in the same climate of opinion: they have shaped him, it is obvious, but what is not so immediately clear is that they have also sprung from him.

This at any rate is incontestable. Our age is not rich in individuality as the Renascence was. The Renascence type--the master of many arts, the all-round or universal man--does not flourish with us. And the reason? Once we peer well inside our psychology, it is apparent that we are aimless and uncreative, and that, I think, is sufficient explanation.

The New Humanist is against the psychology of modernity. He stands for another kind of man which I shall try to portray in the next chapter.

III

THE MAN OF POISE

_“The virtue that results from a right cultivation of one’s
humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living, is
poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles
succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The
difference is none the less marked between the man who is moving
toward poise and the man who is moving away from it.”_--Irving
Babbitt in _Humanism and America_.

One turns to dictionaries sometimes to find out what sense certain terms have had for large bodies of men. There are always several definitions of Humanism that have been widely accepted, including one that covers the meaning of the word as used by American Humanists. No follower of Irving Babbitt could take exception, for example, to the definition in _Webster’s New International Dictionary_, where it is stated that Humanism is “a system, mode, or attitude of thought or action centering upon distinctively human interests or ideals, especially as contrasted with naturalistic or religious interests.” A more interesting definition occurs in the _Century Dictionary_: “A system of thinking in which man, his interests and development, are made central and dominant. Its tendency is to exalt the cultural and practical rather than the scientific and speculative, and to encourage a spirit of revolt against existing opinions.” In the preceding chapter we glanced at some of the nowadays deeply entrenched opinions supporting the “indignity of man” conception which American Humanism seeks to oust, and we may add here that the New Humanist is fighting against the raising of the scientific discipline above the literary discipline. All of us for many years have read such sentences as these: “The field of literature is notoriously the home of lost causes. Almost any antique idea, no matter how rusty and fly-blown, can pass as legitimate currency in literary circles.... Literary men, as a class, are surprisingly ill-informed about anything but literature.... The exclusively literary discipline is one of the most narrowing and least productive of all intellectual disciplines”: and we have wondered under the spell of their confidence if we too should not be a little contemptuous of the offerings of literature to the modern man, rejoicing in them perhaps with a kind of secret shame, while we reserve our serious attention for the latest researches in anthropology and Gestalt psychology. Only, sotto voce, have we observed this alleged reluctance on the part of literary men today to embrace new scientific speculations? On the contrary, they seem, most of them, to be much more prone than genuine scientists to accept the latest guesses as “discoveries.” The New Humanist like the genuine scientist has not much applauded the “guess-sciences,” such as psycho-analysis, for from his training he has formed the stubborn conviction that the great literary masters were _not_ naïve men but quite the opposite, and divined more about the essential constitution of human nature than modern science has yet been able to disentangle. The New Humanist is even prepared to maintain in the teeth of the multitude shouting of “progress” that perhaps modern culture is a retrogression, and we need not think that the growth of a scientific mentality is a compensation for the decline of commonsense, the weakening of feeling, the decay of action as an art. In fact, the contention of numerous scientific apologists for the inferiority of the literary discipline to the discipline of science is a comparatively old story to the New Humanist, reminding him of Arnold’s reply to Huxley. I have it in mind soon to introduce Arnold as a model Humanist, one whose life and works may show us better than any abstract discourse what contemporary Humanism aspires to be, but it will be interesting first to look at his address on _Literature and Science_.

In that discourse Arnold marked his agreement with Huxley up to a certain point. “There is, therefore, really no question,” he said, “between Professor Huxley and me as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing the products of literature and art.” But it is such a statement which the rabid scientific propagandist ignores when he informs his audience that Humanism is anti-science in its tendency. It is not so. The New Humanist objects not to science, but to the exaggerated prestige science has acquired in modern civilization. “Interesting, indeed, these results of science are,” he will say with Arnold, “important they are, and we should all be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you to mark is, that we are still, when they are propounded to us and we receive them, we are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge.” Science is taken by the New Humanist as a great arm of the human spirit, a magnificent intellectual weapon forged for ascertaining the _what-ness_ of things, but still only as one of the great arms of the spirit along with philosophy and art and religion; and now we can bring forward Arnold’s justification for the literary discipline, the reason for his claim that “letters will call out their (mankind’s) being at more points, will make them live more” than an education carried on mainly in the natural sciences.

It is because literature is not confined to the sphere of intellect and knowledge, but is concerned with the relationship between that sphere and the other spheres of a man’s life, the sphere of beauty, the sphere of conduct. It is like dancing which has a regard to the total harmonious action of the body as contrasted with exercises like weight-lifting designed solely to increase strength. The scientific discipline is concerned with knowing, the literary with connecting knowing with feeling and doing. Truth is the prize of the scientist; truth, beauty and goodness the prizes of the man of letters. Thus, it may be said that the function of the literary culture is to sum up all other existent cultures, to gather them in and sweeten their language, and finally to relate their findings to the total being of man.

Arnold beautifully exemplified this relating power gained from the study of letters when he declared that “we shall find, as a matter of experience, if we know the best that has been thought and uttered in the world, we shall find that the art and poetry and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most limited natural knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about many important matters, we shall find that this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have in fact not only the power of refreshing and delighting us, they have also the power,--such is the strength and worth, in essentials, of their author’s criticism of life,--they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty. Homer’s conceptions of the physical universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the shock of hearing from modern science that ‘the world is not subordinated to man’s use, and that man is not the cynosure of things terrestrial,’ I could, for my own part, desire no better comfort than Homer’s line which I quoted just now, ‘for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of men.’”

Let that stand as all the defence required for the _utility_ of the literary classics in a scientific age. But it is a temptation to add further words of explanation, especially when one has at one’s elbow persuasive quotations from Arnold on other aspects of the discussion. Who has ever better stated the social office of literature than Arnold in _Culture and Anarchy_ when he says: “The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the _best_ knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.”

Literary culture then relates one power of our being to another, and it humanizes knowledge by putting it into the clear, supple and beautiful idiom of the world. By doing the second, it makes our knowledge ready for a third operation: it makes it ready for trial by the commonsense of mankind. What errors are revealed when an imposing jargon is at last made over into transparent writing, and what truths recommend themselves with overwhelming authority when at last they are spoken in the world’s tongue! To be passed by the commonsense of mankind is the highest seal of truth we can know. The friends of literary culture are right in their main contentions for literature’s great value. But let me here repeat there is naught in American Humanism _as a doctrine and an attitude_ that denies the restricted utility of modern science to the modern man in his struggle for firm ground on which to plant his feet in this rocking age. At another place we shall have to examine the conclusions of individual American Humanists concerning scientific doctrines. But now, in the endeavor to visualize Humanism in practice, let us look more closely at the figure of Matthew Arnold, who was so eminent an exponent of the literary life.

The first point I wish to make about Arnold is an unfashionable one just now, and therefore not easy for many people to appreciate. Arnold’s life, externally considered, was typically middle-class and ordinary. The son of the famous Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, he went up to Oxford, where he distinguished himself by his verse, and afterwards faced the common problem of making a living. This problem was complicated, as is the common case, by his desire to marry, and he solved it in the ordinary way by taking a position that was not altogether congenial, was in fact irksome, but did enable him to wed Miss Lucy Wightman. Thereafter, he raised a family, and became a member, though a critical one, of the great political and religious institutions of his country. He traveled, he lectured, and he meditated and wrote on matters of wide public interest. There were no exciting physical adventures in his life, no grand crimes of passion, no flaunting colors, no great upheavals of circumstance: in short, his was a representative life and, to an unsympathetic eye, a commonplace one. It was at the other pole from _la vie bohême_.

There are certain advantages not often reckoned in leading a life of conformity, such as Arnold’s outwardly appears to be. But to forestall misunderstanding of my point, I must say that I personally see no virtue in conformity itself, nor in non-conformity by itself. The first is worthless when set up as an ideal, and since the second is only a turning inside out of something worthless (the old illustration of the resemblance between the hollow and the bump comes to mind), it too is of no value: non-conformity for the sake of non-conformity is stupid. No; virtue resides all in the aim and spirit with which one conforms or rebels: the important question is _how_ one lives within the conventions or outside the pale. It is purpose, not pattern, that is radical.

But it so happens--and this is among the certain advantages referred to--that a man who leads a life typical of the millions of middle class mankind is automatically insured of a greater breadth of normal experience than is the bohemian flouter of institutions. The former experiences the common lot of man: a sense of family responsibility, touch with the main life of his community, actions within institutions greater than himself, and so on. The latter often becomes a kind of specialist in eccentric experience. He may be, and often is, of extraordinary gifts, but subtraction must be made for limitation of his experience, for specialization in certain directions, for eccentric psychology. Dazzled by what is unique in him, we often fail to count the price he has paid, his missing the broadening and steadying effects of ordinary experience.

Breadth and steadiness--these are essential for the attainment of poise, and these requisites to a certain extent are mechanically conferred on one who lives in accord with the large customs of his society. In looking at Arnold then, let us forget that he was a Victorian, since that label is a flag to arouse our prejudices and stop our thinking, but let us concentrate on these qualities of breadth and steadiness and see how his life in its very regularity and typicality fed his purpose and attitude, for in them we shall find his genius. It is not conventionality or unconventionality, I repeat, that is worth a tuppence, but that counts which one can extract from living. Arnold wished for proportionateness in character and in following the middle class pattern of life, he was intelligently using it for his purpose. I do not advance this as a general proposition but in his case it was so.

_How_ did Arnold conduct his life? We may view him successively as a thinker, a man of sentiment, and a man of practice, and in each aspect we shall see him hold himself with an admirable poise. First, his mind. Every one grants that it was an exceptionally balanced mind, and the reasons for its fine state of balance are chiefly two: the scope of Arnold’s reading and the purposiveness of his studies. For what makes for an unsteady mind? Insufficient knowledge which permits one to go off half-cocked, as people say; insufficient knowledge, or as Arnold liked to put it, provincialism. Arnold was constantly on guard against provincialism both of time and place. In a famous passage he opposed them both: “Let us conceive of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working towards a common result; a confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another.” But he not only immersed himself in the Occidental mind: he also, as is not common with Western thinkers, absorbed a great deal of the learning of the Orient. In other words, by a diligence that is extraordinary when it is remembered that Arnold by occupation was not a man of letters but an inspector of schools, he carried in his head a knowledge of world literature written over a period of twenty-five hundred years that served him as a marvellous balancing pole in dealing with the transitional problems of his day as they presented themselves in politics, religion, education, social morphology and the art of literature. Breadth of reading was the first aid for him in winning intellectual balance: the second was purposiveness. For there have been many omnivorous readers who have merely, after all, passed the time because of their aimlessness. James Russell Lowell is a pathetic instance. But Arnold’s duties shortened his hours for reading, and he felt he had to read, when he was free to do so, to some purpose. There is a Latin maxim--“_Semper aliquid certi proponendum est_” (always some certain end must be kept in view)--which we know he impressed upon himself. His essays are evidence that he was successful in working the maxim into his blood.

Still the mind is only the third part of a man, and mental poise can exist alongside of emotional debility and incompetence in daily affairs. Not so with Arnold, however, who impresses one almost as much by his emotional poise and his practical level-headedness as by the stability of his mind. He was a poet and is secure of a place in the history of English poetry, and this is proof positive of his strength of feeling, for time permits no man weak in feeling to stay long in the halls of Poesy. More than that, his sentiments, beginning with the personal and lyric, tended to pass into reflective emotion: that is, they broadened, became generalized, impersonal, universal, linked with reflections on the common destiny of mankind. This represents a maturing of his emotional life. Now just as provincialism and aimlessness destroy one’s mental balance, so immaturity and the inability to feel beyond one’s intimate concerns upset one’s emotional balance. But Arnold ripened, leaving the petty and childish behind him. He learned emotionally to stand on his own, to practice a sturdy independence. His sentiments were adult. Mark too his efforts to round out his emotional life. By disposition addicted to melancholy meditativeness, he sought--many times with success--to cultivate gaiety, to support a deeply serious view with as much charm and lightness as were fitting.

Now regard him in his practical aspect. We have seen that Arnold did not evade what the middle class man regards as his duties and responsibilities. He was a man among men, asking for no petting from society, meeting honestly by his own efforts the obligations of his lot. He never underestimated as do many modern artists the importance of conduct. Conduct, he said, was three-quarters of life, and as such man’s most serious concern. “As for living, our servants can do that for us,” said Villiers de l’Isle Adam, but Arnold never echoed such a sentiment. On the contrary, he not only faced daily affairs with dignity and courage, observing all varieties of men, bearing his own part, but he stressed the practical side of his writing. He wished for the best ideas to _prevail_ and he took infinite pains to make them persuasive and lucid and graceful so that they would irresistibly invade men’s minds and prevail. In this he is in extreme contrast with the “ivory tower” attitude which isolates art and thought from events. The practical man wishes to make a mark in the world’s business, and this decidedly Arnold aimed to do. The aim saved him from æsthetic trifling and metaphysical toying. It filled out the third side of his being.

Now perhaps we may see what is involved in the ideal of proportionateness: a threefold activity to clear the mind, to ripen and extend the feelings, to develop a practical attitude. The man of poise cannot neglect any one of these on peril of remaining lop-sided. Bias is his enemy, and against it he needs the full operation of a strong centralizing spirit in himself. Such a spirit, pervading his conduct, pervading his poetry, pervading his mind, Arnold possessed, and it is conveyed in his remark that “we are not here to have facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them.” It is the spirit of a man who faces the natural difficulties of life with a strong will to overcome them.

* * * * *

We are trying to arrive at a life-like picture of the man of poise as American Humanism conceives him. I have chosen Arnold as a working model of the quality, and an imitable one as well. Naturally American Humanists vary in their estimates of Arnold, and one or two--notably G. R. Elliott--are rather harsh in their strictures, but the majority appear to find in him the prime humanistic virtues, and so it seems fair to make the use I have of his example. It is obvious, I hope, that I do not imagine I am passing all of Arnold in review, and furthermore I confess that were I not looking for a man of poise in the recent Humanist tradition, I should never have summed Arnold up under that phrase. Poise to my mind is not the capital thing about him. Beyond the degree of most men, Arnold was a truth-seeker; and poise was to him auxiliary to the pursuit of truth. Auxiliary but necessary. For without moderating one’s powerful prejudices, without attaining a fine balance and tact, without tempering one virtue by its opposite virtue, Arnold was positive that one could not see things as they are. Things, reality, are many-sided, and without the cultivation of many-sidedness in ourselves, how can we hope to approach them fairly? These words from the preface to _Essays in Criticism: First Series_ set forth the right employment of poise in the great endeavor to see life steadily and whole. “To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will,--it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own, one, favorite, particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”

A singular fact ought to be patent from all that has been said: the man of poise is not a type, but an ideal toward which all types of men may strive. Nature makes types, but she does not make human beings of poise. She makes will-less Hamlets who, faced by a necessity to act, simply speculate and speculate, until events force them at last to act; she makes Byrons who, on the other hand, try to force events: they act impetuously, but they reflect like children, as Goethe said of Byron. But Nature does not make the balanced, well-proportioned individual. Arnold worked on himself: he worked to perfect himself beyond the maternal care of Nature.

Thus we see that the man of poise, the Humanist ideal, is in reality a spiritual athlete. His balance and proportionateness are not gifts, such as a vein of poetic emotion or a capacity for intellectual analysis may be, but they are deliberately sought and maintained. It requires constant effort, constant activity, for him to be what he is. Modernity accepts no such ideal as the New Humanist upholds. It wants greater Hamlets, greater Byrons, greater Calibans: it wants the accentuation of types and the growth of specialism: in short, it wishes to go with the grain of Nature. But the New Humanist proclaims that the truly man-like part is to work against the grain of Nature. “It is this backward motion toward the source,” says Robert Frost, the poet, “against the stream, that most we see ourselves in.”

IV

THE NEW BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

_“Our ‘intellectual atmosphere,’ however, is now rapidly changing,
is becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons,
oppressed with the stale skepticism of the post-war period, are
beginning to grow skeptical of that skepticism, and are looking
for a new set of controlling ideas capable of restoring value to
human existence. Certain forces are making for order and for new
objectives.... One of these forces is known as ‘humanism,’ which
is rapidly becoming a word to conjure with.”_--Norman Foerster in
_Humanism and America_.

Before I can treat the grounds of the New Humanist doctrine, I must turn historian and present, briefly at least, correct information about the origin and course of the movement which acknowledges Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More as masters. I am forced to this by the amount of misinformation and crude misrepresentation already widely disseminated concerning More and Babbitt and their colleagues. How this spreading of erroneous information, which now stands in our view, has come about is easily explained. American Humanism has had a quiet development for thirty-five years, making its way chiefly in academic channels and in scholarly books. Not until very recently, and then principally because of the spirited campaign waged in behalf of Babbitt and More by the _Bookman_, has this body of thought made any strong infiltration into popular literary journalism.

Now the roving eye of the literary journalist-at-large seldom glances at anything growing up in the universities, and it missed altogether the New Humanist movement until it emerged in force in the winter of 1929-1930. Then, to his surprise, the literary journalist found himself expected by his public to say something about Humanism. He was totally unprepared to do so, but experience has given him a cynical attitude toward his public. He is the lazy tutor who does not study one lesson in advance of his pupil, but he has learned how to divert the mind of his charge, should he be asked an inconvenient question. He then makes a great play on non-essentials, he bluffs it out until the hour is over, knowing well that his pupil will soon forget both the question and the mystifying answer. To send the public off on false scents was the shift, not always adopted dishonestly, of the unprepared literary journalist when Humanism became no longer an avoidable topic. For literary journalists, it seems, are never pen-tied because of ignorance: no difficulty was experienced in promptly delivering opinions having no bearing on the facts, lacking logic, missing the real issues,--wrong opinions, in short. Myths about the New Humanism were quickly generated, giving delight to connoisseurs in the absurd, but decidedly misleading to gentleman-readers wishing simply for plain light on the new trend. However, to dispel these myths, which obstruct thought, nothing more is needed than some bald information.

It is dramatic contrast, in view of the international attention his teachings have won, to begin with a picture of Irving Babbitt[1] in his classroom, working obscurely, as befits an underminer of an age’s basic assumptions, at his task of moulding the mind of a generation. Among the many professional writers and brilliant teachers who have come out from his courses--one may mention as a catholic selection T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Lippmann, Norman Foerster, Gilbert Seldes, Newton Arvin--was the late Stuart P. Sherman, who has left us a roughly drawn description of his early master’s wealth of mind and strength for destruction and construction.

“I knew Professor Babbitt as a graduate teacher in the History of Literary Criticism and in his Rousseau and His Influence. At that time he had very small classes--meeting around a table. He came in with a bag bursting full of books, and took out a handful of notes which he arranged around him. Began to sway in his chair, then leaped out upon one of them, and poured a barrage of criticism upon some doctrine or some line of poetry,--‘to cast o’er erring words and deeds a heavenly show’--Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Dante, Montaigne, Pascal, Milton, etc.--etc.

“He deluged you with wisdom of the world; his thoughts were unpacked and poured out so fast you couldn’t keep up with them. You didn’t know what he was talking about, but you felt that he was extremely in earnest, that it was tremendously important, that some time it would count; that he was uttering dogmatically things that cut into your beliefs, disposed derisively of what you adored, driving you into a reconstruction of your entire intellectual system. He was at you day after day like a battering ram, knocking down your illusions. He was building up a system of ideas.

“You never felt for a moment that he was a pedagogue, teaching pupils. You felt that he was a Coleridge, a Carlyle, a Buddha, pouring out the full-stuffed cornucopia of the world upon your head. You were no longer in the elementary class. You were with a man who was seeking through literature for illustrations of his philosophy of life. You were dealing with questions on the answer to which the welfare of nations and civilization depended. He himself seemed to know the right answer and was building a thoroughfare of ideas from the Greeks to our own day.

“You went out of the room laden down with general ideas that he had made seem tremendously important.... He related for you a multitude of separate and apparently disconnected tendencies to the great central currents of thought. You carried away also a sense of the need for immense reading. He had given you theses about literature, about life, which you would spend a lifetime in verifying.”

A battering ram knocking down illusions ... myself, I like to think of Irving Babbitt as a dogmatist of the Dr. Johnson type, burly in his judgments, masculine in his sentiments, downright in manner, an unyielding hater of sophistry, a stalwart upholder of commonsense. What is remarkable, in view of the extent of his system, is that he should have laid out at the age of thirty the ground-plan for his whole impressive structure of ideas. “The characteristic thought of Irving Babbitt,” as Norman Foerster observes, “was already adumbrated in 1895 in an address at the University of Wisconsin on ‘The Rational Study of the Classics,’ published two years later in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and in 1908 included in his book on _Literature and the American College_.” Since then he has steadily developed his original thesis: confident of his foundations, he has put up a heavy, many-fronted, turreted fortress for the modern mind to retire into and survey across a moat of commonsense the giddy wheelings of the “modernists,” those, that is, who make a cult of change and take change to be “progress.”

But what were Babbitt’s sources? His mind is powerfully assimilative and very muscular in its operations. He has applied it to world literature, east and west, ancient and modern, and naturally therefore his sources are varied. He is more Aristotelian than Platonic, however, and he takes more from Confucius than from Buddha. He feels himself at home with the rugged conservatism of Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke, and he stands with Matthew Arnold as an urger of more Hellenism in Anglo-Saxon culture.

His more immediate stimulators in American literature seem to be Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton. Emerson as a volatile literary force arose from many elements, one of them assuredly humanistic, and from this fortifying element in Emerson Babbitt has drawn much aid to his own spirit. It was the element which Emerson expressed in the didactic poem quoted on the flyleaf of Babbitt’s first book, _Literature and the American College_, and which no American Humanist since has apparently been able to refrain from quoting some place or other in his writings. I also succumb to the poem’s epigrammatic appeal and concision.

There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.

In respect to that man of truly mellow culture, Charles Eliot Norton, friend of Carlyle, co-editor with Lowell of the _North American Review_, professor of fine arts at Harvard, and celebrated Dantean scholar and translator, to him Babbitt acknowledged his indebtedness in the preface to _Literature and the American College_, written in 1907 shortly before Norton’s death.[2] “Those who,” Babbitt wrote, “during the past generation have felt the need of a more humane scholarship are indebted to him, many for direct aid and encouragement, and all for an example.”

By 1910 Babbitt had found strong fellowship in the direction his mind was working, notably the fellowship of Paul Elmer More. More had been born in St. Louis, Missouri, a year earlier than Babbitt: he graduated from Washington University in 1887 and took his master’s degree from Harvard in 1893, the same date as Babbitt. In the college year of 1894-1895 the two men were thrown together again, More as an instructor in Sanskrit at Harvard and Babbitt as an instructor in the French department. In the intervening year Babbitt had taught in the Romance Languages department of Williams College and there he had met a young instructor, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., who was destined to figure importantly in the growth of American Humanism. But not for long were Babbitt and More to work together as university colleagues, for from Harvard More went to Bryn Mawr College, where he stayed two years teaching Sanskrit and classical literature. Then in 1901, after his retreat to Shelburne, New Hampshire, for meditation, he joined the staff of the _Independent_ as literary editor. Mather too gave up academic work at this time and entered journalism as an editorial writer for the New York _Evening Post_: he was for various terms in the future to be its art critic as well as assistant editor of the _Nation_ and American editor for the _Burlington Magazine_. More’s future included the literary editorship of the New York _Evening Post_ from 1903 to 1909, and the editorship of the _Nation_, then the supreme organ of American scholarship, from 1909 to 1914. In the meantime he had begun to write his well known series of literary studies, the _Shelburne Essays_.

More and Babbitt complement each other extraordinarily. If Babbitt inclines to Aristotle, More inclines to Plato. If Babbitt writes on literary trends, using particular authors only in so far as they illustrate trends, More studies the individual genius, somewhat in the sinuous fashion of Sainte-Beuve, and then points out the trend. Babbitt, speaking roughly, is a critic of culture, More a critic of authors. Their area of agreement is very wide: they unite against Romanticism, agree substantially on Humanism, and diverge only when it comes to the kind of interest and the warmth of interest they feel in Religion. In short, More is more religious by temperament than Babbitt.

* * * * *

After his retirement from the _Nation_ in 1914, More devoted himself to an enterprise of scholarship and criticism which well deserves an adjective to be used with care, an adjective which has several times been applied to it by men who do not write lightly, I mean the adjective, monumental; and for the wonderful completion of this enterprise he has occasionally been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. The undertaking was _The Greek Tradition_ in five volumes, an impressive and inspiring account of the relation of Platonic and Hellenistic thought to early Christian thought; it is a work, incidentally, that has not yet even begun to be digested by American criticism.

There are those who believe More to be the best literary critic in the history of American literature. I think that is so: he appears to me an American counterpart to Cardinal Newman in his grasp at once of the ways of men, the subtle arguments of materialism, and reasoned belief in the spiritual life. But be that as it may, he is today the _doyen_ of American critics, and as such a cause for national pride. Agree or not with their teachings, we must all feel pride that America presents to Europe as, respectively, her _doyen_ of critics and as her master-spokesman for classical literary ideas two men of the resolution, deep scholarship, elevated thought, ripeness of judgment and wide sweep of purpose which characterize Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt.

* * * * *

Possibly the future of American Humanism will be dramatic. Already it has enough adherents of a polemical turn of mind, sharp controversialists like Robert Shafer and Seward Collins, to make things hot for their natural opponents, the Liberals, and the Liberals are certainly not going to relinquish their leadership of present-day American literature and thought before resorting to every device of literary dispute. Perhaps in the next decade Humanist and Liberal will pamphleteer against each other with all the zest and pungency and fierceness of the verbal warfare waged between Tories and Whigs in eighteenth century England. But up till now the New Humanists have been mainly perfecting their viewpoint, gathering strength, and preparing for action.

I distinguish three generations of New Humanists and divide, very arbitrarily, the rise of American Humanism thus far into three brief periods, the first from 1900 to 1917, when Stuart P. Sherman’s _On Contemporary Literature_ appeared, the second from 1917 to the publication of Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_ in 1924, and the third from 1924 to the present.

From 1900 to 1917 the first generation of New Humanists was teaching and writing out of its maturity. Babbitt was publishing his views on educational reform, on modern confusion in the arts, and on literary criticism. More was brilliantly editing the _Nation_ and composing volume after volume of carefully thought out and gracefully written studies of literature. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was making a name as an exacting but sympathetic critic of the fine arts, a calling of which in America he is now the dean. In passing, it may be noted that Mather was a pioneer in the work of advancing the books of Herman Melville to a front place in our literature. At the University of Nebraska, Prosser Hall Frye and Sherlock Bronson Gass were teaching, thinking and writing. Perhaps most prominent of all was the late W. C. Brownell, of whom more than mere mention is required.

Brownell, More and Babbitt--the names often formed a triad, and yet Brownell never held explicitly the general ideas worked out by More and Babbitt. The bond was sympathetic, but intellectually not clearly established. I once ventured to call Brownell a Victorian standpatter. Perhaps this was too harsh. Objection was taken by a critic who nevertheless declared that Brownell’s “senses never felt a concrete situation freshly, unmediated by the anticipation of habit. His mind, acute in distinguishing things, rarely attained any ideas and never a general philosophy. And his feeling for life seldom drove him to remove the blinkers of convention.” It will be seen that these defects lead to standpattism, however, and Brownell resisted change and stood in general for the Mid-Victorian temper and standards. His mind and tastes were typically nineteenth century: he did not have the freedom of the centuries so arduously won by Babbitt and More. But he was loosely united to them in the low opinion he entertained of many forms of modernism and in his insistence on critical standards.

Knowledge of the work these men--Brownell, Gass, Frye, Mather, More and Babbitt--were performing in the early years of this century relieves a little the oppressive feeling of dearth we have in regarding that time in America. In _Their Day in Court_, an out-of-print book by a forgotten impressionistic critic, Percival Pollard, we may get an excellent picture of this brief period of literary dearth. Pollard fought against the dry rot of the professors, the genteelness of editors like Hamilton Wright Mabie, the commercialism of most that passed for criticism, and the overwhelming mediocrity of the period’s books. Rather sadly he said in 1908: “It does not seem to me as if there were, on our side of the Atlantic, any longer such a thing as the art of letters; it is merely a trade.” In that same year a gifted young poet, Ezra Pound, fled our country, and later in his poem, _L’Homme Moyen Sensuel_, expressed his disgust for the quietism of the times more violently than even Pollard did.

Still I’d respect you if you could bury
Mabie, and Lyman Abbott and George Woodberry,
For minds so wholly founded upon quotations
Are not the best of pulse for infant nations.

So it was up to about 1912. There were certain giants looming over the scene--Howells and Henry James and Mark Twain--but they had no great animating effect upon it. James seemed too remote, Howells too selective and genteel in his realism, and Mark Twain too given to compromises. According to Pollard, the one American of literary genius then alive was almost completely neglected. He meant Ambrose Bierce.