Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 100
For proof of this, if proof is needed, one has but to consider fairly and dispassionately the record of the century. How few are the names of first rank that we can offer to the world. In poetry Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, Whitman, with two or three others exhaust the list: of historians of the front rank we have Bancroft, Motley, Prescott and in a liberal sense, Francis Parkman: of novelists, tale writers and essayists we can point with pride to Irving, Poe, Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, James and some few others as names that are known to the world: of theologians we have Colonel Ingersoll, Mrs. Eddy, and Caroline Nation. But brilliant as many of these writers are, can one for a moment compare them with the imposing list of the great names that adorn the annals of British literature in the nineteenth century? Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne are household names to every educated American. Novelists and tale writers such as Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, Kipling, and Stevenson cannot be matched in our country. How seldom are essayists and historians of the class of Carlyle, Macaulay, Gibbon, Green, Huxley, Arnold, Morley, and Bryce produced among our hundred million of free and enlightened citizens. These and a hundred other illustrious names spring to one’s mind to illustrate the splendour of British literature in the nineteenth century. But surely it is unfair to ourselves to elaborate needlessly so plain a point. The candid reader will be fain to admit that the bulk of the valuable literature of the English-speaking peoples written within the last hundred years has been produced within the British Isles.
Nor can we plead in extenuation that inspiration has been lacking to us. Indeed the very contrary is the case. What can be conceived more stimulating to the poetic imagination than the advance of American civilisation into the broad plains of the Mississippi and the Saskatchewan, the passage of the unknown mountains and the descent of the treasure seekers upon the Eldorado of the coast? What finer background for literature than the silent untravelled forests and the broad rivers moving to unknown seas? In older countries the landscape is known and circumscribed. Parish church, and village, and highway succeed one another in endless alternation. There is nothing to discover, no untraversed country to penetrate. There is no mystery beyond. Thus if the old world is rich in history, rich in associations that render the simple compass of a village green a sacred spot as the battleground of long ago, so too is the new world rich in the charm and mystery of the unknown, and in the lofty stimulus that comes from the unbroken silence of the primeval forest. It was within the darkness of ancient woods that the spirits were first conceived in the imagination of mankind and that literature had its birth. A Milton or a Bunyan, that could dream dreams and see visions within the prosaic streets of an English country town — would such a man have found no inspiration could he have stood at night where the wind roars among the pine forests of the Peace, or where the cold lights of the Aurora illumine the endless desolation of the north? But alas, the Miltons and the Bunyans are not among us. The aspect of primeval nature does not call to our minds the vision of Unseen Powers riding upon the midnight blast. To us the midnight blast represents an enormous quantity of horse-power going to waste; the primeval forest is a first-class site for a saw mill, and the leaping cataract tempts us to erect a red-brick hydro-electric establishment on its banks and make it leap to some purpose.
The fact of the matter is that despite our appalling numerical growth and mechanical progress, despite the admirable physical appliances offered by our fountain pens, our pulpwood paper, and our linotype press, the progress of literature and the general diffusion of literary appreciation on this continent is not commensurate with the other aspects of our social growth. Our ordinary citizen in America is not a literary person. He has but little instinct towards letters, a very restricted estimation of literature as an art, and neither envy nor admiration for those who cultivate it. A book for him means a thing by which the strain on the head is relieved after the serious business of the day and belongs in the same general category as a burlesque show or a concertina solo: general information means a general knowledge of the results of the last election, and philosophical speculation is represented by speculation upon the future of the Democratic party. Education is synonymous with ability to understand the stock-exchange page of the morning paper, and culture means a silk hat and the habit of sleeping in pyjamas.
Not the least striking feature in the literary sterility of America is the fact that we are, at any rate as measured by any mechanical standard, a very highly educated people. If education can beget literature, it is here in America that the art of letters should most chiefly flourish. In no country in the world is more time, more thought, and more money spent upon education than in America. School books pour from our presses in tons. Manuals are prepared by the million, for use either with or without a teacher, manuals for the deaf, manuals for the dumb, manuals for the deficient, for the half-deficient, for the three-quarters deficient, manuals of hygiene for the feeble and manuals of temperance for the drunk. Instruction can be had orally, vocally, verbally, by correspondence or by mental treatment. Twelve million of our children are at school. The most skilful examiners apply to them every examination that human cruelty can invent or human fortitude can endure. In higher education alone thirty-five thousand professors lecture unceasingly to three hundred thousand students. Surely so vast and complicated a machine might be expected to turn out scholars, poets, and men of letters such as the world has never seen before. Yet it is surprising that the same unliterary, anti-literary tendency that is seen throughout our whole social environment, manifests itself also in the peculiar and distorted form given in our higher education and in the singular barrenness of its results.
There can be no greater contrast than that offered by the system of education in Great Britain, broad and almost planless in its outline, yet admirable in its results and the carefully planned and organised higher education of America. The one, in some indefinable way, fosters, promotes, and develops the true instinct of literature. It puts a premium upon genius. It singles out originality and mental power and accentuates natural inequality, caring less for the commonplace achievements of the many than for the transcendent merit of the few. The other system absurdly attempts to reduce the whole range of higher attainment to the measured and organised grinding of a mill: it undertakes to classify ability and to measure intellectual progress with a yard measure, and to turn out in its graduates a “standardised” article similar to steel rails or structural beams, with interchangeable parts in their brains and all of them purchasable in the market at the standard price.
The root of the matter and its essential bearing upon the question of literary development in general is that the two systems of education take their start from two entirely opposite points of view.
The older view of education, which is rapidly passing away in America, but which is still dominant in the great Universities of England, aimed at a wide and humane culture of the intellect. It regarded the various departments of learning as forming essentially a unity, some pursuit of each being necessary to the intelligent comprehension of the whole, and a reasonable grasp of the whole being necessary to the appreciation of each. It is true that the system followed in endeavouring to realise this ideal took as its basis the literature of Greece and Rome. But this was rather made the starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history and the philosophy of all ages than regarded as offering in itself the final goal of education.
Now our American system pursues a different path. It breaks up the field of knowledge into many departments, subdivides these into special branches and sections, and calls upon the scholar to devote himself to a microscopic activity in some part of a section of a branch of a department of the general field of learning. This specialised system of education that we pursue does not of course begin at once. Any system of training must naturally first devote itself to the acquiring of a rudimentary knowledge of such elementary things as reading, spelling, and the humbler aspects of mathematics. But the further the American student proceeds the more this tendency to specialisation asserts itself. When he enters upon what are called post-graduate studies, he is expected to become altogether a specialist, devoting his whole mind to the study of the left foot of the garden frog, or to the use of the ablative in Tacitus, or to the history of the first half hour of the Reformation. As he continues on his upward way, the air about him gets rarer and rarer, his path becomes more and more solitary until he reaches, and encamps upon, his own little pinnacle of refined knowledge staring at his feet and ignorant of the world about him, the past behind him, and the future before him. At the end of his labours he publishes a useless little pamphlet called his thesis which is new in the sense that nobody ever wrote it before, and erudite in the sense that nobody will ever read it. Meantime the American student’s ignorance of all things except his own part of his own subject has grown colossal. The unused parts of his intellect have ossified. His interest in general literature, his power of original thought, indeed his wish to think at all, is far less than it was in the second year of his undergraduate course. More than all that, his interestingness to other people has completely departed. Even with his fellow scholars so-called he can find no common ground of intellectual intercourse. If three men sit down together and one is a philologist, the second a numismatist, and the third a subsection of a conchologist, what can they find to talk about?
I have had occasion in various capacities to see something of the working of this system of the higher learning. Some years ago I resided for a month or two with a group of men who were specialists of the type described, most of them in pursuit of their degree of Doctor of Philosophy, some of them — easily distinguished by their air of complete vacuity — already in possession of it. The first night I dined with them, I addressed to the man opposite me some harmless question about a recent book that I thought of general interest. “I don’t know anything about that,” he answered, “I’m in sociology.” There was nothing to do but to beg his pardon and to apologise for not having noticed it.
Another of these same men was studying classics on the same plan. He was engaged in composing a doctor’s thesis on the genitive of value in Plautus. For eighteen months past he had read nothing but Plautus. The manner of his reading was as follows: first he read Plautus all through and picked out all the verbs of estimating followed by the genitive, then he read it again and picked out the verbs of reckoning, then the verbs of wishing, praying, cursing, and so on. Of all these he made lists and grouped them into little things called Tables of Relative Frequency, which, when completed, were about as interesting, about as useful, and about as easy to compile as the list of wholesale prices of sugar at New Orleans. Yet this man’s thesis was admittedly the best in his year, and it was considered by his instructors that had he not died immediately after graduation, he would have lived to publish some of the most daring speculations on the genitive of value in Plautus that the world has ever seen.
I do not here mean to imply that all our scholars of this type die, or even that they ought to die, immediately after graduation. Many of them remain alive for years, though their utility has of course largely departed after their thesis is complete. Still they do and can remain alive. If kept in a dry atmosphere and not exposed to the light, they may remain in an almost perfect state of preservation for years after finishing their doctor’s thesis. I remember once seeing a specimen of this kind enter into a country post-office store, get his letters, and make a few purchases, closely scrutinised by the rural occupants. When he had gone out the postmaster turned to a friend with the triumphant air of a man who has information in reserve and said, “Now wouldn’t you think, to look at him, that man was a d —— d fool?” “Certainly would,” said the friend, slowly nodding his head. “Well, he isn’t,” said the postmaster emphatically; “he’s a Doctor of Philosophy.” But the distinction was too subtle for most of the auditors.
In passing these strictures upon our American system of higher education, I do not wish to be misunderstood. One must of course admit a certain amount of specialisation in study. It is quite reasonable that a young man with a particular aptitude or inclination towards modern languages, or classical literature, or political economy, should devote himself particularly to that field. But what I protest against is the idea that each of these studies is apt with us to be regarded as wholly exclusive of the others, and that the moment a man becomes a student of German literature he should lose all interest in general history and philosophy, and be content to remain as ignorant of political economy or jurisprudence as a plumber. The price of liberty, it has been finely said, is eternal vigilance, and I think one may say that the price of real intellectual progress is eternal alertness, an increasing and growing interest in all great branches of human knowledge. Art is notoriously long and life is infamously short. We cannot know everything. But we can at least pursue the ideal of knowing the greatest things in all branches of knowledge, something at least of the great masters of literature, something of the best of the world’s philosophy, and something of its political conduct and structure. It is but little that the student can ever know, but we can at least see that the little is wisely distributed.
And here perhaps it is necessary to make a further qualification to this antagonism of the principle of specialisation. I quite admit its force and purpose as applied to such things as natural science and medicine. These are branches capable of isolation from the humanities in general, and in them progress is not dependent on the width of general culture. Here it is necessary that a certain portion of the learned world should isolate themselves from mankind, immure themselves in laboratories, testing, dissecting, weighing, probing, boiling, mixing, and cooking to their heart’s content. It is necessary for the world’s work that they should do so. In any case this is real research work done by real specialists after their education and not as their education. Of this work the so-called researches of the graduate student, who spends three years in writing a thesis on John Milton’s god-mother, is a mere parody.
Nor is it to be thought that this post-graduate work upon the preparation of a thesis, this so-called original scholarship is difficult. It is pretentious, plausible, esoteric, cryptographic, occult, if you will, but difficult it is not. It is of course laborious. It takes time. But the amount of intellect called for in the majority of these elaborate compilations is about the same, or rather less, than that involved in posting the day book in a village grocery. The larger part of it is on a level with the ordinary routine clerical duties performed by a young lady stenographer for ten dollars a week. One must also quite readily admit that just as there is false and real research, so too is there such a thing as a false and make-believe general education. Education, I allow, can be made so broad that it gets thin, so extensive that it must be shallow. The educated mind of this type becomes so wide that it appears quite flat. Such is the education of the drawing-room conversationalist. Thus a man may acquire no little reputation as a classical scholar by constant and casual reference to Plato or Diodorus Siculus without in reality having studied anything more arduous than the Home Study Circle of his weekly paper. Yet even such a man, pitiable though he is, may perhaps be viewed with a more indulgent eye than the ossified specialist.
It is of course not to be denied that there is even in the field of the humanities a certain amount of investigation to be done — of research work, if one will — of a highly specialised character. But this is work that can best be done not by way of an educational training — for its effect is usually the reverse of educational, but as a special labour performed for its own sake as the life work of a trained scholar, not as the examination requirement of a prospective candidate. The pretentious claim made by so many of our universities that the thesis presented for the doctor’s degree must represent a distinct contribution to human knowledge will not stand examination. Distinct contributions to human knowledge are not so easily nor so mechanically achieved. Nor should it be thought either that, even where an elaborate and painstaking piece of research has been carried on by a trained scholar, such an achievement should carry with it any recognition of a very high order. It is useful and meritorious no doubt, but the esteem in which it is held in the academic world in America indicates an entirely distorted point of view. Our American process of research has led to an absurd admiration of the mere collection of facts, extremely useful things in their way but in point of literary eminence standing in the same class as the Twelfth Census of the United States or the Statistical Abstract of the United Kingdom. So it has come to pass that the bulk of our college-made books are little more than collections of material out of which in the hands of a properly gifted person a book might be made. In our book-making in America — our serious book-making, I mean — the whole art of presentation, the thing that ought to be the very essence of literature, is sadly neglected. “A fact,” as Lord Bryce once said in addressing the assembled historians of America, “is an excellent thing and you must have facts to write about; but you should realise that even a fact before it is ready for presentation must be cut and polished like a diamond.” “You need not be afraid to be flippant,” said the same eminent authority, “but you ought to have a horror of being dull.” Unfortunately our American college-bred authors cannot be flippant if they try: it is at best but the lumbering playfulness of the elephant, humping his heavy posteriors in the air and wiggling his little tail in the vain attempt to be a lamb.
The head and front of the indictment thus presented against American scholarship is seen in its results. It is not making scholars in the highest sense of the term. It is not encouraging a true culture. It is not aiding in the creation of a real literature. The whole bias of it is contrary to the development of the highest intellectual power: it sets a man of genius to a drudging task suitable to the capacities of third-class clerk, substitutes the machine-made pedant for the man of letters, puts a premium on painstaking dulness and breaks down genius, inspiration, and originality in the grinding routine of the college tread-mill. Here and there, as is only natural, conspicuous exceptions appear in the academic world of America. A New England professor has invested the dry subject of government with a charm that is only equalled by the masterly comprehensiveness of his treatment: a Massachusetts philosopher held for a lifetime the ear of the educated world, and an American professor has proved that even so abstruse a subject as the history of political philosophy can be presented in a form at once powerful and fascinating.
