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.

Though we have in America the semblance of a new movement, humanism itself is not new. It was new, I conceive, when human wisdom was new. It was comparatively new in ancient Greece, Judea, India, and China. It was rather old by the time of the Renaissance, when the word humanist came into currency. In one way or another, its doctrine and discipline have been clarified by persons as various as Homer, Phideas, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, Goethe; more recently, by Matthew Arnold in England and Emerson and Lowell in America: a strange assortment of names, no doubt, but also an indication of the inner diversity as well as the central unity of the humanist ideal. For into the aim of human perfection enter many elements, no less than that central order which is the fruit of discipline.

Yet, if humanism is never new, it must constantly confront new problems in time and place. In the Renaissance, its great foe was mediæval otherworldliness; to-day its great foe is thisworldliness, obsession with physical things and the instincts that bind us to the animal order--in a word, the many forms of naturism that have all but destroyed humane insight, discipline, and elevation. In a given age, humanism may have the task of urging the claims of beauty; in another age the claims of science, or of conduct. It may have one problem in France, and another across the Channel. So long as America tends to set the pattern for the twentieth century, so long will the greatest problem of humanism lie here in the United States.

This relativity of humanistic needs will perhaps go far toward explaining the special traits of the movement in America and the corresponding special lines of attack by its naturistic opponents. Romantics, realists, and sceptics are daily attacking on four fronts: humanists, it is held, are academic, un-American, reactionary, and Puritanic.

Humanists are said to be academic. If this means that they are all university teachers, it is obviously not true. If it means that they are not interested in the present, it is obviously not true. If it means that they are interested in theory and not in practical affairs, it is not true, for what specially concerns them is the relation of theory and practice. They can scarcely be convicted of displaying what Stuart P. Sherman, who knew American academic life from the inside, termed “the professorial vices of pedantry, indolence, timidity, and intellectual quietism, which is a euphemism for the sluggish tolerance of men without philosophic conviction or intellectual purpose.” If it means that our humanists have been more interested than the workaday journalist critics in concrete knowledge and in general ideas, then indeed they may be termed academic. They perceive that when a new movement of thought and life is to be got under way, the first stage is naturally one of acquiring and organising knowledge--particularly neglected knowledge. This was clear to Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell in our little New England renaissance; it was clear to Lessing, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers in Germany; it was clear to the humanists of the Renaissance throughout Europe. Let us remember that the first of all universities was Plato’s “Academy,” the object of which was to attain a wisdom deeper than that of the market-place. Let us remember that “mere” theories are often high explosives, destructive of the prevailing practical life of the market-place, as witness Locke and Rousseau and the German thinkers from Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche.

Humanists are said to be un-American. According to those who cultivate the nationalist conception, a valid new criticism, new literature, new culture must spring from our American experience, not from imported ideas. They forget the lesson of the past that cultural movements have two sexes, so to speak, one native and one foreign, and that the native expresses itself in the main unconsciously under the incitement of the foreign. The native for the most part takes care of itself, the foreign must be sedulously cultivated. In the Renaissance a humanism imported from Italy fructified the native genius of most of Europe. Later, England, for example, drew upon France and then Germany; Germany upon France and England; France upon Spain and England; the United States upon England and Germany. Unlike some of his followers our Walt Whitman himself finally perceived the need of America’s assimilation of foreign culture--even from “all former lands” beginning with ancient India and Greece. It is doubtful whether a real American culture could ever spring from our own experience; it is certain that it could be caused to spring from our own experience by a happy use of foreign culture.

Humanists are supposed to be reactionary. According to those who pride themselves on living in the present if not in the future, humanists want “to return to Buddha and the Bho Tree, to Socrates and the ilex.” Being, in the main, historically educated men, however, humanists are well aware that a return to the past is impossible. On the other hand, they are also aware that, as cultural movements must draw upon foreign supplies, so they must also draw upon past culture. If a present age appears to be bad, it can be changed only by the introduction of forces not vitally existing in that age, and since the future is always a blank, these forces can be found only through a reinterpretation of the past. Thus, to a large extent the Renaissance was rendered possible through the “revival of learning” by the humanists, and the romantic movement of the late eighteenth century was in part a “return” to the Middle Ages and the national past. Even the typical modernist, in his efforts to escape being a Victorian or a Puritan, is plainly bent on “returning” to the primitive.

This brings us to the last and most frequent charge: that humanists are Puritans in disguise. It is hard to answer. Nobody knows what a Puritan is, and when he is disguised such a person is not easy to deal with. Even Professor Percy Gardner, a leading English authority on Greek art, ventures to speak of the “puritanism” of the Dorians. While in America humanists are attacked as Puritan, in France they are attacked as Catholic, and Mr. T. S. Eliot has been attacked as both. Even though American historians do not agree as to what the distinguishing virtues and vices of the seventeenth-century Puritans were, it may be suggested that one of their plainest virtues was the possession of a certain faith, now extinct. Their successors, wanting this faith, cannot well be said to have even the Puritan defects of that virtue. Sometimes those dire opposites of the humanists, the promoters of Uplift, are called Puritans. For my part, I think of our Uplifters rather as misguided humanitarians, followers not of Calvin but rather of that other Genevan, Rousseau.

What the naturists are really driving at, when they fight this phantom Puritan, this Feathertop, is regimentation or discipline. Now, humanism does wish to emphasise discipline, whenever, as to-day, it needs to be emphasised. It has no desire to measure conduct quantitatively, according to the familiar formula, as three-fourths of life, but it does desire to show that the quality of all life is higher or lower according as our power of vital restraint is exercised. Humanism conceives that the power of restraint is peculiarly human, and that those who throw down the reins are simply abandoning their humanity to the course of animal life or the complacency of vegetables. It conceives, further, that the attainment of the ideal of completeness of life, of a human nature rounded and perfect on all its sides, is fatally frustrated at the start unless the ideal of centrality or self-control is introduced as the regulating principle. The substitution of intensity as the regulating principle, which is proposed by many modernists such as Aldous Huxley, provides for quantity but not quality of life, and tends to defeat the ideal of completeness, because certain parts of human nature, if not disciplined, will always thrive at the expense of other parts. This fact was glimpsed even by Walter Pater, notwithstanding his doctrine of the intense moment, when he wrote: “For us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, no less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.”

Many other modernists reject the ideal of completeness itself as making for a dull uniformity, and propose instead the ideal of diversity. Life is “full of a number of things,” one of them prattles, remembering his Child’s Garden, but forgetting that humanism itself aims at diversity--not by urging men to be queerly “different,” each in his own infantile way, but by urging them to develop with mature reasonableness the diversities latent within themselves and thus to work toward a many-sided human type. Humanism believes, with Goethe, that “every one must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.” There have been enough humanists in the world to prove that in fact (and not only in theory) this image of a dull humanistic uniformity is merely another scarecrow. It is not the humanists, certainly, who look forward to a millennium in which all men and women will be superbly alike! If they speak more of the past than of the future, it is because the wisdom of the ages is on record and the wisdom of the future a hope devoid of useful content. But they unreservedly agree with critics who protest that “beyond anything that has yet been said by the academic humanists, there is work for the humane imagination to do.”

This does not exhaust the attacks on the humanists. They are reproached by romanticists for being romantic, but I let that pass. More sensibly, they are ridiculed by irreligionists for being religious, but I let that pass also. Something should be said, however, of still another attack--the objection, by impressionists, that they employ words and phrases as catchwords and labels in disregard of the elusiveness of truth. To offer this objection, surely, is to object to the use of language itself. If words are not more or less arbitrary labels for things and ideas and the relationship of things and ideas, all language is pure nonsense. When Mr. Van Wyck Brooks fifteen years ago, in America’s Coming-of-Age, called for “catchwords” as well as a “programme,” he showed a sounder instinct than he and his followers have displayed since: they have found no programme, and are increasingly averse to catchwords. No doubt the truth an sich is hopelessly elusive, but the attainment of provisional or human truth is the reward of courage and labour. We cannot afford to shirk the task of achieving a reasonably clear and consistent terminology, even though every definition is by nature an affirmation that tends to shut out some portion of absolute truth. Whenever words become too hard and exclusive, humanism is concerned with reconsidering their frontiers; but whenever, as to-day, they become so vague and fluid as to imperil human communication, humanism aims to achieve a clear relation of labels to thought.

If the object of this book, on the one hand, is to indicate the fundamental needs of America as the dominant world power and inadequate model of civilisation in the twentieth century, on the other hand its object is to inquire into the fundamental needs of humanism--to work toward a set of definitions and a terminology neither too rigid nor too loose, to consider the requirements of humanism in the various activities of modern thought and life, to determine the special tasks that confront humanism in this latest moment of time, and to enlist the interest and efforts of that “rather considerable leaven of intelligent people” who, as the Forum has said editorially, “cannot view with indifference the general decay of standards and the resultant chaos into which our intellectual and moral life has been plunged.” The publication of a symposium addressed to this public was first proposed, years ago, by Percy H. Houston, and to him as well as to G. R. Elliott and Robert Shafer, advisory editors in this undertaking, cordial thanks are due for many valuable suggestions, although I am alone responsible for the form which the book has finally assumed. The contributors are for the most part between thirty and forty-five years of age (perhaps three or four are over, and three or four under these limits). One-third of them, as it happens, hold or have held important editorial positions. The academic group comprises several professors of English literature, one of French and comparative literature, one of the fine arts (also director of an art museum), and one of physics (also dean of a graduate school). The youngest contributor, a student and athlete, represents that rapidly growing part of the rising generation which is turning from aimless revolt to the quest of standards. In consequence of a diversity in occupations, as well as in temperament and personality, the authors of the book display numerous divergencies in outlook, in emphasis, and especially in tone. While all of them, for example, are lovers of the law of measure or “Golden Mean,” some of them seek the way of quiet firmness or “sweet reasonableness,” even in this blatant age, while others conceive that modern excesses must be

“Scorch’d by a flaming speech on moderation.”

As the reader will soon perceive, the contributors agree in certain broad, fundamental opinions. Without exception they have sought to work their way free of the dogmatic incrustations that threaten to corrode even what is sound in characteristically modern thought. None of them, I think, can be suspect of a secret attraction to those pseudo-scientific and humanitarian short-cuts to truth and morality that lead in fact to pure scepticism and anarchy. All of them perceive that a naturistic humanism is finally a paradox. Some of them might be termed “pure” or “mere” humanists, others are religious humanists. Each has been free to speak his own mind, and is responsible only for what he has himself said. If the reader chances to conceive, as I personally do, that Irving Babbitt is at the centre of the humanistic movement, some of the other authors will appear to be near the periphery, although they too may seem near the centre from some other point of view. The authors of this symposium, in a word, have no desire to form a closed school, or party, or cult, or religion. They would agree that the ism in humanism is at present a necessary evil. They are here temporarily assembled for the sole end of offering suggestions toward that new integration of values which may yet justify modernity.

Norman Foerster.