Chapter I (3)

Most of the people at Chautauqua come either from the south or from the middle west. They pronounce the English language either without any _r_ at all, or with such excessive emphasis upon the _r_ as to make up for the deficiency of their fellow-seekers. In other words, these people are really American, as opposed to cosmopolitan; and to live among them is--for a world-wandering adventurer--to learn a lesson in Americanism. Mr. Roosevelt once stated that Chautauqua is the most American institution in America; and this statement--like many others of his inspired platitudes--begins to seem meaningful upon reflection.

At one time or another I have drifted to many different corners of the world; but my residence at Chautauqua was my only experience of a democracy. In this community there are no special privileges. If the President of the Institution had wished to hear me lecture (he never did, in fact--though we used to play tennis together, at which game he proved himself easily the better man) he would have been required to come early and take his chance at getting a front seat; and once, when I ventured to attend a lecture by one of my colleagues, I found myself seated beside that very waitress in the Athenæum who had disapproved of my method of ordering a meal. All the exercises are open equally to anybody--first come, first served--and the boy who blacks your boots may turn out to be a Sophomore at Oberlin. Teachers in Texas high-schools sweep the floors or shave you, and the raucous newsboy is earning his way toward the University of Illinois. All this is a little bewildering at first; but in a day or two you grow to like it.

This free-for-all spirit that permeates Chautauqua reminds me to speak of the economic conduct of the Institution. The only charge--except in the case of certain special courses--is for admission to the grounds. The visitor pays fifty cents for a franchise of one day, and more for periods of greater length, until the ultimate charge of seven dollars and fifty cents for a season ticket is attained. On leaving the grounds, he has to show his ticket; and if it has expired he is taxed according to the term of his delinquent lingering. Once free of the grounds, he may avail himself of any of the privileges of the Assembly. Lectures, on an infinite variety of subjects, are delivered hour after hour; and a bulletin of these successive lectures is posted publicly and printed in the daily paper. Every evening an entertainment of some sort is given in the Amphitheatre, and this is eagerly attended by swarming thousands. The Institution owns all the land within the bounding palisades. Private cottages may be erected by individual builders on lots leased for ninety-nine years; but the Institution owns and operates the only hotel, and exercises an absolute empery over the issuance of franchises to necessary tradesmen. The revenue of the corporation is therefore rich; but all of it is expended in importing the best lecturers that may be obtained, and in furthering the general good of the general assembly. The entire system suggests the theoretic observation that an absolute democracy can be instituted and maintained only by an absolute monarchy. If all the people are to be free and equal, the government must have absolute control of all the revenue. Here is, perhaps, a principle for our presidential candidates to think about.

But I do not wish to terminate this summer conversation on a serious note; and I must revert, in closing, to some of the recreations at Chautauqua. The first of these is tea. Every afternoon, from four to five o'clock, the visitor lightly flits from tea to tea,--making his excuses to one hostess in order to dash onward to another. This is rather hard upon the health, because it requires the deglutition of innumerable potions. I have always maintained that tea is an admirable entity if it be considered merely as a time of day, but that it is insidious if it be considered as a beverage. At Chautauqua, tea is not only an hour but a drink; and (though I am a sympathetic soul) I can only say that those who like it like it. For my part, I preferred the concoction sold at rustic soda-fountains, which is known locally as a "Chautauqua highball,"--a ribald term devised by college men who make up the by-no-means-despicable ball-team. This beverage is compounded out of unfermented grape-juice and foaming fizz-water; and, if it be taken absent-mindedly, seems to taste like something.

But the standard recreation at Chautauqua is the habit of impromptu eating in the open air. Every one invites you to go upon a picnic. You take a steamer to some point upon the lake, or take a trolley to a wild and deep ravine known by the somewhat unpoetic name of the Hog's Back; and then everybody sits around and eats sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and considers the occasion a debauch. This formality resembles great good fun,--especially as there are girls who laugh, and play, and threaten to disconcert you on the morrow when you solemnly arise to lecture on the Religion of Emerson. But picnic-baskets out of doors are rather hard on the digestion.

Perhaps I should record also, as a curious experience, that I was required to appear as one of the guests of honor at a large reception. This meant that I had to stand in line, with certain other marionettes, and shake hands with an apparently endless procession of people who were themselves as bored as were the guests of honor. I determined then and there that I should never run for President,--not even in response to an irresistible appeal from the populace. I had never suspected before that there could be so many hands without the touch of nature in them. I shook hands mechanically, chatting all the while with a humorous and human woman who stood next to me in the line of the attacked--until suddenly I felt the sensitive and tender grasp of a sure-enough hand, reminding me of friends and one or two women it has been a holiness to know. My attention was attracted by the thrill. I turned swiftly--and I looked upon a little bent old woman who was blind. She had a voice, too, for she spoke to me ... and,--well, I was very glad that I went to that reception.

And many other matters I remember fondly,--a certain lonely hill at sunset, whence you looked over wide water to distant dream-enchanted shores; the urbanity and humor of the wise directors of the Institution; the manner of many young students who discerned an unadmitted sanctity beneath the smiling conversations of those summer hours; my own last lecture, on "The Importance of Enjoying Life"; the people who walked with me to the station and whom I was sorry to leave; and the oddly-minded student behind the desk of the hotel; and an old man from Kentucky who cared about Walt Whitman after I had talked about his ministrations in the army hospitals; and the trees, and the reverberating organ, and, beneath a benison of midnight peace, the hushed moon-silvery surface of the lake. It is, indeed, a memorable experience to have lectured at Chautauqua.

ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP

Any one who has traveled much about the country of recent years must have been impressed by the growing uneasiness of mind among thoughtful men. Whether in the smoking car, or the hotel corridor, or the college hall, everywhere, if you meet them off their guard and stripped of the optimism which we wear as a public convention, you will hear them saying in a kind of sad amazement, "What is to be the end of it all?" They are alarmed at the unsettlement of property and the difficulties that harass the man of moderate means in making provision for the future; they are uneasy over the breaking up of the old laws of decorum, if not of decency, and over the unrestrained pursuit of excitement at any cost; they feel vaguely that in the decay of religion the bases of society have been somehow weakened. Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a _tour de force_, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence. Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. It is a more complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem correspondingly safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.

Only a year after the sinking of the _Titanic_ I was crossing the ocean, and it befell by chance that on the anniversary of that disaster we passed not very far from the spot where the proud ship lay buried beneath the waves. The evening was calm, and on the lee deck a dance had been hastily organized to take advantage of the benign weather. Almost alone I stood for hours at the railing on the windward side, looking out over the rippling water where the moon had laid upon it a broad street of gold. Nothing could have been more peaceful; it was as if Nature were smiling upon earth in sympathy with the strains of music and the sound of laughter that reached me at intervals from the revelling on the other deck. Yet I could not put out of my heart an apprehension of some luring treachery in this scene of beauty--and certainly the world can offer nothing more wonderfully beautiful than the moon shining from the far East over a smooth expanse of water. Was it not in such a calm as this that the unsuspecting vessel, with its gay freight of human lives, had shuddered, and gone down, forever? I seemed to behold a symbol; and there came into my mind the words we used to repeat at school, but are, I do not know just why, a little ashamed of to-day:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!...

Something like this, perhaps, is the feeling of many men--men by no means given to morbid gusts of panic--amid a society that laughs overmuch in its amusement and exults in the very lust of change. Nor is their anxiety quite the same as that which has always disturbed the reflecting spectator. At other times the apprehension has been lest the combined forces of order might not be strong enough to withstand the ever-threatening inroads of those who envy barbarously and desire recklessly; whereas today the doubt is whether the natural champions of order themselves shall be found loyal to their trust, for they seem no longer to remember clearly the word of command that should unite them in leadership. Until they can rediscover some common ground of strength and purpose in the first principles of education and law and property and religion, we are in danger of falling a prey to the disorganizing and vulgarizing domination of ambitions which should be the servants and not the masters of society.

Certainly, in the sphere of education there is a growing belief that some radical reform is needed; and this dissatisfaction is in itself wholesome. Boys come into college with no reading and with minds unused to the very practice of study; and they leave college, too often, in the same state of nature. There are even those, inside and outside of academic halls, who protest that our higher institutions of learning simply fail to educate at all. That is slander; but in sober earnest, you will find few experienced college professors, apart from those engaged in teaching purely utilitarian or practical subjects, who are not convinced that the general relaxation is greater now than it was twenty years ago. It is of considerable significance that the two student essays which took the prizes offered by the Harvard _Advocate_ in 1913 were both on this theme. The first of them posed the question: "How can the leadership of the intellectual rather than the athletic student be fostered?" and was virtually a sermon on a text of President Lowell's: "No one in close touch with American education has failed to notice the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, and the small regard for scholarly attainment."

Now, the _Advocate_ prizeman has his specific remedy, and President Lowell has his, and other men propose other systems and restrictions; but the evil is too deep-seated to be reached by any superficial scheme of honors or to be charmed away by insinuating appeals. The other day Mr. William F. McCombs, chairman of the National Committee which engineered a college president into the White House, gave this advice to our academic youth: "The college man must forget--or never let it creep into his head--that he's a highbrow. If it does creep in, he's out of politics." To which one might reply in Mr. McCombs's own dialect, that unless a man can make himself a force in politics (or at least in the larger life of the State) precisely by virtue of being a "highbrow," he had better spend his four golden years otherwhere than in college. There it is: the destiny of education is intimately bound up with the question of social leadership, and unless the college, as it used to be in the days when the religious hierarchy it created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding place for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the _jeunesse dorée_ (_sc._ the "gold coasters"). We must get back to a common understanding of the office of education in the construction of society, and must discriminate among the subjects that may enter into the curriculum, by their relative value towards this end.

A manifest condition is that education should embrace the means of discipline, for without discipline the mind will remain inefficient, just as surely as the muscles of the body, without exercise, will be left flaccid. That should seem to be a self-evident truth. Now it may be possible to derive a certain amount of discipline out of any study, but it is a fact, nevertheless, which cannot be gainsaid, that some studies lend themselves to this use more readily and effectively than others. You may, for instance, if by extraordinary luck you get the perfect teacher, make English literature disciplinary by the hard manipulation of ideas; but in practice it almost inevitably happens that a course in English literature either degenerates into the dull memorizing of dates and names or, rising into the O Altitudo, evaporates in romantic gush over beautiful passages. This does not mean, of course, that no benefit may be obtained from such a study, but it does preclude English literature generally from being made the backbone, so to speak, of a sound curriculum. The same may be said of French and German. The difficulties of these tongues in themselves, and the effort required of us to enter into their spirit, imply some degree of intellectual gymnastics, but scarcely enough for our purpose. Of the sciences it behooves one to speak circumspectly, and undoubtedly mathematics and physics, at least, demand such close attention and such firm reasoning as to render them an essential part of any disciplinary education. But there are good grounds for being sceptical of the effect of the non-mathematical sciences on the immature mind. Any one who has spent a considerable portion of his undergraduate time in a chemical laboratory, for example, as the present writer has done, and has the means of comparing the results of such elementary and pottering experimentation with the mental grip required in the humanistic courses, must feel that the real training obtained therein was almost negligible. If I may draw further from my own observation I must say frankly that, after dealing for a number of years with manuscripts prepared for publication by college professors of the various faculties, I have been forced to the conclusion that science, in itself, is likely to leave the mind in a state of relative imbecility. It is not that the writing of men who got their early drill too exclusively, or even predominantly, in the sciences lacks the graces of rhetoric--that would be comparatively a small matter--but such men in the majority of cases, even when treating subjects within their own field, show a singular inability to think clearly and consecutively, so soon as they are freed from the restraint of merely describing the process of an experiment. On the contrary, the manuscript of a classical scholar, despite the present dry-rot of philology, almost invariably gives signs of a habit of orderly and well-governed cerebration.

Here, whatever else may be lacking, is discipline. The sheer difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one's self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain. And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the classics do actually surpass their unclassical rivals in any field where a fair test can be made. At Princeton, for instance, Professor West has shown this superiority by tables of achievements and grades, which he published in the _Educational Review_ for March, 1913; and a number of letters from various parts of the country, printed in the _Nation_, tell the same story in striking fashion. Thus, a letter from Wesleyan (September 7, 1911) gives statistics to prove that the classical students in that university outstrip the others in obtaining all sorts of honors, commonly even honors in the sciences. Another letter (May 8, 1913) shows that in the first semester in English at the University of Nebraska the percentage of delinquents among those who entered with four years of Latin was below 7; among those who had three years of Latin and one or two of a modern language the percentage rose to 15; two years of Latin and two years of a modern language, 30 per cent.; one year or less of Latin and from two to four years of a modern language, 35 per cent. And in the _Nation_ of April 23, 1914, Prof. Arthur Gordon Webster, the eminent physicist of Clark University, after speaking of the late B.O. Peirce's early drill and life-long interest in Greek and Latin, adds these significant words: "Many of us still believe that such a training makes the best possible foundation for a scientist." There is reason to think that this opinion is daily gaining ground among those who are zealous that the prestige of science should be maintained by men of the best calibre.

The disagreement in this matter would no doubt be less, were it not for an ambiguity in the meaning of the word "efficient" itself. There is a kind of efficiency in managing men, and there also is an intellectual efficiency, properly speaking, which is quite a different faculty. The former is more likely to be found in the successful engineer or business man than in the scholar of secluded habits, and because often such men of affairs received no discipline at college in the classics, the argument runs that utilitarian studies are as disciplinary as the humanistic. But efficiency of this kind is not an academic product at all, and is commonly developed, and should be developed, in the school of the world. It comes from dealing with men in matters of large physical moment, and may exist with a mind utterly undisciplined in the stricter sense of the word. We have had more than one illustrious example in recent years of men capable of dominating their fellows, let us say in financial transactions, who yet, in the grasp of first principles and in the analysis of consequences, have shown themselves to be as inefficient as children.

Probably, however, few men who have had experience in education will deny the value of discipline to the classics, even though they hold that other studies, less costly from the utilitarian point of view, are equally educative in this respect. But it is further of prime importance, even if such an equality, or approach to equality, were granted, that we should select one group of studies, and unite in making it the core of the curriculum for the great mass of undergraduates. It is true in education as in other matters that strength comes from union, and weakness from division, and if educated men are to work together for a common end, they must have a common range of ideas, with a certain solidarity in their way of looking at things. As matters actually are, the educated man feels terribly his isolation under the scattering of intellectual pursuits, yet too often lacks the courage to deny the strange popular fallacy that there is virtue in sheer variety, and that somehow well-being is to be struck out from the clashing of miscellaneous interests rather than from concentration. In one of his annual reports some years ago President Eliot, of Harvard, observed from the figures of registration that the majority of students still at that time believed the best form of education for them was in the old humanistic courses, and _therefore_, he argued, the other courses should be fostered. There was never perhaps a more extraordinary syllogism since the _argal_ of Shakespeare's gravedigger. I quote from memory, and may slightly misrepresent the actual statement of the influential "educationalist," but the spirit of his words, as indeed of his practice, is surely as I give it. And the working of this spirit is one of the main causes of the curious fact that scarcely any other class of men in social intercourse feel themselves, in their deeper concerns, more severed one from another than those very college professors who ought to be united in the battle for educational leadership. This estrangement is sometimes carried to an extreme almost ludicrous. I remember once, in a small but advanced college, the consternation that was awakened when an instructor in philosophy went to a colleague--both of them now associates in a large university--for information in a question of biology. "What business has he with such matters," said the irate biologist; "let him stick to his last, and teach philosophy--if he can!" That was a polite jest, you will say. Perhaps; but not entirely. Philosophy is indeed taught in one lecture hall, and biology in another, but of conscious effort to make of education an harmonious driving force there is next to nothing. And as the teachers, so are the taught.

Such criticism does not imply that advanced work in any of the branches of human knowledge should be curtailed; but it does demand that, as a background to the professional pursuits, there should be a common intellectual training through which all students should pass, acquiring thus a single body of ideas and images in which they could always meet as brother initiates.

We shall, then, make a long step forward when we determine that in the college, as distinguished from the university, it is better to have the great mass of men, whatever may be the waste in a few unmalleable minds, go through the discipline of a single group of studies--with, of course, a considerable freedom of choice in the outlying field. And it will probably appear in experience that the only practicable group to select is the classics, with the accompaniment of philosophy and the mathematical sciences. Latin and Greek are, at least, as disciplinary as any other subjects; and if it can be further shown that they possess a specific power of correction for the more disintegrating tendencies of the age, it ought to be clear that their value as instruments of education outweighs the service of certain other studies which may seem to be more immediately utilitarian.

For it will be pretty generally agreed that efficiency of the individual scholar and unity of the scholarly class are, properly, only the means to obtain the real end of education, which is social efficiency. The only way, in fact, to make the discipline demanded by a severe curriculum and the sacrifice of particular tastes required for unity seem worth the cost, is to persuade men that the resulting form of education both meets a present and serious need of society and promises to serve those individuals who desire to obtain society's fairer honors. As for the specific need of society at the present day, it is not my purpose to open this matter now, for the good reason that the editor of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW has already permitted me to argue it at length in my article on _Natural Aristocracy_. Mr. McCombs, speaking for the "practical" man, declares that there is no place in politics for the intellectual aristocrat. A good many of us believe that unless the very reverse of this is true, unless the educated man can somehow, by virtue of his education, make of himself a governor of the people in the larger sense, and even to some extent in the narrow political sense, unless the college can produce a hierarchy of character and intelligence which shall in due measure perform the office of the discredited oligarchy of birth, we had better make haste to divert our enormous collegiate endowments into more useful channels.

And here I am glad to find confirmation of my belief in the stalwart old _Boke Named the Governour_, published by Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531, the first treatise on education in the English tongue, and still, after all these years, one of the wisest. It is no waste of time to take account of the theory held by the humanists when study at Oxford and Cambridge was shaping itself for its long service in giving to the oligarchic government of Great Britain whatever elements it possessed of true aristocracy. Elyot's book is equally a treatise on the education of a gentleman, and on the ordinance of government; for, as he says elsewhere, he wrote "to instruct men in such virtues as shall be expedient for them which shall have authority in a weal public." I quote from various parts of his work with some abridgment, retaining the quaint spelling of the original, and I beg the reader not to skip, however long the citation may appear:

Beholde also the ordre that god hath put generally in al his
creatures, begynning at the moste inferiour or base, and
assendynge upwarde; so that in euery thyng is ordre, and without
ordre may be nothing stable or permanent; and it may nat be called
ordre, excepte it do contayne in it degrees, high and base,
accordynge to the merite or estimation of the thyng that is
ordred. And therfore hit appereth that god gyueth nat to euery man
like gyftes of grace, or of nature, but to some more, some lesse,
as it liketh his diuine maiestie. For as moche as understandyng is
the most excellent gyfte that man can receiue in his creation, it
is therfore congruent, and accordynge that as one excelleth an
other in that influence, as therby beinge next to the similitude
of his maker, so shulde the astate of his persone be auanced in
degree or place where understandynge may profite. Suche oughte to
be set in a more highe place than the residue where they may se
and also be sene; that by the beames of theyr excellent witte,
shewed throughe the glasse of auctorite, other of inferiour
understandynge may be directed to the way of vertue and commodious
liuynge....

Thus I conclude that nobilitie is nat after the vulgare opinion of
men, but is only the prayse and surname of vertue; whiche the
lenger it continueth in a name or lignage, the more is nobilitie
extolled and meruailed at....

If thou be a gouernour, or haste ouer other soueraygntie, knowe
thy selfe. Knowe that the name of a soueraigne or ruler without
actuall gouernaunce is but a shadowe, that gouernaunce standeth
nat by wordes onely, but principally by acte and example; that by
example of gouernours men do rise or falle in vertue or vice. Ye
shall knowe all way your selfe, if for affection or motion ye do
speke or do nothing unworthy the immortalitie and moste precious
nature of your soule....

In semblable maner the inferiour persone or subiecte aught to
consider, that all be it he in the substaunce of soule and body be
equall with his superior, yet for als moche as the powars and
qualities of the soule and body, with the disposition of reason,
be nat in euery man equall, therfore god ordayned a diuersitie or
pre-eminence in degrees to be amonge men for the necessary
derection and preseruation of them in conformitie of lyuinge....

Where all thynge is commune, there lacketh ordre; and where ordre
lacketh, there all thynge is odiouse and uncomly.

Such is the goal which the grave Sir Thomas pointed out to the noble youth of his land at the beginning of England's greatness, and such, within the bounds of human frailty, has been the ideal even until now which the two universities have held before them. Naturally the method of training prescribed in the sixteenth century for the attainment of this goal is antiquated in some of its details, but it is no exaggeration, nevertheless, to speak of the _Boke Named the Governour_ as the very Magna Charta of our education. The scheme of the humanist might be described in a word as a disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination to the end that the student may behold, as it were in one sublime vision, the whole scale of being in its range from the lowest to the highest under the divine decree of order and subordination, without losing sight of the immutable veracity at the heart of all variation, which "is only the praise and surname of virtue." This was no new vision, nor has it ever been quite forgotten. It was the whole meaning of religion to Hooker, from whom it passed into all that is best and least ephemeral in the Anglican Church. It was the basis, more modestly expressed, of Blackstone's conception of the British Constitution and of liberty under law. It was the kernel of Burke's theory of statecraft. It is the inspiration of the sublimer science, which accepts the hypothesis of evolution as taught by Darwin and Spencer, yet bows in reverence before the unnamed and incommensurable force lodged as a mystical purpose within the unfolding universe. It was the wisdom of that child of Stratford who, building better than he knew, gave to our literature its deepest and most persistent note. If anywhere Shakespeare seems to speak from his heart and to utter his own philosophy, it is in the person of Ulysses in that strange satire of life as "still wars and lechery" which forms the theme of _Troilus and Cressida_. Twice in the course of the play Ulysses moralizes on the causes of human evil. Once it is in an outburst against the devastations of disorder:

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite.

And, in the same spirit, the second tirade of Ulysses is charged with mockery at the vanity of the present and at man's usurpation of time as the destroyer instead of the preserver of continuity:

For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.

To have made this vision of the higher imagination a true part of our self-knowledge, in such fashion that the soul is purged of envy for what is distinguished, and we feel ourselves fellows with the preserving, rather than the destroying, forces of time, is to be raised into the nobility of the intellect. To hold this knowledge in a mind trained to fine efficiency and confirmed by faithful comradeship, is to take one's place with the rightful governors of the people. Nor is there any narrow or invidious exclusiveness in such an aristocracy, which differs in its free hospitality from an oligarchy of artificial prescription. The more its membership is enlarged, the greater is its power, and the more secure are the privileges of each individual. Yet, if not exclusive, an academic aristocracy must by its very nature be exceedingly jealous of any levelling process which would shape education to the needs of the intellectual proletariat, and so diminish its own ranks. It cannot admit that, if education is once levelled downwards, the whole body of men will of themselves gradually raise the level to the higher range; for its creed declares that elevation must come from leadership rather than from self-motion of the mass. It will therefore be opposed to any scheme of studies which relaxes discipline or destroys intellectual solidarity. It will look with suspicion on any system which turns out half-educated men with the same diplomas as the fully educated, thinking that such methods of slurring over differences are likely to do more harm by discouraging the ambition to attain what is distinguished than good by spreading wide a thin veneer of culture. In particular it will distrust the present huge overgrowth of courses in government and sociology, which send men into the world skilled in the machinery of statecraft and with minds sharpened to the immediate demands of special groups, but with no genuine training of the imagination and no understanding of the longer problems of humanity, with no hold on the past, "amidst so vast a fluctuation of passions and opinions, to concentre their thoughts, to ballast their conduct, to preserve them from being blown about by every wind of fashionable doctrine." It will set itself against any regular subjection of the "fierce spirit of liberty," which is the breath of distinction and the very charter of aristocracy, to the sullen spirit of equality, which proceeds from envy in the baser sort of democracy. It will regard the character of education and the disposition of the curriculum as a question of supreme importance; for its motto is always, _abeunt studia in mores_.

Now this aristocratic principle has, so to speak, its everlasting embodiment in Greek literature, from whence it was taken over into Latin and transmitted, with much mingling of foreign and even contradictory ideas, to the modern world. From Homer to the last runnings of the Hellenic spirit you will find it taught by every kind of precept and enforced by every kind of example; nor was Shakespeare writing at hazard, but under the instinctive guidance of genius, when he put his aristocratic creed into the mouth of the hero who to the end remained for the Greeks the personification of their peculiar wisdom. In no other poetry of the world is the law of distinction, as springing from a man's perception of his place in the great hierarchy of privilege and obligation, from the lowest human being up to the Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently set forth as in Pindar's _Odes of Victory_. And Æschylus was the first dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the intellect in the law of orderly development, seemingly at variance with the divine immutable will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious accord with it. When the philosophers of the later period came to the creation of systematic ethics, they had only the task of formulating what was already latent in the poets and historians of their land; and it was the recollection of the fulness of such instruction in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ and the Platonic Dialogues, with their echo in the _Officia_ of Cicero, as if in them were stored up all the treasures of antiquity, that raised our Sir Thomas into wondering admiration:

Lorde god, what incomparable swetnesse of wordes and mater shall
he finde in the saide warkes of Plato and Cicero; wherin is ioyned
grauitie with dilectation, excellent wysedome with diuine
eloquence, absolute vertue with pleasure incredible, and euery
place is so infarced [crowded] with profitable counsaile, ioyned
with honestie, that those thre bokes be almoste sufficient to make
a perfecte and excellent gouernour.

There is no need to dwell on this aspect of the classics. He who cares to follow their full working in this direction, as did our English humanist, may find it exhibited in Plato's political and ethical scheme of self-development, or in Aristotle's ideal of the Golden Mean which combines magnanimity with moderation, and elevation with self-knowledge. If a single word were used to describe the character and state of life upheld by Plato and Aristotle, as spokesmen of their people, it would be _eleutheria_, _liberty_: the freedom to cultivate the higher part of a man's nature--his intellectual prerogative, his desire of truth, his refinements of taste--and to hold the baser part of himself in subjection; the freedom, also, for its own perfection, and indeed for its very existence, to impose an outer conformity to, or at least respect for, the laws of this inner government on others who are of themselves ungoverned. Such liberty is the ground of true distinction; it implies the opposite of an equalitarianism which reserves its honors and rewards for those who attain a bastard kind of distinction by the cunning of leadership, without departing from common standards--the demagogues who rise by flattery. But it is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age whose appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a _via media_ between an equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other times, they have fallen under displeasure for their veto on a contrary excess. Thus, in his savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave the significant title _Behemoth_, Hobbes lists the reading of classical history among the chief causes of the rebellion. "There were," he says, "an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so educated as that in their youth, having read the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity and great actions, in which books the popular government was extolled by that glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny, they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and out of these men were chosen the greatest part of the House of Commons; or if they were not the greatest part, yet by advantage of their eloquence were always able to sway the rest." To this charge Hobbes returns again and again, even declaring that "the universities have been to this nation as the Wooden Horse was to the Trojans." And the uncompromising monarchist of the _Leviathan_, himself a classicist of no mean attainments, as may be known by his translation of Thucydides, was not deceived in his accusation. The tyrannicides of Athens and Rome, the Aristogeitons and Brutuses and others, were the heroes by whose example the leaders of the French Revolution (rightly, so far as they did not fall into the opposite, equalitarian extreme) were continually justifying their acts:

There Brutus starts and stares by midnight taper,
Who all the day enacts--a woollen-draper.

And again, in the years of the Risorgimento, more than one of the champions of Italian liberty went to death with those great names on their lips.

So runs the law of order and right subordination. But if the classics offer the best service to education by inculcating an aristocracy of intellectual distinction, they are equally effective in enforcing the similar lesson of time. It is a true saying of our ancient humanist that "the longer it continueth in a name or lineage, the more is nobility extolled and marvelled at." It is true because in this way our imagination is working with the great conservative law of growth. Whatever may be in theory our democratic distaste for the insignia of birth, we cannot get away from the fact that there is a certain honor of inheritance, and that we instinctively pay homage to one who represents a noble name. There is nothing really illogical in this: for, as an English statesman has put it, "the past is one of the elements of our power." He is the wise democrat who, with no opposition to such a decree of Nature, endeavors to control its operation by expecting noble service where the memory of nobility abides. When last year Oxford bestowed its highest honor on an American, distinguished not only for his own public acts but for the great tradition embodied in his name, the Orator of the University did not omit this legitimate appeal to the imagination, singularly appropriate in its academic Latin:

... Statim succurrit animo antiqua illa Romae condicio, cum non
tam propter singulos cives quam propter singulas gentes nomen
Romanum floreret. Cum enim civis alicujus et avum et proavum
principes civitatis esse creatos, cum patrem legationis munus apud
aulam Britannicam summa cum laude esse exsecutum cognovimus; cum
denique ipsum per totum bellum stipendia equo meritum, summa
pericula "Pulcra pro Libertate" ausum,... Romanae alicujus
gentis--Brutorum vel Deciorum--annales evolvere videmur, qui
testimonium adhibent "fortes creari fortibus," et majorum exemplis
et imaginibus nepotes ad virtutem accendi.

Is there any man so dull of soul as not to be stirred by that enumeration of civic services zealously inherited; or is there any one so envious of the past as not to believe that such memories should be honored in the present as an incentive to noble emulation?

Well, we cannot all of us count Presidents and Ambassadors among our ancestors, but we can, if we will, in the genealogy of the inner life enroll ourselves among the adopted sons of a family in comparison with which the Bruti and Decii of old and the Adamses of to-day are veritable _new men_. We can see what defence against the meaner depredations of the world may be drawn from the pride of birth, when, as it sometimes happens, the obligation of a great past is kept as a contract with the present; shall we forget to measure the enlargement and elevation of mind which ought to come to a man who has made himself the heir of the ancient Lords of Wisdom? "To one small people," as Sir Henry Maine has said, in words often quoted, "it was given to create the principle of Progress. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." That is a hard saying, but scarcely exaggerated. Examine the records of our art and our science, our philosophy and the enduring element of our faith, our statecraft and our notion of liberty, and you will find that they all go back for their inspiration to that one small people, and strike their roots into the soil of Greece. What we have added, it is well to know; but he is the aristocrat of the mind who can display a diploma from the schools of the Academy and the Lyceum, and from the Theatre of Dionysus. What tradition of ancestral achievement in the Senate or on the field of battle shall broaden a man's outlook and elevate his will equally with the consciousness that his way of thinking and feeling has come down to him by so long and honorable a descent, or shall so confirm him in his better judgment against the ephemeral and vulgarizing solicitations of the hour? Other men are creatures of the visible moment; he is a citizen of the past and of the future. And such a charter of citizenship it is the first duty of the college to provide.

I have limited myself in these pages to a discussion of what may be called the public side of education, considering the classics in their power to mould character and foster sound leadership in a society much given to drifting. Of the inexhaustible joy and consolation they afford to the individual, only he can have full knowledge who has made the writers of Greece and Rome his friends and counsellors through many vicissitudes of life. It is related of Sainte-Beuve, who, according to Renan, read everything and remembered everything, that one could observe a peculiar serenity on his face whenever he came down from his study after reading a book of Homer. The cost of learning the language of Homer is not small; but so are all fair things difficult, as the Greek proverb runs, and the reward in this case is precious beyond estimation.

Nor need we forget another proverb from Greece, with its spirit of "accommodation"--that the half is sometimes greater than the whole. Even a moderate acquaintance with the language, helped out by good translations (especially in such form as the Loeb Classics are now offering, with the original and the English on opposite pages), will go a surprising length towards keeping a man, amid the exactions of a professional or otherwise busy life, in possession of the heritage to which our age has grown so perilously indifferent.

HYPNOTISM, TELEPATHY, AND DREAMS

A good many good judges find the world more out of joint, and moving with a more threatening rattling, than at any previous time since the French Revolution, and think that this is largely because the machine has lost too much of that regulation it used to get from the religions. Much of the regulation came from an interest in things wider than those directly revealed by sense.

Possibly a revival of such an interest may be promised by the recent indications of a range of our forces, both physical and psychic, far wider than previous experience has indicated. This leads us to invite attention to some unusual psychic phenomena evinced by persons of exceptional sensibilities not yet as well understood, or even as carefully investigated, as perhaps they deserve to be. The physical phenomena are outside of our present purpose.

There are hundreds of well authenticated reports of super-usual visions. The vast majority of them, however, were experienced when the percipients were in bed, but believed themselves awake. But almost everybody has often believed himself awake in bed, when he was only dreaming. Hence the probability is overwhelming that most of these super-usual experiences were had in dreams.

But it is certain that not all were, at least in dreams as ordinarily understood; but there seems to be a waking dream state. Foster's visions virtually all came while he was awake, and they were generally at once described by him as if he were describing a landscape or a play. At times he very closely identified himself with some personality of his visions, and acted out the personality, just as Mrs. Piper has habitually done. The following is an approximate instance, quoted by Bartlett (_The Salem Seer_, p. 51 f.):

Says a writer in the New York _World_, Dec. 27, 1885:

... While we were talking one night, Foster and I, there came a
knock at the door. Bartlett arose and opened it, disclosing as he
did so two young men plainly dressed, of marked provincial
aspect.... I saw at once that they were clients, and arose to go.
Foster restrained me.

"Sit down," he said. "I'll try and get rid of them, for I'm not in
the humor to be disturbed...."

Foster hinted that he had no particular inclination to gratify
them then and there, but they protested that they had come some
distance, and, with a characteristically good-natured smile, he
gave in....

Then follows an account of a fairly good séance--taps on the
marble table, reading pellets, describing persons, etc., until I
thought Foster was tired of the interview and was feigning sleep
to end it. All of a sudden he sprang to his feet with such an
expression of horror and consternation as an actor playing Macbeth
would have given a good deal to imitate. His eyes glared, his
breast heaved, his hands clenched....

"Why did you come here?" cried Foster, in a wail that seemed to
come from the bottom of his soul. "Why do you come here to torment
me with such a sight? Oh, God! It's horrible! It's horrible!... It
is your father I see!... He died fearfully! He died fearfully! He
was in Texas--on a horse--with cattle. He was alone. It is the
prairies! Alone! The horse fell! He was under it! His thigh was
broken--horribly broken! The horse ran away and left him! He lay
there stunned! Then he came to his senses! Oh! his thigh was
dreadful! Such agony! My God! Such agony!"

Foster fairly screamed at this. The younger of the men ... broke
into violent sobs. His companion wept, too, and the pair of them
clasped hands. Bartlett looked on concerned. As for me, I was
astounded.

"He was four days dying--four days dying--of starvation and
thirst," Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible
hieroglyphs written on the air. "His thigh swelled to the size of
his body. Clouds of flies settled on him--flies and vermin--and he
chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my
God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! that's
how your father died!"

So saying, with a great sob, Foster dropped into his chair, his
cheeks purple, and tears running down them in rivers. The younger
man ... burst into a wild cry of grief and sank upon the neck of
his friend. He, too, was sobbing as if his own heart would break.
Bartlett stood over Foster wiping his forehead with a
handkerchief....

"It's true," said the younger man's friend; "his father was a
stock-raiser in Texas, and after he had been missing from his
drove for over a week, they found him dead and swollen with his
leg broken. They tracked him a good distance from where he must
have fallen. But nobody ever heard till now how he died." ...

Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor could ever have had this scene in his mind as vividly as Foster had. In that case where and how did Foster get the vividness and emotion? How do we get them in dreams? He dreamed while he was awake.

As Bartlett quotes this, and as it declares him to have been present, he of course attests it by quoting it. So in each of Bartlett's quoted cases, the original witness is the reporter in the newspaper, and Bartlett, who was present (he was Foster's traveling companion and business agent) thus confirms it. We know Mr. Bartlett personally, and have thorough confidence in his sanity and sincerity. We have also been at the pains to learn that he commands the confidence and respect of his fellow townsmen in Tolland, Connecticut, where he is passing a green old age. Moreover, he does not interpret these phenomena by "spiritism."

We also had a sitting with Foster, in which he undoubtedly showed abundant telepathy, and satisfied us that he was fundamentally honest, though not always discriminating between his involuntary impressions, and his natural impulses to help out their coherence and interest.

* * * * *

Those who explain these things by denying their existence, were at least excusable thirty, or even twenty, years ago, but since the carefully sifted and authenticated and recorded evidence of recent years, especially that gathered by the Society for Psychical Research, the makers of such explanations simply put themselves in the category of those who, in Schopenhauer's day, denied the telopsis which is now quite generally recognized. He said their attitude should not be called skeptical, but merely ignorant. This brings to mind an excellent very practical friend who read the first number of this REVIEW, and praised it, but said: "Don't fool any more with Psychical Research and Simplified Spelling." We refrained from saying that we had not known that he had ever studied either, and we would not say it here if we were not confident that his aversion from the subject will prevent his reading this.