Humanism and America

Part 1

HUMANISM AND AMERICA

ESSAYS ON THE OUTLOOK OF MODERN CIVILISATION

Edited by NORMAN FOERSTER

FARRAR AND RINEHART INCORPORATED PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY FARRAR AND RINEHART PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Preface

“Life’s a long headache in a noisy street,” sang the poet Masefield in The Widow in the Bye Street seventeen years ago. Since then, we have all come to live in Main rather than Bye Street, and our headache has grown apace despite the best efforts of the physicians of the age. The noise and whirl increase, the disillusion and depression deepen, the nightmare of Futility stalks before us in the inevitable intervals when activity flags. Heroically or mock-heroically we distrust or reject such stimulants and anodynes as religion, moral conventions, the dignity of manners, the passion for beauty, and even our recent faith in democracy, in liberalism, in progress, in science, in efficiency, in machinery. At length revolt and scepticism themselves have ceased to be interesting. The modern temper has produced a terrible headache.

In vain does our Chief Executive assure us that “we have reached a higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the history of the world.” Like Mr. Punch when it was announced that the government would soon be broadcasting intelligence by radio, we wonder “Where will the government get it?” All governments, all nations, are to-day in this predicament.

The alleged Americanisation of Europe appears to signify, at bottom, that tendencies native to Europe are being worked out most thoroughly in the United States and are therefore making the United States the model of twentieth-century Europe. At the same time Europe knows that the model is, to speak very gently, inadequate. For a good many years our own writers have deplored the condition of civilisation in the United States, with exaggeration but essential truth. But they have generally made of revolt and scepticism ends rather than beginnings of wisdom. For materialistic complacency they have substituted a smart superiority resting on the most dubious foundations. Their feebleness in constructive power is very patent. They are part of the disease--symptoms not remedies.

Our “intellectual atmosphere,” however, is now rapidly changing, is becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons, oppressed with the stale scepticism of the post-war period, are beginning to grow sceptical of that scepticism, 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. They are not strong forces, they can scarcely be called movements, but they are receiving a hearing and they contain the promise of growth.

One of these forces is known as “humanism,” which is rapidly becoming a word to conjure with. In its broadest signification, it denotes a belief that the proper study of mankind is man, and that this study should enable mankind to perceive and realise its humanity. But the study of mankind is capable of yielding all manner of results, so that, for a long time to come, we may expect the word denoting this study to carry a large variety of meanings. Since man may be conceived as living on three planes, the natural, the human, and the religious, the content of the middle term will frequently tend to be invaded by that of the extremes. Thus, many persons who call themselves humanists, in this naturistic era from which we have not yet emerged, are unwittingly naturists yearning stoically for adaptation to the universe or mystically for a fusion of the human and the natural. Such persons might call themselves, paradoxically, humanistic naturists. In the interest of clearness, as it seems to me, the word humanism should be confined to a working philosophy seeking to make a resolute distinction between man and nature and between man and the divine.

The most fruitful approximation to such a distinction, in the twentieth century, has been the work of two American scholar-critics, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. The characteristic thought of Irving Babbitt 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. This book contains in essence, one may almost say, everything in the series of volumes in which he has since applied his humanistic standards to various aspects of modern life and thought. With a tenacity of purpose unexampled in an age shifting aimlessly from one enthusiasm and disillusionment to another, with an effect growing more massive as he has worked out his ideas in such fields as æsthetics, literary criticism, ethics, psychology, education, and politics, with a remarkable power of relating his sense of permanent values to an historical sense (so that his books are in one view works of history, and in another, doctrinal inductions from facts), with a vast accumulation of learning that has been thoroughly assimilated, and with a mode of expression notable for weighty vigour, earnestness, brilliant ridicule, and an instinct for ruinous quotation, Professor Babbitt has done more than any one else to formulate the concept of humanism and gain for it an ever-widening hearing. A great teacher as well as writer, lecturing to students at Harvard for some thirty-five years, he has done much to shape the minds and purposes of a whole generation of young men, and thus to render possible the continuance of his task in the future.

Paul Elmer More, after a brief experience as teacher of Sanskrit and Classical literature, entered criticism through the avenue of journalism, becoming literary editor of the Independent and the New York Evening Post and editor of the Nation. Through his relation with contributors to the Nation, in particular, he exerted a powerful influence upon the higher critical activity of the country, an influence extended more widely through his long series of Shelburne Essays, beginning in 1904, in which he united in fine balance a profound and far-ranging scholarship, unusual psychological insight, an humanistic point of view, and a gift of firm, luminous, urbane but penetrating writing. Undervalued because of their hostility to the popular tendencies of the epoch, these essays will one day be generally recognised, I believe, as the highest accomplishment in literary criticism in the whole of American literature. The fundamental unity in the work of our two leading humanistic thinkers may be seen by comparing, say, the conclusion of Mr. Babbitt’s Masters of Modern French Criticism and the “Definitions of Dualism” at the close of the eighth series of Shelburne Essays, or the introduction to Democracy and Leadership and the first essay in the New Shelburne Essays, Volume I. The main difference, perhaps, lies in emphasis; while Mr. Babbitt has been first and last concerned with building up a sound conception of individualism, Mr. More has been progressively absorbed in the study of the duality of human nature. His strong religious bent in this study led, in the years following his retirement from journalism, to the writing of The Greek Tradition, in five volumes, on the relation of Platonic and Hellenistic to Christian thought--a monumental work, the full significance of which can scarcely be estimated in its own time.

In a book recently crowned by the French Academy, Le Mouvement humaniste aux États-Unis, Louis J. A. Mercier, professor of French at Harvard, restricts his account to Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and W. C. Brownell. In a broad view of the “movement” the late Mr. Brownell doubtless merits a conspicuous place. Entering criticism, like Mr. More, by way of journalism, Brownell performed valuable service through his acute non-provincial book on French Traits as far back as 1888, and through his perennial insistence on high standards in literature and the fine arts. Never a humanist in the strict doctrinal sense, before his death he inclined to respond to the humanitarian optimism of America. The tendency toward humanitarianism, emotional sympathy with divine or undivine average humanity, appeared more strikingly in the post-war writings of Stuart P. Sherman. A student under Professor Babbitt, a contributor to the Nation under Mr. More, Sherman became the author of two books written in a vigorous and accomplished style and permeated with humanistic principles, one on Matthew Arnold conceived as a Victorian humanist, and one On Contemporary Literature conceived as a chaos of naturalism. Then, carried away by admiration of Wilsonian idealism and hatred of “Prussian autocracy,” and by an uncritical devotion to Emerson, he drifted from his humanistic position into an ever vaguer faith in the common man, and at length, as a literary journalist in New York, into a rather indulgent impressionism. In the field of the fine arts, the most humanistic writer has been Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., of Princeton. Among others who published significant books in various fields, prior to 1928, are P. H. Frye, Sherlock Bronson Gass, Robert Shafer, Percy H. Houston, and W. F. Giese. By 1928 something like a movement could indeed be discerned: books began to multiply, and periodicals were printing series of articles--the Forum and the Bookman in America, the Criterion (edited by T. S. Eliot) and the Nineteenth Century and After in England. Whether the movement will continue to develop, whether it will succumb to disunion and vagueness, or be submerged by a narrow conventionalism of one sort or other, it would be idle to predict.

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